Jeopardy!’s Tournament of Champions begins Friday, an annual event that’s somewhat akin to a Super Bowl for the American trivia community. But this yr, it feels somewhat different. For one thing, the tournament is usually held in the autumn. For one other, last week, Jeopardy! officially entered its fifth consecutive month of tournament play—the longest period without regular play within the show’s history, a longtime chronicler of the series told me.
For weeks, the king of game shows has been mired within the Champions Wild Card, where scrappy previous winners attempted to secure a spot within the esteemed Tournament of Champions after they didn’t earn it during their original appearance. This bracket arrives on the tail of Second Chance games, wherein strong players who didn’t win their first Jeopardy! appearance got one last opportunity to punch a ticket into the inner circle, in addition to a separate prolonged series of untamed card qualifiers that ran throughout the tip of 2023. (Before those, in fact, was one other Second Chance contest.)
All that is to say that loyal viewers have been watching a complete lot of the identical contestants take the lecterns, over and all over again, in a dirgeful grind toward an ultimate reward that never seems to materialize. If you are feeling such as you’re going insane, you’re not alone. Reports of tournament fatigue have flitted through social media over the past few months, as Jeopardy!’s reliable inertness—three nerds answering questions on television, without the greater bureaucracy getting in the best way—continues to elude us. The excellent news is that there’s an end in sight. The bad news is that these new-fashioned tournaments aren’t going away, as Jeopardy! marches toward a franchise-forward future.
Like so many derangements in recent television history, the issue arose from the Writers Guild of America strike, which lasted from May to September last yr. The work stoppage disallowed many Jeopardy! writers from crafting latest clues, and when the executives on the show made the alternative to return in September, they did so by allowing the show to make use of questions that had either been written before the work stoppage or recycled from Jeopardy! episodes of yore. Michael Davies, Jeopardy! producer and someone who has made clear his aspirations to rework the sport show into something akin to America’s fifth major sport, desired to avoid a scenario where latest contestants were competing with old material. Given that web sites just like the J! Archive contain an encyclopedic history of past Jeopardy! potpourri, you possibly can understand his fears of enshrining a winner who made their bones on rote memorization.
So this system reached deep into its bag to resurface those bygone clues. In an early strike-era Second Chance game, one eagle-eyed viewer identified a category that was first broadcast all the best way back in 2003. The panel only got one out of 5 correct. It turned out that the majority people haven’t internalized the solutions to decades-old Jeopardy! grids. But the countless tournaments continued as planned.
Many Jeopardy! fans objected to the show returning in any respect while writers were on strike. Some top recent competitors said they wouldn’t appear on the Tournament of Champions during a strike, either, before Sony confirmed the event could be postponed. Other viewers razzed Ken Jennings for hosting the show during this era, even with the recycled clues. (Former co-host Mayim Bialik, who was eventually brushed off in favor of Jennings, had said she wouldn’t work on the show in the course of the strike. I should note I’m a member of a WGA shop at Slate.) But by the tip of all of it, the issue turned out to be more basic: The crush of indeterminable tournament play has made it tempting to tune out the show altogether. The Second Chance tournament was actually launched in 2022, when it lasted a much more tolerable two weeks. This time, it was all just an excessive amount of. Jeopardy!’s producers have syndication deals to hit, but as with a few of the latest specials in prime time, this tournament schedule had the effect of cheapening the brand somewhat bit.
Perhaps a more charitable takeaway from all this might be appreciation for the wizards who make regular Jeopardy! work. The clues must take far longer to jot down than I previously imagined, and the regular cadence of the show shouldn’t be taken with no consideration. And an end is in sight: Regular-old Jeopardy! will likely return in April. (That is, after a miscellaneous “invitational,” which can be showcased within the week following the Tournament of Champions. God is dead!) The implication here is that the coffers are in need of a refilling, and Davies desires to be sure that the audience won’t endure an underbaked Madame Bovary category. “Our No. 1 imperative right now is to get our postseason back on track,” Davies said on an episode of the Inside Jeopardy! podcast back in October. “They have a lot of pent-up clues, and I’m sure they’re going to write like the wind, but we want them always to have the time they need. What they write really is quality. It takes time, so we won’t sacrifice that.”
With the Tournament of Champions kicking off Friday, we are going to finally have something weightier than this countless slew of Second Chance hopefuls, who mostly seemed just completely happy to be here. At long last, Jeopardy! will crown an actual champion, which is kind of a thing to say after a season-long playoff. (It can even be spicy for off-screen reasons: Remember three-time champion Yogesh Raut, who trashed the show after his appearances? He’s back next week!) I’m excited to witness the fruits of all these qualifiers, but I really can’t wait to return to some semblance of normalcy in the course of the 7 o’clock hour. Davies clearly loves Jeopardy!, but I sincerely hope he doesn’t learn the mistaken lessons from this unholy gantlet he’s put in front of us. Perhaps they need some latest eyes elsewhere on the Sony lot, on Wheel of Fortune? Now, that’s a show in need of a fresh coat of paint.
Credit : slate.com