To the Jeopardy! faithful, the immortal game show is as sacred as religion, and the appointment of a new host is a higher-stakes proposition than the anointment of the next pope. After all, it’s not as if we’re going to have to spend a televised half hour with the Holy Father five nights a week.
The death of Alex Trebek in November 2020 threw the quiz-program institution into an existential crisis, its producers suddenly tasked with finding someone to fill the gargantuan void left by a four-decade fixture of the small screen. Protective fans insisted that the show forge onward, and offered plenty of thoughts about who should be at the helm, in the form of various grassroots campaigns. Through a turbulent 2021, the series’ decision-makers tried to placate everyone and satisfied no one with a rotation of guest hosts that, in the instances of nootropic hawkers like Dr. Mehmet Oz or Big Bang Theory star Mayim Bialik, succeeded only in sullying the integrity of an honorable post. Things hit rock bottom when producer Mike Richards, destined to go down in history as the Liz Truss of Jeopardy!, stepped in and stepped down over the course of a single week after news of past sexual harassment lawsuits and offensive podcast remarks promptly surfaced.
Season 38 brought the Chaos Year to a close with a half-measure ruling that Bialik and super-champion Ken Jennings would switch off hosting duties, a decision that some saw as forestalling the rightful inevitability of Jennings’ full-time takeover. In the 12 months since then, that faction has seemingly gotten their wish: kept busy with Celebrity Jeopardy!, Bialik hasn’t appeared on “the mother ship” since July, despite an earlier press release stating that she’d be back behind the podium this past January. But this far into Season 39 and the largely stabilized post-Trebek era, regulars can see that leaving the awkward, disjointed flip-flopping behind has allowed the early evening staple to hit a groove and settle into its next evolutionary form. Colloquial and congenial, Jeopardy! 2.0 has adapted to a changing viewership and TV landscape, charting a viable course into the future.
Seeing Jennings on duty, it’s hard to believe anyone else was ever up for the job. To put it in Sorkinese, you’re seeing Shakespeare the way it was meant to be done. A lifetime trivia nerd long before he became the winningest player in the show’s record books, he’s adeptly attuned to the invisible demands of the gig, his every cadence and pronunciation calibrated for maximum comprehension. He runs a looser and warmer game, with a well-deployed sense of humor that skews toward the dorkily online in a tone that neither grates nor distracts. If the host of Jeopardy! is James Bond, and in so many ways he is, then Trebek is the buttoned-up Sean Connery to Jennings’ droll Roger Moore, always ready with a savvy wink and a delightfully corny one-liner. Most importantly, he’s a bona fide genius, enriching each match with edifying context and off-the-cuff tidbits. The show works only with a host who can sustain the audience’s belief that he’d know every factoid coming out of his mouth even without an earpiece, and Jennings has earned that trust.
He’s also a die-hard fiend for statistics, and that passion has proved instrumental in helping his employer shed its lingering identification with the retiree demographic. In his intros and chat breaks, Jennings geeks out over streaks and personal bests in the same way NBA Twitter obsesses over minutiae. Taking another cue from the sporting world, the emphasis on personalities has grown more pronounced: The theme-song title sequence now opens with a snapshot of a past champ that presumes our familiarity with them. Tournaments between top scorers are planned more frequently, with the upcoming best-of-the-best prime-time special Jeopardy! Masters inviting Mattea Roach devotees and Amy Schneider–ites to duke it out on social media. They might even get noticed by their faves with an @-reply, the parasocial equivalent of nailing Final Jeopardy. (Incidentally, the queer and trans representation the two have brought to the hall of fame also has the happy side effect of bolstering the show’s relevance.)
Jeopardy! needs a young following if it’s going to continue in infinite syndication despite declining network ratings, and as an ascended fan himself, Jennings understands that the most rewarding parts of the experience happen around the game as often as within it. The show has become more purposeful in the construction and promotion of its own mythology, with leaderboard victory given the same status as any pro athlete’s ascent to Valhalla. During the last Tournament of Champions, heavyweights like Roach, Schneider, James Holzhauer, and Matt Amodio all discussed the transformative effect of the big wins that brought an overnight windfall of followers, wealth, and professional opportunities. Far from a fusty exercise for oldsters to retain their mental acuity, Jeopardy! stands to capture the next generation with the resonant promise of making ordinary people instantly famous for something other than being hot.
And to Bialik’s credit, she’s done a commendable job holding down the fort on Celebrity Jeopardy!, a loosey-goosey fun time that demands an emcee more than a quizmaster. When the point is putting on a good show, no one bats an eye at the occasional mispronunciation or her penchant for building suspense with a pregnant pause before she gives a Double Jeopardy solution. The questions ease up on the academic rigor to foster a more relaxed party atmosphere, which fits Bialik’s default performer mode, as well as a crop of contestants that skews in the direction of comedians. She can riff along with Patton Oswalt or Ike Barinholtz while also keeping everyone on task, and she can do it without coming off like a buzzkill. If anything, the franchise should embrace the informality and go full Match Game, keeping everyone well lubricated with an endless supply of cocktails.
Purists might cry foul at this desecration of the good Jeopardy! name, just as they’ve fretted over the producers’ planned spinoffs focusing on sports and pop culture to go with the standalone tournaments for librarians, educators, and students. But maybe the powers that be need to dilute the brand a little to preserve the most important part of it. Stopping short of altering the format for the flagship program, they’ve subtly and smoothly revamped the atmosphere while maintaining the bedrock of intellectualism. The producers of Jeopardy! understand that much of the show’s charm comes from a defiant un-hipness known to every kid whose arm was first to shoot up in class. A change made for the sake of expanding commercial appeal doesn’t have to be a concession.
A couple of months before Trebek’s death, Sony formally renamed in his honor the studio space he’d presided over for nearly half a century. That’s now how announcer Johnny Gilbert rings in each episode, his emphases a melody known by heart: “From the Alex Trebek Stage at Sony Pictures Studios, this i-i-i-i-s Jeopardy!” Hearing that name is a valuable reminder, and not just of the legacy to which anyone tinkering with the show has to answer. As the show tests competitors on their history, it also builds on its own. After taking over from original presenter Art Fleming with the 1984 relaunch, Trebek put his stamp on the position entrusted to him. It’s only fitting that his successors have the opportunity to do the same.
