Welcome to my latest “Andy’s Weekly Thoughts” installment, where I give some of my thoughts about happenings in the world of Jeopardy!.
“Next Clue.”:
On social media this week, especially on Tuesday, there were some grumblings about how the quality of play was affected by the ruling against Elliott after he called the dessert “baked Alaskan”. To this, I would say that an underrated part of contestant preparation is being able to put past clues in the past and only focus on the “next clue.” I would say that, to quote Kipling, “If you can keep your head when all about you / Are losing theirs,” your chances of winning on the show will go up considerably.
On “Tournament Fatigue”:
Reddit was also the site of a complaint this week from a diehard fan complaining of “tournament fatigue”. One thing that a lot of diehard fans often forget about: the diehards—the ones that post to Reddit, JBoard, and even the comments section here at The Jeopardy! Fan—comprise an immensely small percentage of the show’s actual viewership. And, unfortunately for the diehard viewers who may prefer “regular” play, the fact of the matter is that the overall viewership as a whole gets more invested in tournaments. Thus, we will continue to see tournaments—because tournaments make the show more money.
Have a Listen To Chuck Forrest:
This week on BuzzerBlog‘s Tell Us About Yourself podcast (in conjunction with the National Archives of Game Show History at the Strong Museum of Play), host Christian Carrion has a conversation with the famed Jeopardy! contestant Chuck Forrest; Chuck was a 5-time champion in the fall of 1985, winning over $72,000, and is generally considered the first modern Jeopardy! great. Other former contestants have been interviewed on the podcast in the past—give the show a listen!
This Summer’s “Encore Presentations”:
For those fans whose TV guides list episodes out far enough, the Season 39 summer encore presentation schedule is beginning to be released; the week of July 31–August 4 will be the first Second Chance Competition. My only concern is that this encore presentation of October’s competition will air close enough to the start of Season 40 that viewers will get confused about when the new September episodes are resuming. Since Season 40 is supposed to begin with Second Chance, viewers in September may see Second Chance and think that September’s games are not new.
In Conclusion:
We’ve got three weeks left of regular play this season—let’s enjoy them!
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We might get a true test of tournament fatigue next season if Davies’ plans of having EVERY winner of at least one game in 2022-23 taking part in yet another created tourney does indeed take place.
This event alone could take so long that we could logistically see nothing BUT tourney games from September through November sweeps (the Second Chance tourney, this “every winner” tourney, and then the TOC), unless something’s pushed into primetime.
We have been batting around the idea that many clues have been sub par lately due to their hurried production prior to the writers strike. If the strike continues into the new season, how do you think that will be handled? [I was thinking that it should be acceptable to formulate the “ALL the winners” Tournament with ALL the clues just randomly selected from seasons prior to theirs (or maybe from 5+ years ago), acknowledging that, but probably not until broadcast.]
I don’t think anyone on the “outside” knows how many boards, if any, the show has ready to go.
Thanks for bringing the podcast to my attention, Andy, I’m excited to give it a listen. I’m especially interested in the John Carpenter interview. Not only was his WWTBAM win ine of the greatest gameshow moments of all time (indisputably, i think), it was also the first time I remember watching TV amd thinking “I want to be him.” Inspiring stuff.
Ooh, yeah, starting the reruns with last year’s Second Chance is an odd choice. I guess they’re responding to the complaints of the more casual viewers from last year who had never realized before that the summer tournaments were reruns and hated that the promos for the next day’s episode often “spoiled” the current one, but this is just going to cause a slightly different type of confusion from those viewers.
I liked the idea of season highlights, since six weeks is just about the perfect length to show each ToCer and Second Chancer at least once (assuming at least a few of the Second Chancers played against ToCers, which is a safe bet), but i can understand why it was confusing to a lot of people, and if they’re going to go back to rerunning syndicated tournaments during the hiatus then there’s not a lot of other options now. Personally, i’d like to see them do Vault episodes again for reruns (especially if they can do a couple of unarchived episodes every year), but also since i don’t see how Second Chance + Champions Wildcard can take up less than six weeks (unless they break out the fourth podium, which i’d be all for), i feel like ideally they should look into the possibility of eventually going year-round like the Art Fleming version did and have SC+CW happen during what would be the summer break — so it’s new episodes, but rerun contestants, and the number of new regular-play episodes isn’t impacted so much.
The thing is, though, going all summer with regular play would actually leave the show with too many winners for the postseason.
But if Champions Wildcard + Second Chance take up about six weeks or more (with about 60 champions + 18 Second Chancers, just having everyone play once is already five weeks), then going year-round to get six extra weeks of new episodes would just end up being a wash with about the same number of regular-play episodes (and hence about the same number of champions) next season as this season.
And what if you don’t have a Cris Pannullo and a Ray Lalonde? Having to rely on 2–3 superchampions a season to make your postseason work isn’t a good idea.
I’m also thinking that the stations that contract for syndicated Jeopardy! wouldn’t want to pay full price for new episodes during a summer period when they think too many people are outside or on vacation. Of course for all I know they have a set ANNUAL price, but if so, wouldn’t Sony want to raise that price if producing any kind of new episodes year-round? (In which case the stations might not want to pay more due to the same “low viewership summers” reason.)