Welcome to my second Mailbag column, where I answer questions that fans and viewers have sent to me. (I haven’t completely exhausted the mailbag this week, so if I haven’t answered your question yet, don’t worry!) If you do have a question that you’d like me to potentially answer in this column, feel free to email it to mailbag@thejeopardyfan.com!
How Do The Pairings Work?
Patti asks,
Once they choose the 27 contestants, do they choose the threesomes randomly? Once they have the groups, are their places at the podiums based on amounts previously won or some other criteria?
The best I can say here is: it depends.
At the 30th Tournament of Champions last fall, the tournament was seeded and paired via seeding. As I noted in my preview for that event, the players were seeded 1 through 21 by wins and money win (with automatic qualifiers placed between 4- and 5-time champions), and then, the quarterfinals were paired in a very orderly fashion: 4–10–21, 5–11–20, 6–12–19, 7–13–18, 8–14–17, and 9–15–16. Following that, the semifinals were re-seeded along the same lines and matched up 1–6–9, 2–7–8, and 3–4–5.
However, this isn’t necessarily always the case. In the case of Fall 2023’s Champions Wildcard, it appears the players were assigned generally randomly to matches in both the quarterfinals and semifinals; I certainly haven’t been able to find a consistent pairing metric in the event. I believe this is certainly a case of the show not being as confident in seeding players who last played 2 or 3 seasons ago. Certainly, for tournaments prior to the 30th ToC, it was generally seen that the producers would pair the semifinals in ways to increase the competitiveness of matches in the interest of having the most exciting tournament overall.
One thing that has been a longtime constant in tournament play, though: for a very long time, podiums have been assigned left-to-right based on a player’s final game score in the previous round of the tournament.
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Where Is Jeopardy at the Daytime Emmys?
Matt says,
With the Daytime Emmy Awards set to finally be given out on the Friday after your next mailbag, I think it would be worthwhile to refresh the readership as to why Jeopardy! isn’t up for any of them—and when the show does come up for awards, why Ken and Mayim are separately nominated.
Certainly!
First of all, a brief primer as to why there are Daytime Emmy Awards and Primetime Emmy Awards in the first place: the Primetime Emmys are awarded by the LA-based Academy of Television Arts & Sciences, whereas the New York-based National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences awards the Daytime Emmys. After a fiasco in the late 1960s where the Emmy judges failed to nominate anyone for “Outstanding Achievement in Daytime Programming”, the New York group created its own set of awards, and the two groups coexisted (definitely not peacefully, though.)
From the outset of the Daytime Emmys, game shows were definitely the bailiwick of daytime television, each network’s daytime block was filled with game shows, daytime talk shows, and soap operas. However, with the prime time success of Who Wants to be a Millionaire? around the turn of the millennium, game shows were soon found more often in prime time, with fewer and fewer game shows in a network’s daytime block. Thus, due to this scheduling shift, it became an outlier for the game show genre to be awarded by the Daytime Emmys (as opposed to the Primetime Emmys).
Thus, as of this year’s award season, as part of the realignment of many Emmy categories (and a warming of relations between the LA and New York groups), game shows were moved to the Primetime Emmy Awards.
So, as per the second part of the question: why are Ken and Mayim separately nominated, as opposed to being nominated as a group? (By way of example, the five Queer Eye hosts are nominated as a group, in addition to Amy Poehler and Maya Rudolph for Baking It.) It’s because the Queer Eye and Baking It emcees appear on screen together, whereas Ken and Mayim never host the same episode. (Despite what my most recent April Fools joke might have had viewers believing.) Thus, they are considered separate hosts in the eyes of the Academy and can receive separate nominations.
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Thanks!
Thanks again for your emails and I’ll do another one of these next week!
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Originally, weren’t game shows, soap operas, news, (and what few sit-coms there were) all aired live, then recorded out of New York and movies filmed in Hollywood? [This is not an assertion, just a long-held understanding that I haven’t easily been able to affirm or refute.] I had just assumed that the Daytime Emmy Awards had been split off due to too many awards for a single show. I also thought I recalled the Daytime Emmy Awards also airing in daytime (since it would be daytime viewers who would care most), though I never would have seen them due to work and I know that they now air in primetime.
So, anyway, I found your actual facts about them (and the new change) to be interesting, but just wondered . . . if I was right about the origins of daytime programming, would that have at least slightly entered into the division? Or at least why the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences is based in New York?