It reeks of a Marvel-brained corporate strategy driven toward constant extrapolation: limited serials, alternative rule sets, an overload of new characters, storylines, and motifs. What the British Already Knew About Russell Brandīut I do find myself wondering if an emphasis on endless, monolithic growth-an incarnation of Jeopardy! that wishes to compete head-to-head with Mets games-is exactly what I want from the straightforward quiz show I’ve been watching since I was a teenager. The 40 Greatest Stand-Alone TV Episodes of All TimeĪmerica Is Experiencing a Confusing Avalanche of Small Boob Ads It’s undeniably fun to spend time with the show’s recent stars again, even if it seems as if someone has given one too many notes on dialing up the “personality.” The Second Chance mechanic is also satisfactory, if only because I have a special sympathy for those right-brained players who bungle their Final Jeopardy calculus. Despite all of its textual vagueness and weird redundancy with the other high-level Jeopardy! brackets, the Masters tournament makes for compelling television. I will admit that, so far, I’ve mostly enjoyed Davies’ vision. “You know, LeBron James is still out there, and we’ve stopped all these great players from playing.” “ Jeopardy! is kind of like the NBA, but they wipe off every roster every season and they start with whole new players,” Davies says at one point. Celebrity tournaments with their own pipeline of trivially inclined VIPs.” In the piece, Davies floats the idea of a professional league for elite Jeopardy! superstars-effectively offering someone like Holzhauer a heavyweight title they could defend all season, an avenue for anyone to become a professional in the art of trivia. A book club and a fully fledged fan convention. He imagines bars playing episodes, then rolling right into Jeopardy !-sponsored pub trivia.” Davies’ grand strategy includes “pop culture and sports spinoffs, and international expansions … to cue up a Ryder Cup–style global battle royale. In a revealing profile by the Ringer’s Claire McNear, Davies described “a dominion of Jeopardy! stretching into a mostly uncharted future. He’s continued to reaffirm a desire to transform the game show into something akin to America’s fifth major sport. This is all part of the plan for Michael Davies, who has served as executive producer for Jeopardy! since 2021. Now there’s a clear line of demarcation between the die-hards and the casuals, and I’m starting to feel left behind. Participating in Jeopardy! fandom used to be as easy as turning on the television. It looks like a trigonometry problem you’d find in a Saw dungeon. He’s gonna get smoked!) Meanwhile, the game show’s competitive structure-newly bloated with all of the edge cases and contingencies that come with an expanded footprint-has grown so unwieldy that someone on the r/Jeopardy subreddit devised a viscerally unpleasant flowchart detailing all of the arcane qualifying rounds and selection minutiae a contestant must navigate to make it to the show’s hallowed ground. (Congratulations to Ike Barinholtz, who has also, hilariously, been invited to the Tournament of Champions. Jeopardy! has moved its longtime Celebrity Jeopardy! variant, by far my least favorite flavor of the format, to prime time for extra eyeballs. (Justin Bolsen, a freshman at Brown University, won the $100,000 prize and punched his ticket to this winter’s Tournament of Champions.) In 2022 the show broke ground on a recurring Second Chance special, where strong players who’d ultimately lost their games (usually at the hands of a wunderkind like Holzhauer) were offered an opportunity to avenge those unlucky defeats, which undoubtedly evoked at least one pickled rant about “participation trophies” somewhere in the conservative webspace. Earlier this year, Jeopardy! brought on a High School Reunion series, in which kids who’d first competed on one of the show’s juvenile brackets were invited back to the stage as college students so we could all see if their acumen had been dulled by campus life. The Masters tournament is just the tip of the iceberg. Whether that’s sacrilegious or long overdue for America’s most beloved game show will likely depend on your own mileage. In practice, that means that Jeopardy! now brandishes all sorts of gimmicks to foster a sense of perpetual spectacle, as if the old half-hour and an enticing Egyptology category can no longer stand on their own. The producers seek to escape the limited confines of early-evening syndication, becoming bigger, more versatile, and closer to the heat of American discourse. Now, following Trebek’s death in late 2020, the show’s leadership has undertaken deeper changes to the Jeopardy! mystique.
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