Jeopardy! Season 40 is here
Season - new. One tournament - new. Clues - some new, many old. Contestants - old, for the foreseeable future.
It’s the second Monday in September. But it’s not an entirely happy occasion for fans of America’s Favorite Quiz Show.
Jeopardy! kicks off the last season of the fourth decade of its syndicated run in far different circumstances than the show was in fifty-two weeks ago. As we hit Week 1 of this new season, the Writers Guild of America’s strike against the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers rolls toward its twentieth week, with nothing approaching an endpoint anywhere in sight. When taping began on August 15, the show’s writers were on a picket line outside Sony Pictures Studios, not inside the cold confines of the Alex Trebek Stage. This has further modified the structure for Season 40 from the already changed form it was going to take.
Where we go, starting today
Even absent the WGA strike, Jeopardy! planned to begin a season with “special” play (aka not regular games) for only the second time in the entire syndicated run.1 Five weeks ago, Michael Davies returned to “Inside Jeopardy!” to set out the revised plan for the upcoming season. He decided that without a full set of properly written material to play on, it wasn’t acceptable for the postseason to be contested under those circumstances. Whenever he made that decision, he wasn’t the only one to so decide; at least eight players who had qualified into the Tournament of Champions said they wouldn’t play while the writers remain on strike. Davies also concluded that it would also be improper to contest regular play without the scribes back in the fold. So, his solution is… ANOTHER POSTSEASON! Here’s the rundown:
Three weeks of Season 37 Second Chance; we know the names of these twenty-seven returning non-winners. Each is a “traditional tournament, second week”; three single-elimination semifinals and a two-day total point final. The three contestants left standing will feed into…
A Season 37/38 Champions Wildcard, expected to last at least a further nine weeks. In addition to the three S37 Second Chance winners, one- to three-game champions from 2020-21 & 2021-22 will return. We don’t yet know how many there’ll be, who they are, or how this event will be formatted.
Once all that is done — if, the Fates willing, the WGA and AMPTP have settled their disputes by then, which is anything but certain — the originally scheduled Season 39 Second Chance, Champions Wildcard, and
2023now surely 2024 Tournament of Champions. That will be followed by the Jeopardy! Invitational Tournament, bringing back past greats to face off against the three players relegated from last May’s Jeopardy! Masters, for one spot in the next edition of that event.
Then, and only then, will Davies allow Lucas Partridge to return to defend, and regular play to resume.
The reactions
On the relevant r/Jeopardy thread, it was a mix of congratulations to the contestants, as well as other pleasantries and random comments. On the relevant JBoard thread, the tenor was quite different. There were a few justifications of Davies’s course of action, and a few other random remarks. But the majority of the commentary was negative — in a few cases specifically about the contestants, but more so about the choice to bring back more previous contestants in lieu of new ones. I wasn’t surprised by this; JBoard, generally, represents the “small-c conservative” corner of the community.
If you’ve read Syntactic Reversal, you’ll know that I was lukewarm to the Davies “postseason” concept; I said so at some length. I am even cooler to the prospect of doing it twice back-to-back before we play even one more regular game. It would not begrudge me one bit if we kept Masters, incorporated the Invitational Tournament into the syndicated schedule to complement it, and otherwise largely restored the status quo ante. That is, Tournaments of Champions at 12 to 18 month intervals, as regular play dictates, College Championships and Teachers Tournaments in there too, and ditch Second Chance and the Champions Wildcard. (The exact format of the tournaments themselves, including wild cards and/or two-day total-point finals, concerns me far less — as does whether the Teen Tournament is revived.)
But I accept that I’m not on the staff of Jeopardy!, and neither is Harry Friedman anymore. We have to work with what we have and what we’re given.
Why this, and why these players?
When this shift in plan was announced, a question was asked by many, and it’s an eminently fair one: “if even partially ‘recycled’ material is good enough for these returning contestants, then why not for regular players?”
Andy Saunders is one of the few, if any, who have actually taken a serious stab at answering it. He notes that the contestants getting The Call for the second time have received it on relatively short notice — about three weeks, he estimates.2 That’s significantly less time to cram than some “pool swimmers” might have had to study, particularly J! Archive.
I think Andy’s right insofar as that specific either/or goes, but I’m going to take a bit of a deeper look. There’s another dimension to the competitive edge available to prospective contestants under these circumstances, and it was hinted at in the show’s July 25 statement regarding the brewing ToC boycott:
However, just as we did, led by Alex Trebek, during the 2007-2008 strike…
So, in the same vein as the question posed at the start of this section: “partially ‘recycled’ material was good enough for regular play in Season 24; why is that no longer the case?”
Or to restate the question in a manner that acknowledges the most obvious response: is there something substantively different about the situation then and now, other than the identity of the Executive Producer? And to that, I conclude: part of it is “yes, the ground has fundamentally shifted”; but it’s also in part “no, we just have Davies now instead of Friedman.”
The fundamental shift has been in the technological and information landscape over the intervening sixteen years. Ken Jennings had to scribble presidents and world capitals on bright pink index cards3; he may not have had to pull out a World Book or trudge to his local library to get that information, but the Google of his day (and the Lycos? Altavista?) was less powerful than the one players have access to now, and services like Anki are available to arrange the presentation of the trivia. The one particular information mine that is far deeper and richer than now, and very easily searchable, is the Archive. There are nearly four and a half times as many clues available there as there were just before the start of the 2007-08 strike, and a much higher percentage of the material that has ever aired has been captured there.4
So it’s not just the additional lead time potential regular-play contestants have over those invited back to compete earlier this season; it’s they can do so much more with any amount of it than was possible in Season 24. And all of that taken together is what informs the part of this that seems to me more purely “Davies vice Friedman.” The call was made that, for whatever reason, there would have been too fundamental a difference between regular play conducted under the present circumstances and ideal ones. Along the same line as the delaying the Season 39 postseason due to its effects on the downstream events, that difference would have introduced a competitive inequity of a large enough magnitude to impact things starting further up the stream (for example, contesting a ToC between players from ‘mixed’ clue sets and entirely original ones).
But ultimately, anything that involves “the postseason,” or reduces to that, is functionally equivalent to “Davies steering a different course, wanting different things, and having a different vision for Jeopardy! than Friedman did.” The postseason is Davo’s baby. He owns it hook, line & sinker and from stem to stern. Everything associated with it, including and especially how this first part of Season 40 plays out and is received, is on him. (And there are already inauspicious tidings; in promoting Season 37 Second Chance, the show’s digital team saw fit to prohibit comments on the Facebook post and disable replies on the Twitter post.) The buck stops in certain cr*p parts of Southern California and the South Fork of Long Island,5 and nowhere else.
To watch or not?
I will be watching. The WGA has not called for a boycott. When the scribes and the suits do get all this sorted out — and it seems like it might take forever less a day, but they will — I want the writers to have jobs to come back to, hopefully with better conditions of employment, newly collectively bargained.
Every viewer may, and ultimately must, come to their own conclusion regarding how to proceed.
A few loose ends
Tonight’s season premiere is going to be pre-empted on more than half the ABC stations that air Jeopardy! for Monday Night Football and its pregame show; this will also happen on September 18 & 25. Here’s a Twitter thread from me detailing how most of those stations intend to compensate, and those few that don’t.
Maps! I didn’t forget about those. They’re just about done. Later this week. Really.
This isn’t as full or as joyous an occasion as it usually is… but all the same, it is the second Monday in September. It’s Jeopardy! season once again.
The only previous instance was in 1999; Season 16 opened with a Back to School Week. The first quarterfinal of the 2009-10 Million Dollar Celebrity Invitational took place in Week 1 of Season 26, but it was on Thursday of that week.
David Maybury, on his blog, has noted that he got re-Called on July 13, and taped on August 15. 8/15 minus 7/13 is 33 days, and 33 is 157% of 21.
Brainiac, page 53 of the paperback edition.
508,620 clues as of the time of writing; 113,457 on October 30, 2007, the last Wayback Machine capture I could find prior to the start of the strike. In percentage terms, I believe J! Archive is now solidly north of 90 percent of Jeopardy!’s entire history.
Davo’s residences, as he’s fond of referring to them (and similarly, that of co-host Roger Bennett) in the introduction of the Men in Blazers podcast.