The Maps Post
Where and when Jeopardy! airs… in the majesty of colorful imagery
I promised you maps. Here they are. There are three of them.
The building blocks
The Jeopardy! “Master Station List,” compiled by me, detailing station, network, and air time for all 209 affiliates that carry the show
The ZIP Codes List, also compiled by me, containing a representative five-digit postal identifier for each Nielsen Designated Market Area (DMA)
The Nielsen DMA Map, found on the site of the Video Advertising Bureau. It’s four years old, but it’s the most recent one out there.
This was inspired by a 2014 post on a blog called “Graph Graph,” which rendered airing data for both Jeopardy! and Wheel of Fortune. The archived version of that is here. I am now pleased to present an updated version… well, for one of the two game shows.
Jeopardy! airings by local time
On this map, for example, New York (7:00 pm Eastern) and Los Angeles (7:00 pm Pacific) are colored the same.
As of the start of Season 40, there are fourteen distinct half-hours in which Jeopardy! is seen, per the clocks of those watching it then. But some are predominant over others. 89 percent of stations (186 of 209), representing 92.5% of all households, get the show in one of its “big five” airing slots: 7:30 pm (73), 4:30 pm (37), 7:00 pm (32), 6:00 pm (27), and 3:30 pm (17). Though 4:30 pm has five more affiliates than 7:00 pm does, the latter has nearly three times the population, by virtue of claiming three of the top four in New York, Los Angeles, and Philadelphia, as well as no. 10 San Francisco and five more inside the top 25. By contrast, the largest 4:30 market is the Twin Cities at no. 15, and only St. Louis joins it in the top 25. Of the 23 markets outside those “big five” air times, 17 show Jeopardy! in one of three time slots: 5:00 pm (8, including Nashville), 6:30 pm (5, including Salt Lake City), and 4:00 pm (4). The remaining six times are each served by a single market in their respective half-hours: 11:00 am, 11:30 am (Houston), 12:00 pm, 12:30 pm, 2:30 pm, and 3:00 pm (Oklahoma City).
7:30 is prevalent over 7:00 by a wide margin in the Eastern Time Zone (19.5 million households and a commanding 66-18 lead in stations), while 7:00 predominates in Pacific Time (10.9 million households ahead, and 14-6 on stations). In the two coastal time zones, network prime time begins at 8 pm, so Jeopardy! and Wheel of Fortune, in some order, air back-to-back in the preceding hour on the same channel.1
In the remaining four time zones, network prime time kicks off at 7 pm local time. Thus, the hour available in the Eastern and Pacific time zones can’t be used. (Why is Phoenix, a Mountain Time market, at 7:30? That will be answered by the third map.)
But why is it not more uniform, especially in the Central Time Zone? I think there are a couple of different things in play. One is the individual preferences of station management, informed by familiarity built up over history. But another involves Wheel of Fortune and constraints imposed by its syndication contract. This was brought to my attention on Monday by Twitter user [at]WheelRob10, who is just as much an authority on Wheel’s timing and placement as I am on Jeopardy!’s. ABC’s decision to begin simulcasting ESPN’s coverage of Monday Night Football and its pregame show at 7:30 Eastern/6:30 Central hit Wheel much harder than J!. In a thread, he explains what the restrictions are; the big ones are that Wheel must air at 6:30 in Central Time (update in this footnote)2, and it cannot be moved earlier in the day. With that uniformity, and I’m sure contractual requirements that J! & Wheel cannot air simultaneously in the few markets where the shows are on different stations3, Jeopardy! gets spread out over more time slots, not having the same restrictions in its syndication agreement.
There are no 5:30 airings anywhere; in Central time, this is likely due to the national newscasts of the legacy “big three” networks airing at 5:30 Central. Some do put it between that national news and Wheel; Milwaukee’s WDJT, for example, and Dallas-Fort Worth just moved it back to 6:00 on its CBS channel after ten years on sister station KTXA, displacing a local newscast. (This is also the predominant half-hour in Mountain Time, as well as Alaska.) But that 6pm local news remains the standard in many places. Perhaps foremost among them, Chicago — thus, Jeopardy! has been a longtime staple at 3:30 on WLS. Similarly, 4:30 pm on KSDK in St. Louis. For its part, I wonder if Honolulu is at 4:30 in part to ensure that all markets finish airing the show by 11:00 Eastern Time. Speaking of which…
Jeopardy! airings by Eastern Time
On this map, for example, New York (7:00 pm Eastern) and Dallas-Fort Worth (6:00 pm Central) are colored the same, as are Phoenix (7:30 pm Mountain Standard), Seattle (7:30 pm Pacific), and Honolulu (4:30 pm Hawaiian Standard). This map adjusts to Eastern Daylight Time, accounting for the two states (four media markets) that do not change their clocks twice a year.
Viewed in this way, the number of half-hours in which Jeopardy! airs rises to seventeen4. This reveals a much starker contrast between the Central and Mountain Time Zones, one that my choice of color palettes brings into even sharper relief. When the clock strikes 8:00 pm in the East, every Eastern and Central Time market has already seen Jeopardy! — and with only four exceptions, Tucson being by far the largest, it’s still to come for everyone in the remaining four time zones.
Network prime time is in progress across the entirety of the lower forty-eight in the 9:00 pm hour, which explains why no station airs Jeopardy! in either half of it during the majority of the season in which Daylight Saving Time is in effect.
Jeopardy! airings by broadcast network
Each of the four major American television networks airs Jeopardy! in at least twelve markets — but that distribution has the hallmarks of institutional inertia built up over nearly four decades of history. It is Fox that only carries the show in twelve places. Fox, of course, only came into being as a network in October 1986, more than two years after Jeopardy! premiered, and didn’t truly reach full national prominence and parity with the “big three” until 1994, when it landed the rights to broadcast the National Football League.
The thing that might particularly strike you is the lack of blue, at least relative to red and green. ABC is Jeopardy!’s go-to network partner for its primetime limited series, like The Greatest of All Time, and the Celebrity and Masters editions. It airs the show in 13 of the 25 biggest media markets in the United States, including seven of the largest ten, as well as on all eight of its O&Os. But it actually is behind the other two legacy networks by a good margin on total stations, with only 51. While they each trail ABC by about 20 million households that get Jeopardy! from them, CBS and NBC are ahead on stations — and on both that metric and households, the two are just about even.5
Two markets watch Jeopardy! on a station not affiliated with any network; this just came down from three, with the show moving back to CBS in Dallas-Fort Worth. One is Salt Lake City, where it airs at 6:30 pm on KJZZ. The other is Phoenix, where KTVK shows it at 7:30 pm. (The station’s being independent is why it’s able to air J! in that particular half hour.) The situation of regular, syndicated Jeopardy! being in network prime time creates some awkwardness when those special versions are running. They’re 60 minutes long and start at 7:00 pm on ABC affiliate KNXV — meaning that in Phoenix, the second half of those specials is going directly against the syndicated series’ episode.
A couple of final notes
The figures on households in each market (“TV sets,” if you will) are from last season; those are the most recent available from Nielsen.
Each market has a single color, based on the point from which its programming originates. This applies even in markets that span time zones.6
This concludes our broadcast day — um, our tour of Jeopardy! viewing times and networks. I’ve really gotten into collecting and maintaining this data for the last six years, and it was fun to fulfill a long-time goal of getting the data into graphical form and interpreting it. I hope you enjoyed this as much or more!
With other syndicated programming or local news on its competitors. For example, while the game shows air on WPVI (ABC) for me here, the 7:00 hour is filled by Inside Edition & Entertainment Tonight on KYW (CBS), Extra & TMZ on WTXF (Fox), and a local newscast & Access Hollywood on WCAU (NBC).
I misinterpreted Rob’s statement. The actual restriction on the airing of Wheel of Fortune is what I thought it was prior to Monday: the 7:00 hour in the Eastern and Pacific Time Zones, and the 6:00 hour in all the others. It just so happens that of the 81 Central Time markets, all but one air Wheel at 6:30.
Houston and Minneapolis-St. Paul, to name two large ones.
When Daylight Saving Time is not in effect, it becomes eighteen, as Phoenix and Honolulu shift from 10:30 pm Eastern to 9:30, a window in which no other market airs the show.
NBC leads on stations, 73-71; CBS has the edge by about 160,000 households (30.71 million to 30.55 million).
Take Bismarck-Minot-Williston-Dickinson, North Dakota, for example. You can see that the time zone boundary (pink dashed line) cuts across the southwestern part of the state. Programming there originates from Bismarck, so for my tabulation purposes, it is a Central Time market; of course, the Mountain Time portion of the DMA receives all its programming an hour earlier locally.
It might be more interesting to break it down by station owner/operator, as (other than the obvious ABC O&Os) networks don't play a role in deciding syndicated content. But like you say about broadcast inertia, it doesn't seem like any one station group would try to snap it up for all its stations such as Nexstar or Sinclair (the latter who has Jeopardy in my market), if that would even be possible.