Thoughts on the holiday weekend games
Is it time for a long-standing tradition to be retired? Is the show handing the widest-ranging pre-emptions correctly? Are the networks and stations?
Having seen both the Thanksgiving and Black Friday episodes of Jeopardy!, I have some thoughts about them. (The first section contains spoilers for Thursday’s episode; the remaining sections do not contain spoilers about Friday’s.)
Shout-outs, jokes, and the “Holzhauer Rule”
On Thursday, Ed Hashima led Jen Jazwinski by $2,800 entering Final Jeopardy!. Ed appeared to write quite a bit, setting down his stylus with eight seconds to spare. Six seconds later, he picked it back up, crossed out “hydrogen,” and got one “h” onto the screen before time ran out. When his response was revealed, it included a message to the show staff: “thanks for having me back!” Ed was the only one to miss Final, sending Jen through to next Monday and Tuesday.
On JBoard, seaborgium (aka five-time champion and 2010 Tournament of Champions second runner-up Stefan Goodreau) opined that if Ed had put down one more letter, he’d have the chemical symbol for helium, and it would have been credited — but that additional letters short of the full response would not have been. Earlier in that thread, MarkBarrett (himself a 2006 contestant) chimed in: “The contestant coordinators try to discourage the extra message stuff and Ed should now be the poster child during the pregame speech the players get. Cite his example of wasting precious thinking time and it turning out to be very costly.” In his game recap at The Jeopardy! Fan, Andy Saunders: “I’m left wondering that if Ed hadn’t been thinking of the shoutout at the bottom of his response, maybe he would have continued thinking and changed his response sooner? Oh, what might have been.”
There’s another thing the producers could do in response to this, if they wished to do anything at all: apply the standard they adopted with respect to James Holzhauer to all players’ Final Jeopardy! responses. I explain it at some length here; the short form is that Holzhauer had to stop including messages alongside his Final responses after having done so in each of his first seventeen games, or risk being ruled incorrect on account of them.
As the show said itself in a particularly infamous application: “When a contestant adds incorrect information to an otherwise correct response, they are ruled incorrect.”1 In the main game, “Roy Kroc” and “Giacomo Rossini” have been ruled wrong. In a 2012 game, a Final Jeopardy! response was deemed unacceptable (and the player giving it lost) because it was changed, but only the first name of the original response was crossed out. Shout-outs and jokes from all players should be handled the same way; that is, considered to be part of the response, making it incorrect if included alongside an otherwise correct one. This would still allow for such things in cases where nothing is on the line, like where a player has wagered zero or is out of contention. Thus, Alex Jacob’s “WHAT IS ALEVE” or Dhruv Gaur’s “We ♥ You, Alex”, among others, could still be given.2
Pre-emptions: the networks and stations
As I mentioned a week ago, the last two weekdays of this week see some of the most widespread pre-emptions of the Jeopardy! season — particularly Black Friday. Less than one-fourth of the 209 stations carrying the show aired yesterday’s episode on the show’s usual station at its usual time.
Paradoxically, to a small extent, the expansion of the sports coverage over this holiday weekend has had impacts that I find beneficial. Take ABC, for example. For several years, it would air two college football games on Black Friday, with the second slated to end at 7:00 PM. This gave stations airing Jeopardy! at that hour two options; I know this well, because WPVI employed each of the two in different years. They can err on the side of caution, assume the football will run long, and bump the whole of Jeopardy! to a separate channel or to another time slot. Or, they can take the network at its word, and when the football and/or postgame show inevitably does run over, join the game show in progress, which generally means the missed portion is not re-aired. With ABC now airing three football games and highlight shows between them, this issue goes by the wayside; as the sports is now nonstop from noon to 11 PM, the entire show has to be moved or not aired at all on every ABC station airing it.
This problem does still exist, though — particularly this year, it did for 7:30 PM Eastern markets where CBS carries Jeopardy!. There are twenty-six of those; all but three kept J! in its normal half-hour on those CBS stations.3 The Missouri at Arkansas game ended at 7:26 PM, and fifteen minutes of postgame coverage followed. Thus, CBS didn’t turn the airwaves back over to its affiliates until more than a third of the way through the 7:30 half-hour.
In terms of how to handle the broadcast of the game as it happens, there’s not much that can be altered. You don’t need to remind me about the Heidi Game, and individual stations may not exactly be able to dictate to their parent network how long the postgame show should go. But they can be more cautious and less deferential to the coverage estimates from their networks; allocate the remainder of the half-hour following a scheduled sports telecast to something less likely to anger viewers if it’s missed, such as a local newscast or rerun of a syndicated series no longer in production. Personally, I think that a later airing of the full game, even after the late night talk shows and Nightline, is far preferable to an on-time airing of only part of it.
Stations also have to be better at communicating these changes and potential effects. As I put together my list of impacts to airing, I didn’t see very many statements from stations themselves.4 Guide listings should also accurately detail what episode is airing when. There were late changes; and in some cases where a new episode might air in place of a usual repeat, the latter is still what is said to be airing. (KTRK (ABC Houston) may be one such example.) More accurate information, supplied earlier, would be helpful at least inasmuch as reducing the possibility of viewers being surprised when their favorite game shows don’t come on at the time and in the place they expect.
Pre-emptions: the Jeopardy! staff and Sony
Speaking of more accurate information, supplied earlier, that is a point upon which the show itself has backslid in recent years. It used to be the case that as the Jeopardy! staff became aware of pre-emptions, those impacts would be posted on the show’s “where to watch” page. These days, not so much. Even if that page were updated with only a general listing of networks and times (for example, “all ABC airings on Black Friday —check your local listings” and similar), it would be helpful.
I also compare these pre-emptions with other examples in the recent past. For Election Day last year, Michael Davies inserted a non-competitive “exhibition” game between the quarterfinal and semifinal rounds of the Tournament of Champions, featuring the three players with byes into the semis, and placed the full episode on its official YouTube channel. Also made available on YouTube was the last game of the ToC final series. I think that the pre-emptions of yesterday’s episode might be more extensive than Election Day last year. It might be worthwhile for the show to post Thursday’s and Friday’s episodes on the YouTube channel, if only for a limited time (perhaps until the end of Clubs on Tuesday), to allow everyone watching the two-game final early next week to be up to speed.
Normally, I wouldn’t suggest the show do such a thing, as it would be only two regular games affected.5 But on account of the unique circumstances occasioning Season 40, the missed episodes directly determine two of the three players who are sure to compete for a $100,000 grand prize and a spot in the next Tournament of Champions. Having established the precedent a year ago, it’s absolutely appropriate to criticize the show for not deploying that remedy in this instance. I’m expecting Jeopardy! to schedule around next year’s Election Day, it being a Presidential election year; we shall see if they make that episode directly available.
Last but not least
I’m not optimistic that this will happen, but I hope we get the matchups for all nine quarterfinals of the Hearts bracket on Monday (as opposed to just the first three as part of a new “This Week’s Contestants.”
I’ll leave a full preview of the Clubs final to Andy, but I’ll just say that I think any of the three finalists is capable of winning it. There should be some fireworks early next week on the Alex Trebek Stage!
That was, of course, an incorrect application of this rule; the infamous “Berry/Barry” ruling on September 15, 2020.
Andy Saunders noted back during the Spades bracket that for over a quarter century, players betting zero have been advised to not seriously attempt the clue.
WROC (Rochester, NY) moved it to late night; WRDW (Augusta, GA — Aiken, SC) moved it to a sister channel; and in Boston, while WBZ joined in progress, WSBK aired it in full, which I counted as “no impact” due to WSBK being where J! airs on all Fridays during the NFL season, it and Wheel displaced by Patriots All Access.
Among those who did publicize, I want to highlight WOLO (ABC Columbia, SC), WNEM (CBS Flint-Saginaw, MI) and WSYT (FOX Syracuse, NY). I appreciate the forthrightness and clarity from these stations.
Side note — now that Thanksgiving is behind us, we’ve reached the point where the “postseason” would have completed and Season 40 regular play would have started, absent the WGA strike. Accordingly, from here on out, culpability for the seemingly endless run of tournaments falls squarely and solely upon the AMPTP.