Jeopardy! Announces Major Season 40 Overhaul Amid Writers’ Strike — Find Out What’s Changing

Michael Ausiello
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It’s official: Jeopardy! will forge ahead with Season 40 in spite of the current writers’ strike, albeit with a few key asterisks.

Jeopardy! showrunner Michael Davies announced Monday via the Inside Jeopardy! podcast that Season 40 will undergo significant tweaking as a result of the strike. Namely, the season will feature not just recycled questions, but recycled contestants, too.

“I believe, principally that it would not be fair to have new contestants,” Davies said. “Making their first appearance on the Alex Trebek stage, doing it with non-original material or as we’ll talk about a combination of non-original material and material that was written pre-strike. And so we decided that really we needed to invite back and give a second chance in general to players who probably thought that their chance to come back and play on the Alex Trebek stage had gone forever. So we’re gonna open the season with a second chance tournament for players from Season 37 who lost their initial game, and winners from that will advance to a Season 37 and Season 38 Champions Wild Card.” (FYI: S38 contestants have already had their Second Chance competition.)

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Once the writers’ strike ends, “We’ll head into our Season 39 post-season, which will culminate with the [Tournament of Champions],” Davies continued. “So episodes at the beginning of the season for the Season 37 and Season 38 contestants, the material that we’re gonna be using is a combination of material that our WGA writers wrote before the strike, which is still in the database and material that is being redeployed from multiple, multiple seasons of the show.”

Meanwhile for the first time in more than two decades, Jeopardy! will be “increasing the second and third place prize amounts by a thousand each,” Davies revealed. “So the third place prize will move up to $2,000. The second place prize will move up to $3,000. This is something that we’ve been working on ever since I really took the reins of the show. It’s something that obviously is discussed widely within our social communities and with the community of our contestants. We understand that post-COVID, uh, travel costs have increased. We understand how complicated sort of funding a trip to Jeopardy is for, you know, many contestants within our community.”

Still unclear: Who will be standing behind the game show’s iconic lectern when Season 40 launches on Monday. Sept. 11. Ken Jennings had been facing pressure to follow co-host Mayim Bialik’s lead in not crossing the picket line. (As you’ll recall, Bialik bowed out of Season 39’s final weeks in a public expression of solidarity with the show’s striking writers, prompting Jennings to step in and close out the season.)

In late July, as Season 39 was winding down, a Jeopardy! spokesperson maintained that — in spite of the strike — Season 40 would move forward with new episodes, albeit featuring recycled questions. (Sony Pictures Television did, however, delay the annual Tournament of Champions contest as a result of said strike.)

“We have always been careful to honor our WGA agreements and we would never air game material not created by WGA writers,” the rep said at the time. “However, just as we did, led by Alex Trebek, during the 2007-2008 strike, we will deliver first-run episodes again this fall… featuring the best of our WGA written material.”

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