Jeopardy! Vet James Holzhauer Slams Upcoming Changes for Season 40

Rebecca Iannucci
·2 min read
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We’ll take “Irked Jeopardy! Alumni” for $200, please.

On the heels of Jeopardy!‘s showrunner revealing how, exactly, Season 40 will proceed this fall while the Writers Guild is striking — in short, the show plans to recycle clues and contestants — series veteran James Holzhauer has expressed his displeasure with the planned changes.

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“If you don’t have time to listen, here’s the executive summary of today’s announcement,” Holzhauer posted on X (fka Twitter) Monday night, with a link to the latest Inside Jeopardy! podcast episode. “1:00-2:00: Jeopardy’s writers are invaluable and we couldn’t produce the show without them. 2:00-15:00: Here is how we will produce the upcoming season without them.”

Showrunner Michael Davies explained on the podcast that Season 40 (premiering Monday, Sept. 11) will open 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.”

“I believe, principally, that it would not be fair to have new contestants,” Davies explained. “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.”

According to Davies, the clues that those returning contestants will receive are “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.”

In late July, as Season 39 was winding down, a Jeopardy! spokesperson maintained that — in spite of the writers’ 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; Davies confirmed during his podcast appearance that the Season 39 post-season, including the Tournament of Champions, will take place once the strike ends.

Holzhauer has become one of Jeopardy!‘s best-known contestants, beginning with his 32-game win streak during Season 35. He won the subsequent Tournament of Champions later that year, then went on to finish second in the Greatest of All Time Tournament (against Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter) and first in the inaugural Jeopardy! Masters Tournament.

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