The British Did the Unthinkable to Jeopardy!

Jeopardy! has been on the air, in some form or fashion, for six decades. The game show adopted its modern format in 1984, and little has changed since. A typical episode rattles off 61 questions in a zippy 22 minutes, with brief intermissions for the get-to-know-ya contestant interviews, the Daily Double math, and the roiling anxiety of the final wager. That’s all there is to it. Jeopardy! has been a remarkably stable beast during a wobbly financial environment for network television, which is exactly why the show’s latest United Kingdom spinoff—which debuted earlier this month on ITV—has emerged as such an uncanny product.

The British have done the unthinkable. They have taken the greatest trivia show ever made—evidenced by its decades’ worth of continued syndication—and altered its DNA in small yet momentously stupid ways. The show has been extended out to an hour, with two opening rounds of questions before moving on to the much more consequential Double Jeopardy board (similar to the current, misguided prime-time U.S. celebrity editions). The prize pool has been hemmed in to ridiculously piddly amounts. The cheapest answers score a dinky £25, while the most difficult clues—worth $1,000 in America—register at £150. And then there is the problem at the podium.

Our host is the affable and beloved Stephen Fry, a legitimate star, who certainly cuts the silhouette of a Jeopardy! presenter with his professorial vibe, woody voice, and resonant worldliness. But Fry seems incapable of matching the brisk, staccato cadence of the departed Alex Trebek or his disciple in Ken Jennings (to say nothing of Mayim Bialik, or, hell, even Aaron Rodgers!). On U.K. Jeopardy!, Fry is a man of digressions and asides. He rarely lets a clue go by without tacking on some of his own wonky commentary. When Trebek was really cooking, he could marshal out three questions in 30 seconds. Fry is lucky to get through one a minute, such is his need to comment on every right and wrong answer. It is a brutal reminder—as if any fan of the franchise needs one at this point—that not everyone is up to being a Jeopardy! host.

To be fair, Fry has a lot of time to fill, and that necessitates a version of Jeopardy! that is slower, sleepier, and irritatingly nonchalant—especially compared to the American mother ship, which treats the show like a professional sport. Nobody seems to be all that happy with this desecration. The notoriously cranky English press, like the Sun, has already compiled the brewing anathema local viewers are harboring toward this imported trivia tradition.(“Absolute boring tripe with a crap presenter!” reads one characteristically eloquent take.) Even funnier are the outraged Americans piling up their own pedantic critiques, to which I obviously relate. (“The show needs to be shortened to 30 minutes, the second round of single Jeopardy needs to be scrapped, and Stephen Fry needs to be replaced,” reads one review written by a righteously change-resistant American who found the show on YouTube.)

But the truth is the British incarnation of Jeopardy! was in a no-win situation from the start. This is actually the fourth time producers have attempted to kickstart the show across the pond after short-lived endeavors in the ’80s and ’90s, and unsurprisingly, none of those conversions found an audience. Jeopardy! is a North American institution, and probably my favorite television show of all time. But it is also, undoubtedly, replete with all sorts of maladaptive eccentricities that were ensconced in the rulebook years ago, and have never been excised for clarity. These things can get lost in translation. Answering trivia in the form of a question is bizarre, so good luck explaining that premise to anyone who hasn’t been watching Jeopardy! since they were a preteen. In the episodes I watched of the U.K. facsimile, Fry needed to reiterate those procedural quirks to contestants on multiple occasions, after they buzzed in without the proper phrasing. It might be instinctual to native members of Jeopardy! nation, but can you really blame newcomers for being turned off by, I don’t know, a baffling, free-associative sentence like, “What is isosceles triangle?”

Also, more importantly, Jeopardy! is, at its core, an extremely straightforward trivia game show. It became venerated because of the intense competitive fandom surrounding it, what with all the winning streaks, GOAT debates, and championship showdowns. Jeopardy! has sustained a truly impressive American cult—scroll through the J! Archive if you’re not convinced—and that well-hewn infrastructure simply does not exist in the United Kingdom. So if someone tuned in to the show for the first time, probably on a rainy Wednesday in beautiful Milton Keynes or something, they’d probably think Jeopardy! is little more than Stephen Fry posing a slew of softball queries to a trio of bemused nerds. They’d be wrong, of course, but it’d be hard to argue with them.

All this is to say that British Jeopardy! is likely doomed, just like the many times it was doomed before. Some television rituals are isolated in their own circumstances. Jeopardy! will never belong to the world. The Atlantic Ocean is a merciless barrier of norms. Could I get “Reckless Brand Expansion” for £75, Stephen?