Jeopardy ’s Great National Nightmare Is Finally Coming to an End

Jeopardy!’s Tournament of Champions begins Friday, an annual event that’s somewhat akin to a Super Bowl for the American trivia community. But this year, it feels a little different. For one thing, the tournament is typically held in the fall. For another, last week, Jeopardy! officially entered its fifth consecutive month of tournament play—the longest period without regular play in the show’s history, a longtime chronicler of the series told me.

For weeks, the king of game shows has been mired in the Champions Wild Card, where scrappy previous winners attempted to secure a place in the esteemed Tournament of Champions after they did not earn it during their original appearance. This bracket arrives on the tail of Second Chance games, in which strong players who didn’t win their first Jeopardy! appearance got one last opportunity to punch a ticket into the inner circle, as well as a separate extended series of wild card qualifiers that ran throughout the end of 2023. (Before those, of course, was another Second Chance contest.)

All this is to say that loyal viewers have been watching a whole lot of the same contestants take the lecterns, over and over again, in a dirgeful grind toward an ultimate reward that never seems to materialize. If you feel like you’re going insane, you’re not alone. Reports of tournament fatigue have flitted through social media over the past few months, as Jeopardy!’s reliable inertness—three nerds answering questions on television, without the greater bureaucracy getting in the way—continues to elude us. The good news is that there is an end in sight. The bad news is that these new-fashioned tournaments aren’t going away, as Jeopardy! marches toward a franchise-forward future.

Like so many derangements in recent television history, the problem arose from the Writers Guild of America strike, which lasted from May to September last year. The work stoppage disallowed many Jeopardy! writers from crafting new clues, and when the executives at the show made the choice to return in September, they did so by allowing the show to use questions that had either been written before the work stoppage or recycled from Jeopardy! episodes of yore. Michael Davies, Jeopardy! producer and someone who has made clear his aspirations to transform the game show into something akin to America’s fifth major sport, wanted to avoid a scenario where new contestants were competing with old material. Given that websites like the J! Archive contain an encyclopedic history of past Jeopardy! potpourri, you can understand his fears of enshrining a winner who made their bones on rote memorization.

So the program reached deep into its bag to resurface those bygone clues. In an early strike-era Second Chance game, one eagle-eyed viewer identified a category that was first broadcast all the way back in 2003. The panel only got one out of five correct. It turned out that most people haven’t internalized the solutions to decades-old Jeopardy! grids. But the endless tournaments continued as planned.

Many Jeopardy! fans objected to the show returning at all while writers were on strike. Some top recent competitors said they wouldn’t appear at the Tournament of Champions during a strike, either, before Sony confirmed the event would be postponed. Other viewers razzed Ken Jennings for hosting the show during this period, even with the recycled clues. (Former co-host Mayim Bialik, who was eventually pushed aside in favor of Jennings, had said she would not work on the show during the strike. I should note I am a member of a WGA shop at Slate.) But by the end of it all, the problem turned out to be more basic: The crush of indeterminable tournament play has made it tempting to tune out the show altogether. The Second Chance tournament was actually launched in 2022, when it lasted a far more tolerable two weeks. This time, it was all just too much. Jeopardy!’s producers have syndication deals to hit, but as with some of the new specials in prime time, this tournament schedule had the effect of cheapening the brand a little bit.

Perhaps a more charitable takeaway from all this would be appreciation for the wizards who make regular Jeopardy! work. The clues must take far longer to write than I previously imagined, and the regular cadence of the show shouldn’t be taken for granted. And an end is in sight: Regular-old Jeopardy! will likely return in April. (That is, after a miscellaneous “invitational,” which will be showcased in the week following the Tournament of Champions. God is dead!) The implication here is that the coffers are in need of a refilling, and Davies wants to make sure that the audience won’t endure an underbaked Madame Bovary category. “Our No. 1 imperative right now is to get our postseason back on track,” Davies said on an episode of the Inside Jeopardy! podcast back in October. “They have a lot of pent-up clues, and I’m sure they’re going to write like the wind, but we want them always to have the time they need. What they write really is quality. It takes time, so we won’t sacrifice that.”

With the Tournament of Champions kicking off Friday, we will finally have something weightier than this endless slew of Second Chance hopefuls, who mostly seemed just happy to be here. At long last, Jeopardy! will crown an actual champion, which is quite a thing to say after a season-long playoff. (It will also be spicy for off-screen reasons: Remember three-time champion Yogesh Raut, who trashed the show after his appearances? He’s back next week!) I am excited to witness the fruits of all these qualifiers, but I truly can’t wait to return to some semblance of normalcy during the 7 o’clock hour. Davies clearly loves Jeopardy!, but I sincerely hope he does not learn the wrong lessons from this unholy gantlet he’s put in front of us. Perhaps they need some new eyes elsewhere on the Sony lot, on Wheel of Fortune? Now that’s a show in need of a fresh coat of paint.