--:-- Shamita Basu: This is In Conversation from Apple News Today. I'm Shamita Basu. Every weekend, we're taking you deeper into the best journalism on Apple News.
--:-- Shamita Basu: The late host of Jeopardy, Alex Trebek, used to insist that he was not the show's star. The contestants and the writers, they're the stars of the show. The thing is, that never really felt true, you know? Alex Trebek was the show's compass, its conscience, which is why when he died in 2020, it brought up all these questions about the future. Could the show continue to be successful without Alex Trebek?
--:-- Shamita Basu: These past few months have been some of the most thrilling in Jeopardy's recent history. We've had celebrity guest hosts and some really impressive contestants have gone out on that stage and set new records.
--:-- Shamita Basu: You are our Jeopardy champion, Matt, with a 38-day total of 1,500,000. And then came Amy Schneider, who beat Amodio's newly set record and walked away with 40 consecutive wins. You now have the second longest streak in Jeopardy! history.
--:-- Shamita Basu: With all this excitement, ratings have soared. At the start of this year, Jeopardy! was, for the first time in at least three decades, the highest-rated non-sports program on broadcast and cable television, proving that fans are tuning in even without Alex Trebek reading the clues.
--:-- Shamita Basu: It is so weird that this show is so popular after all these decades on air. That's Claire McNair. She's a reporter for The Ringer and the author of the book Answers in the Form of Questions, a definitive history and insider's guide to Jeopardy.
--:-- Claire McNair: It is totally strange that this is a show that competes with like major sporting programming. Like it makes no sense that Jeopardy is this huge, huge hit, but it is.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Claire is exactly the person you want to talk to about Jeopardy in this moment. It was her reporting that led to the resignation of Mike Richards, the former EP who had been named as the next host. Claire dug up old offensive comments he made years ago, and he ended up stepping down.
--:-- Claire McNair: So, yeah, not only has she written about the history of the show, she also kind of ended up shaping its future. And along the way, she has gone so deep. She's on the online message boards for superfans. She talked to Alex Trebek and lots of people who work on the show.
--:-- Shamita Basu: And she can tell you what kinds of strategies it takes to not just win, but go on a huge winning streak. So I asked her to start by telling us more about how Trebek first got the job as the man behind the lectern.
--:-- Claire McNair: I think what I found interesting from sort of digging through his archive was that when he took on Jeopardy and when he took on the game shows before that, he didn't want to be a game show host. He didn't want to do it.
--:-- Claire McNair: He moved down from Canada where he'd been sort of a newscaster and hosted this variety show. And he got an in as the host of a game show called The Wizard of Odds. And I think it lasted all of one season, but he saw it as a way to get down to Los Angeles and become an actor.
--:-- Claire McNair: That was what he wanted to do. And then of course, you know, because he'd hosted one game show, he was invited to host another, hired to host another, and it kind of became this endless cycle.
--:-- Claire McNair: And even as, you know, he got hired at Jeopardy and Jeopardy took off very quickly. I mean, it was very popular very quickly. So it was clear it was not going to get immediately canceled, that it was going to be this hit, that he was getting publicity as the host of the show, he was still just like, well, I'm kind of trapped.
--:-- Claire McNair: Like, I see this as a trap. I mean, he said literally those words in an interview in the 80s. And clearly, I mean, he kind of made his peace with it. And I think he also did enjoy it at some level.
--:-- Claire McNair: So it's not like every single day for 36 and a half years, he was just like, you know, holding his head being like, oh God, another day of jeopardy. I don't think that's at all what was happening.
--:-- Claire McNair: I think he, as a very rational person realized that he was pretty good at it and certainly it paid well. So he stuck around.
--:-- Claire McNair: One thing that I think there must be a pretty big divide on this. I think some people think that Alex Trebek was truly super smart and knew every answer on that show. And then I think there are other people who understand that to a certain degree, he was playing a character as the host of the show, although I'm sure he was also very smart.
--:-- Claire McNair: So how much was it about the character do you think And how much does the next host need to be about a character versus smarts alone?
--:-- Claire McNair: I mean there are a few ways of looking at this I think you are absolutely correct that it was a character It was one that he played very well for a very long time this kind of occasionally surly, disappointed school teacher who would sort of like wag his finger at you if you missed what he thought was an easy clue.
--:-- Claire McNair: But also, like, he really kind of, to a large degree, was that person. I mean, he was somebody who really, like, his favorite vacation place, I think he had said in many interviews was like the home of the Brontes in England.
--:-- Claire McNair: And like, he just loved all the classics and he had this crazy library in his home. And one of my favorite things that I learned from talking to contestants is he would often walk up to the contestant lecterns at the end of the game and you could kind of see him chatting with them, but you couldn't hear anything.
--:-- Claire McNair: They'd cut the mics. And often he was just like comparing notes on Final Jeopardy. He was like, did you guess? Or like for people who didn't get that, like, you know, oh, how could you have missed like this major thing that happened or whatever.
--:-- Claire McNair: The humiliation of getting the answer wrong and then having Alex Trebek come up and try and talk through the play-by-play of how you got it wrong seems excruciating.
--:-- Claire McNair: Oh, brutal, brutal. But like, so in character, but of course at that point the mics were off, like that was him.
--:-- Claire McNair: Right, right. But what I will say is Art Fleming was the host of Jeopardy in the 60s and 70s. And as much as the show had the same format, he was a very different host.
--:-- Claire McNair: Like he would say publicly that he didn't know any of it. Like he was like, I'm so glad that I have the answers in front of me. And he played this kind of affable, humble, like, oh, wow, I don't know how these smart people like know all this stuff.
--:-- Claire McNair: And that show was hugely popular, too. I'm not sure that that would work as well today. And I think that's why somebody like Ken Jennings, who, of course, is the winningest Jeopardy! contestant ever and has been filling in as a guest host, like, why he has so many fans.
--:-- Claire McNair: I think it's because people know that, I mean, he's literally Jeopardy's greatest of all time and that he probably does know a lot of that material and he might, you know, beat the stuffing out of the three contestants if he had his own buzzer.
--:-- Claire McNair: But I don't think it's totally necessary for that to be part of it. But I do think that that added something.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Okay, let's talk about the contestants that we're seeing right now. One of your most popular and really recent articles is all about the winning streaks we've been seeing lately.
--:-- Claire McNair: And I saw this on Twitter and I read this in the comments. So many people were saying, I have been waiting for this explanation. Like someone needs to explain to me why we're seeing so many winning streaks.
--:-- Claire McNair: Yeah, so this has been just a bizarre season at Jeopardy in terms of the contestants. We've seen these two really, really long winning streaks that are now number two and number three ever.
--:-- Claire McNair: I think that this is the Moneyball era of Jeopardy in the sense that people are aspiring Jeopardy contestants and people often try for years and years to get on.
--:-- Claire McNair: I think Amy said she had been trying to get on the show for like a decade or something before she finally got on. People who are kind of in that group of like, I apply every year. I really want to go on Jeopardy. This is one of my dreams.
--:-- Claire McNair: Often they will be like preparing in that time before they get called for the show. And they will be doing things like people now sort of rig buzzers of their own and use software to time themselves and practice having just the right pose or, you know, what conditions they buzz slightly better under.
--:-- Claire McNair: And of course, that's kind of a gamble because you don't really know what it's going to be like in the studio, but they'll do that.
--:-- Claire McNair: Now we are really going down the rabbit hole of deep Jeopardy strategy. See, a casual viewer might think that Jeopardy is just a trivia show, but it's so much more than that.
--:-- Claire McNair: Like that thing I just said about the buzzer. It turns out buzzer timing is a big part of strategy. Alex Trebek, he made this critical rule change, which is that the host has to finish reading the entire clue before the contestants can ring in.
--:-- Claire McNair: And the result of that is instead of the initial version of the show where there would be this kind of loud buzzer ringing sound as people rang in and shouted the answer as quickly as they could, it created a situation, A, where it was much better to play from home because you want the host to get through the whole clue so that you can play along.
--:-- Claire McNair: But B, it also made buzzer strategy and buzzer timing this huge, huge part of the game because you have this kind of very narrow window as soon as the host finishes that very last word.
--:-- Claire McNair: And there's kind of a secondary human element of the person who enables the buzzers at the end of that is a researcher, a Jeopardy researcher who sits just offstage and literally like flips a switch to enable the buzzer.
--:-- Claire McNair: So it becomes this massively important thing where you get locked out if you're too early or if you too slow then you just get beaten and it doesn't matter if you know every single answer to the whole game You don't get any money.
--:-- Claire McNair: I mean Ken Jennings I think has compared it to an Olympic sport where the very first time anybody played was in the Olympics.
--:-- Claire McNair: Because fans are so obsessed with this stuff, Jeopardy! made a change this season. The show introduced a new element where viewers can actually see how many times a contestant buzzed in and study their buzzing techniques.
--:-- Claire McNair: Jeopardy! just introduced a daily scorecard where they show the buzzer data. For the very first time, we now know exactly how many times every single contestant on that stage rang in and whether they were beaten to the buzzer.
--:-- Claire McNair: So it was always kind of guessing if somebody was good on the buzzer or bad on the buzzer. But now we know, and also that has kind of dispelled this longtime theory of Jeopardy!, that the best players were just the ones who were best on the buzzer.
--:-- Claire McNair: And now you could see, like, looking at Amy's scorecards, she was just ringing in on so many more clues than anybody else on the stage for the most part.
--:-- Claire McNair: And so really, I mean, she just knew so much stuff. Like, she was just the most trivially inclined for so many of those games.
--:-- Claire McNair: So, I mean, it's an exciting thing for the fans because now the show is sort of officially embracing this statistics era of Jeopardy.
--:-- Claire McNair: So really good contestants like Amy and Ken and Matt definitely study up on buzzer timing. That's one part. The second skill set might seem like the most obvious, but you still need it. Trivia.
--:-- Claire McNair: And aspiring contestants put a lot of time into studying past clues. They'll use tools like the J-Archive, which is this fan-run database of essentially every game since 1984.
--:-- Claire McNair: It's not every single one, but it is really close. And it has every single clue. It has every single daily double wager. It has just everything. Everything is there.
--:-- Claire McNair: It is a fascinating read. I mean, you can go and look at yesterday's game and it will just be there and you can kind of play along.
--:-- Claire McNair: And a lot of contestants do. So who assembled that? It's fans. So it started in the early aughts.
--:-- Claire McNair: There's kind of this group of people who love the show and know each other and go through it every day and add like the new clues. And they're always trying to like hunt for weird VHS tapes of like the missing games and get really excited when they find one of the games.
--:-- Claire McNair: They get to plug into like 1985 Jeopardy or whatever. Like a garage sale VHS find. Absolutely.
--:-- Claire McNair: I mean, there's also a forum called Jboard where a lot of this stuff is kind of discussed and planned.
--:-- Claire McNair: So the diehard fans would go on there and kind of do like the breakdown and debate like whether it was a hard final or not.
--:-- Claire McNair: Wow. So there is this community of people who take it very seriously. And a lot of those people are people who want to go on the show and who kind of study that quite religiously.
--:-- Claire McNair: And that brings us to the third skill you'll need to be a champion, deciding what to wager for daily doubles and in Final Jeopardy.
--:-- Claire McNair: I mean, there's this incredible site called The Final Wager that was started by a Jeopardy alum named Keith Williams that digs into the really complicated math behind how you should wager in Final Jeopardy.
--:-- Claire McNair: And has kind of led to this community of people who are not necessarily math people at all, but who very, very carefully study the math before they go on Jeopardy so that they know exactly what to do in those scenarios.
--:-- Claire McNair: There are Jeopardy! alumni who basically serve as coaches for aspiring Jeopardy! contestants or for people who know they're going to play a month from now and are just trying to get as ready as they possibly can.
--:-- Claire McNair: Man, it sounds like, I mean, Jeopardy, when you think about it, is really such a combination of, frankly, really different skills.
--:-- Claire McNair: It's not just trivia at all, right? We're talking about trivia. We're talking about strategy. We're talking about, like, the physicality of pressing a buzzer at the right time.
--:-- Claire McNair: And you're also bringing in, of course, the math behind the wagers, which is a huge part of it.
--:-- Claire McNair: How has data analytics changed the conversation among hopefuls?
--:-- Claire McNair: It is worth mentioning that there is a small but very cranky subset of the Jeopardy fandom, including some actual alumni of the show, former contestants, who say that this is a sign that the show is broken and that they need to discontinue Jeopardy, that people are breaking the game and ruining it for everybody.
--:-- Claire McNair: And they need to bring back the five-day limit for returning champions, which was something they had until just before Ken Jennings.
--:-- Claire McNair: And of course, Ken Jennings came through and won 74 games. But it used to be that you would win five games and they'd kick you out, maybe give you a car, invite you back for a tournament, but that was it. You couldn't go any higher. Five-timers, right.
--:-- Claire McNair: So these are the Jeopardy purists who believe that we need a return to a simpler time in the game. Absolutely.
--:-- Claire McNair: But I think that is a very small group of people. I mean, And you would see in the comments people saying like, oh, I'm so tired of Matt. I'm so tired of Amy. Like, I can't wait for this to be over.
--:-- Claire McNair: So there's some drama again. And I think I and a lot of other people who love the show would contend that it's got very high drama when there is a great champion like this.
--:-- Claire McNair: And it's fascinating. And of course, the ratings support this theory. I mean the ratings this season have been absolutely absurd I think it like the highest rated show that not sports programming right now of anything on TV
--:-- Claire McNair: So I think that that opinion exists but I do not think it is one that is widely held. And I certainly do not think it is one that is popular at Jeopardy or at Sony.
--:-- Claire McNair: I've definitely heard murmurs. I'm sure you have too, that there must be some kind of conspiracy going on for all these long streaks to happen.
--:-- Claire McNair: And I saw that you tweeted about how it can't possibly be a conspiracy. The games are not being fixed because apparently rigging a quiz show is a federal crime.
--:-- Claire McNair: What? Yes, absolutely.
--:-- Claire McNair: So this is one of the bizarre things about the show. And it's not just Jeopardy, of course, it is all quiz shows.
--:-- Claire McNair: So if you have seen the movie quiz show, you might be familiar with this scandal from the 50s where a bunch of very popular game shows manufactured these really exciting high stakes winning streaks.
--:-- Claire McNair: And they did that by a combination of feeding the correct answers to the returning champion and telling either the defender or a new contender to throw the game.
--:-- Claire McNair: And I think in some cases paying them to do so and kind of choosing people to become the champion, the long-winning champion who would be exciting for fans.
--:-- Claire McNair: So the most famous, most successful of them was Charles Van Doren, who was a lecturer at Columbia, and he was a young, good-looking guy.
--:-- Claire McNair: And they just decided, absolutely we will get a ton of press if he wins a whole bunch of money. I think he was the first contestant to win $100,000.
--:-- Claire McNair: And then it became such a scandal when it came out that in fact, this was nonsense, that he was not winning all that fair and square, that Congress basically dragged Van Doren and a bunch of other people into a session and amended the Federal Communications Act to make it a crime, a federal crime, to cheat on a quiz show.
--:-- Claire McNair: And that includes, for the people who make the quiz show. They cannot give answers to people. They cannot tell people to throw a game.
--:-- Claire McNair: And as a result of that, the most practical way that becomes obvious on Jeopardy that you don't really see when you're watching it is the show totally separates the contestant department from everything else that happens because they don't want contestants to have any possible claim that it was not fair and square, you know, in a good way or a bad way.
--:-- Claire McNair: And they take it so seriously that there's this kind of famous story about Ken Jennings in the midst of his winning streak.
--:-- Claire McNair: He'd worn like a tie for whatever game that just didn't read well on camera. Like there are certain patterns that just don't work well. Like plaid doesn't really work well.
--:-- Claire McNair: So they give him another tie and the game's about to start. So they're like, okay, come on, come on, come on. And lead him to the mirror that is just backstage.
--:-- Claire McNair: And it is the one that Trebek would use right before he walked out to kind of make sure his tie was straight. But in doing so, he had to pass the host lectern where the game was laid out.
--:-- Claire McNair: And they had this like huge debate in the show about whether, you know, they had to just end his streak right there on the spot because potentially he could have cheated.
--:-- Claire McNair: And of course they figured out a way to square and it might've been by just scrapping that game entirely, but they take it so seriously that they were willing to kick off Ken Jennings.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Wow. That's so, that's really interesting. I didn't know that.
--:-- Shamita Basu: You said earlier that you really felt like when Alex Trebek died, you were not sure if the show was really going to make it.
--:-- Claire McNair: And I think a lot of people had that sort of pit in their stomach feeling in that moment. It really seemed like the best days were behind Jeopardy.
--:-- Claire McNair: But these past few months of play and all the streaks and the strategy, it made me think, I mean, are we actually entering the golden age of Jeopardy? Is it ahead of us? What do you think?
--:-- Claire McNair: That is a great question, and it is one I would have said definitely no to two years ago.
--:-- Claire McNair: I think I saw Alex Trebek's eventual exit from the show because he had been talking about retirement for a long time. I saw it as an existential threat for Jeopardy.
--:-- Claire McNair: I think I had trouble seeing how the show could be kind of separated from him. And, I mean, it was just Alex Trebek was Jeopardy, and Jeopardy was Alex Trebek.
--:-- Claire McNair: And he would always say, I'm not the star of Jeopardy. the stars are the contestants and the stars the game. Those are the stars of Jeopardy, not me.
--:-- Claire McNair: And, you know, it's a lovely line, but I don't think even as I was reporting and writing this book, I'm not sure that I totally believed it.
--:-- Claire McNair: And I think what has stood out to me is I was totally wrong. He was absolutely correct. I mean, in hindsight, but the show, I mean, is doing phenomenally this season.
--:-- Claire McNair: And it's clear that the game and the contestants really are what people come back to Jeopardy for.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Well, Claire, thank you so much for your reporting. And thanks for sitting down with me.
--:-- Claire McNair: Thank you so much for having me.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Answers in the Form of Questions, A Definitive History and Insider's Guide to Jeopardy by Claire McNair is available now on Apple Books. You can find a link on our show notes page.
