March 29, 2024: What is Game Show Studying?: Jeopardy!

[On March 30,1964, the legendary game show Jeopardydebuted. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy that classic and a handful of othergame show histories! Add your thoughts, obviously in the form of a question, incomments!]

On twoways the legendary game show echoes topics from earlier in the week, and oneway it stands out.

Maybe it’san apocryphal story (TV game shows are a mixture of reality and fiction, peopleand performance, as this whole week’s series has hopefully reflected), but inany case as the story goes Jeopardy! wascreated in direct response and contrast to the 1950s quiz show scandals aboutwhich I wrote on Tuesday. As creator MervGriffin described it in a 1963 profile published while the show was stillin development, “My wife Julannjust came up with the idea one day when we were in a plane bringing us back toNew York City from Duluth. I was mulling over game show ideas, when she noted thatthere had not been a successful ‘question and answer’ game on the air since the quizshow scandals. Why not do a switch, and give theanswers to the contestant and let them come up with the question?” Soundslikely enough, and I love the thought that the longest-running and mostsuccessful quiz show in TV history was inspired to flip the traditional question-and-answerformat (the innovation that made it stand out) by a cultural need to flipnarratives of fixed quiz shows.

Across thatlong-running history, Jeopardy! has likewiseconnected to both the daytime and primetime varieties of game show about whichI wrote in yesterday’s post. The original 1964 iteration,hosted by Art Fleming and running until January 1975, was a daytime show thataired weekly; the 1984reboot, initially hosted by Alex Trebek and still on the air today despiteTrebek’s 2021 passing, was and remains a primetime show that airs daily. Asthose hyperlinked clips indicate, the two versions were in gameplay and manyways identical to each other, but I would argue that (just as I argued about Deal or No Deal in yesterday’s post) theprimetime version of Jeopardy! did nonethelessfeel distinct, both in heightened production values and in higher stakes(relatively speaking—Jeopardy! hasnever had the million-dollarpayouts of some other quiz and game shows). Most of the other long-runninggame shows have stayed on one side or the other of this duality, so it’sparticularly interesting to see how a single show has evolved from daytime to primetime.

While Jeopardy! is thus very much inconversation with TV game show trends and topics from throughout the genre’snearly 100 years of history, I would say that it has achieved a level ofcultural presence and influence beyond any other such show (it’s not acoincidence that both RosiePerez’s character in the film WhiteMen Can’t Jump and AnnDowd’s [SPOILERS in that clip] in the TV show The Leftovers have dreams of appearing on Jeopardy!, for example; nor that Weird Al wrote a songabout it!). The question of why is of course an open-ended one, but if I wereto boil it down I would emphasize two factors related to my two prior paragraphsin this post: the flipped “answer and question” format that we apparently oweto Merv Griffin’s wife; and the host who took over for the show’s primetimereboot and became very much a celebrity in his own right (with the Saturday Night Live parody to prove it). As someone whotried out for Jeopardy! multipletimes (and who was in fact invited to be on the show but was frustratinglyunable to do so, which is a story you’d have to draw out of me with anAmericanStudies beer or two), I can say that I fully understand the show’sunique appeal, and am happy to celebrate it here on its 60thbirthday!

MarchRecap this weekend,

Ben

PS. Whatdo you think? Other game shows you’d highlight?