Behind the Scenes With Ken Jennings

O
n a cool September morning in Culver City, California, the host of Jeopardy! strides across the Alex Trebek Stage to perform what is now a ritual at the start of each taping. The host is not Alex Trebek, the reserved Canadian expat who occupied that role for 36 years, until his death from pancreatic cancer in 2020. Instead, it is Ken Jennings, a former star contestant who was anointed after a meandering nearly-three-year search that included a rotating cast of celebrity guest hosts and one minor controversy — an odd period of instability in the lifespan of perhaps the only pop-culture entity as certain as death and taxes. Casually dressed in Uniqlo and a pair of Vans, Jennings approaches that day’s 15 potential contestants, seated in the studio audience, to offer a warm greeting. “I’m on your side,” he assures them with a big smile.

The famous set looks almost exactly as it has for most of the past five decades, full of glowing blue screens and polished surfaces. There are the three podiums for the game’s contestants, Jennings’ lectern, and the massive neon Jeopardy! sign in its iconic font. As of today’s taping, the game board is now one giant monitor rather than 30 individual ones in a grid, the only significant cosmetic change in years. But in some ways, today’s Jeopardy! is very different. Post-Trebek, producers are rolling out new tournaments and spinoffs, including the just-launched Pop Culture Jeopardy!, which streams on Prime with three episodes dropping every Wednesday.

There are more subtle changes, too. Even Jennings’ informal greeting is a departure. During the Trebek era, contestants didn’t see the host until he walked onstage at the beginning of their episode.

“That is an extremely intimidating moment for the contestant,” Jennings tells me during a lunch break between tapings. “The game on your TV has risen around you like you’re in Tron. Suddenly you’re in the light cycle, and then Alex walks out and you almost can’t believe it. It’s like you’re seeing hologram Tupac or something: ‘How can the Alex Trebek be right over there?’ A lot of the time, these contestants will seem like they’ve got it all going on, and I know from experience that they’re in this weird, ‘I can’t believe this is happening,’ surreal fog.”

Geeking Out

Jeopardy! began life as a private joke between the legendary TV producer Merv Griffin and his wife Julann, who suggested the “answers in the form of a question” gimmick as a riff on the quiz-show scandals of the Fifties, when contestants were given the answers in advance. The original version, hosted by Art Fleming, ran on and off from 1964 through 1979. But it’s the modern incarnation, which debuted in the fall of 1984 with Trebek as host, that became an institution: a reassuring constant in an otherwise turbulent world.

Trebek was one big reason for that. He filled the role for so long and in such an unflappable manner that he lent the nerdy proceedings an almost Rat Pack level of cool. Whether he was snarkily dismissing a contestant’s anecdote in the show’s interview segment, overpronouncing the word “genre,” or dryly replying “Oh, no!” when a player made a wildly wrong guess, it often felt like Trebek was the series. By the time of his death, he was something of a national monument. Still, according to Jennings, Trebek was fond of saying the focus of Jeopardy! should not be the host. He firmly believed that the game itself was the true star — and in the aftermath of his death, it seems clearer than ever that he was correct. According to Nielsen, Jeopardy! has consistently ranked as the Number Two entertainment program across broadcast, cable, and syndication since the airing of Trebek’s final season in 2020-21.

Jeopardy! is such a fixture that every fan’s origin story with the show is more or less the same: A comforting nightly ritual, usually performed with a parent or grandparent. The addictive sense of pride in shouting out a correct answer. A passion for learning — specifically, for mastering a broad swath of obscure knowledge — kindled at an early age. The specifics vary slightly from person to person. Former contestant and Pop Culture Jeopardy! writer Louis Virtel says his oldest childhood memory is of watching a Super Jeopardy! special with his mom in 1990. Super-champ Matt Amodio — who had a 38-game win streak in 2021 and amassed $1.5 million in winnings — grew up in a baseball-crazy family in suburban Ohio. Whenever their beloved Cleveland Indians were playing a night game, “we would watch at seven o’clock,” Amodio says. “But at 7:30, we had to miss a few innings to switch over to Jeopardy!.” In middle school, my best friend Mike and I would frequently watch episodes while on the phone together, trying to beat each other at calling out answers.

It helps that the format — what co-head writer Michele Loud describes as “a perfect game” — has barely changed from the Art Fleming days: In every episode, players participate in two rounds of trivia — six categories of five clues each. Those clues are assigned a prize value based on difficulty. In the first round, the dollar amounts range from $200 to $1,000; in the more challenging second round, Double Jeopardy!, those amounts double. Special “Daily Double” clues allow players to boost their winnings (or fall into a hole) with a bet. Then comes Final Jeopardy!, the last clue of the game, where the players wager a dollar amount in advance based solely on the category.

The topics Jeopardy! covers include everything from 19th-century philosophy to U.S. presidents to the periodic table of elements to European landmarks to the Greek alphabet. The clues have evolved over the years to feature more pop-culture references, says co-head writer Billy Wisse, “because the base of people’s knowledge has changed,” but it still delivers a little something for everyone. “If you don’t like one TV & Movies,” says Wisse, “there’s going to be one or two down from it [that you do], or when you get to Double Jeopardy!, or to tomorrow’s show. There’s just so much variety that people stick with it. They figure there’ll be something for them soon.”

There are other long-running, iconic game shows — The Price Is Right (1972), Wheel of Fortune (1975), Family Feud (1976) — with much more obvious populist appeal. Everyone, from high school dropouts to Ph.D.s, goes to the supermarket. Everyone knows that “T” is more likely to appear in a word than “Q.” Everyone knows the five things a woman is most likely to say to her husband when he comes home tipsy. But Jeopardy!, with its air of intellectualism, should have a higher barrier to entry. In Robert Redford’s 1994 film Quiz Show, about the scandals that inspired Julann Griffin, a cynical executive predicts that the only thing to change about game shows over time will be that the questions will get easier. Jeopardy! has proved to be the one exception to that trend.

On its face, the show should appeal only to bookworms and mathletes, but instead, it is beloved across demographics. In his 2015 appearance, Virtel had a viral moment when he delivered an emphatic snap after nailing a Daily Double answer. He has since appeared on other game shows as well as on Jimmy Kimmel Live!, and hosts the popular podcast Keep It. Yet backstage at the 2019 Emmys, he says, RuPaul approached him, statuette in hand, and said, “I know you. You’re the Jeopardy! guy!” The series’ celebrity iteration — where the famous and famously not-as-smart play for charity — has been spoofed on Saturday Night Live, and ever since the show dropped its five-game limit for champions in the early 2000s, repeat contestants like Amodio, James Holzhauer, and Amy Schneider have become minor celebrities in their own right.

The program “seems like it ought to come off as elitist and exclusionary,” says Schneider, “and yet somehow it doesn’t. So many Jeopardy! fans will tell me, ‘I watch every day, I maybe get two questions right.’ And yet they’re still really invested. Part of it is the standard game-show thing of seeing people coming out of their everyday lives, having this [adventure], and maybe winning a bunch of money, and that’s just fun to watch.” (Last season, the show gave away close to $5.3 million in cash winnings to its competitors.) “But just as a game,” she adds, “it is really well-designed. In terms of the arc within any given game, there’s drama more often than not.”

This holds true over the course of the two taping days I visit, for episodes that aired in late October. There is one absolute stinker of a Double Jeopardy! round, filled with incorrect guesses and clues when nobody even buzzes in. The studio audience frequently winces, and Jennings lets out a relieved cry of “Yes!” after someone breaks a long streak of futility for all three contestants. The next two games, though, feature close matchups and big dollar totals, including a Double Jeopardy! round with two successful instances of contestants betting all of their money in a “true Daily Double.” You can feel energy pulsing through the studio at this platonic ideal of the game, where the audience members and the crew seem as excited as the contestants. Well, almost as excited. When grad student Joseph Carlstein wins a game, he is visibly shaking, overwhelmed by the emotion of the moment. “It’s incredible,” he tells Jennings in a post-episode conversation. “I’ve waited for this moment my whole life.”

Game Changers

Since the Eighties, Jeopardy! has operated on a familiar production schedule: Five episodes are taped in a single day, two back-to-back days in a given week, with the studio audience swapped out when the lunch break comes after each day’s third episode. The day begins with the contestants playing rehearsal games so they can get used to buzzing in with their signaling devices. During commercial breaks, upholding a tradition started by Trebek, Jennings takes questions from the studio audience, which range from Jeopardy!-related (no, he’s never seen a contestant get cold feet and back out) to personal (his favorite sandwich is a BLT) to unanswerable (“Are there more wheels or doors in the world?”).

Jennings describes the production as “uniquely stable” for Hollywood. Some employees have been with the show for decades — Wisse and Loud have worked at Jeopardy! for 35 and 32 years, respectively. Stage manager Jimmy McGuire and producer Sarah Whitcomb Foss joined in 2001 as members of the Clue Crew, who travel the globe to record video clues on location. Even the show’s lead public-relations executive is a former contestant who still takes pleasure predicting Final Jeopardy! answers in a notepad before they’re revealed to the contestants. “The guy who mic’d me up today mic’d me up in 2004 when I was a contestant,” Jennings says. “Same guy.”

It makes sense, then, that the loss of Trebek — plus the retirement, just months earlier, of the show’s producer of 20-plus years, Harry Friedman — was such a tectonic shift for the staff. According to current showrunner Michael Davies, Friedman and Trebek had amassed so much institutional power over the decades that Sony Pictures Television basically allowed the duo to do whatever they wanted without studio input. “It was a cottage industry that nobody ever went near,” says Davies, who has worked for Sony since 2008 and was never on the Jeopardy! stage until a few weeks before he took over operations in the summer of 2021. “It was protected for years to just go and be its own little world.”

That protected world was broken wide open after Trebek’s passing, as the production awkwardly barreled forward without a succession plan in place. While Sony executives and then-showrunner Mike Richards figured out how to proceed in the long term, they appointed Jennings as interim host. Trebek had asked Jennings to record large portions of the audiobook version of The Answer Is …: Reflections on My Life to help preserve his own voice during treatment. “That was the first time I ever had a conversation with him that was [about] torch passing,” says Jennings, “and even that was kind of very unspoken.”

“ROTATING HOSTS FELT WEIRD. THIS IS THE POSITION OF JEOPARDY! HOST. THIS IS A NATIONAL INSTITUTION. IT’S NOT A GAME.”

Amy Schneider

Jennings began his first episode with a monologue about Trebek’s legacy and brilliance, his voice frequently breaking as he spoke. “It was hard to get through,” he recalls, “because everybody there was very emotional, and I had to be the one talking through it, even though I probably knew him least of all 100 people on set, crew and the staff. It was very scary. You’re aware that the audience does not want you there. They’re like me, they want the other guy, and I was missing him too. I’m like, ‘I don’t want to be here. I would give anything to not be here right now.’”

By some standards, Jennings was the perfect candidate for the job. He had spent his school-age years in South Korea and Singapore, his family drawn to the Far East from Seattle by his father’s work as an attorney, and watched Jeopardy! daily as a lifeline to American culture. (Jennings returned to Seattle as an adult and is still based there with his wife and two children; he commutes to L.A. for tapings.) Twenty years ago, pausing his day job as a computer programmer to appear on the show, he won 74 consecutive games — a record that still stands — and more than $2.5 million. He would later win another $2 million in various tournaments pitting past champions against one another, including 2020’s Jeopardy! The Greatest of All Time. He also had Trebek’s implicit endorsement. (Trebek’s widow, Jean, even gave Jennings a pair of her husband’s cuff links to wear on his first episode.) But he was not an experienced broadcaster, which made some fans skeptical. Others rolled their eyes at another white guy in a profession full of them.

With the jury out on Jennings, Richards and Sony put together an entire season of rotating hosts, where Jennings would take turns with familiar faces from the world of news (Robin Roberts, Katie Couric), sports (Aaron Rodgers, Joe Buck), entertainment (Mayim Bialik, LeVar Burton), and even fellow Jeopardy! contestant Buzzy Cohen. Some guest hosts, like Roberts, were excellent but clearly there just to check off an item on their bucket list. Some, like Burton, obviously wanted the full-time gig but struggled with the distinct rhythms of the game. A few shined, like Bialik and Rodgers (“Aaron was dead serious” about finding a way to host the show in between football games, says Wisse), and brought more name recognition and polish than Jennings. Still, the roller coaster didn’t sit well with many Jeopardy! fans — including a future super-champion.

“It just felt weird,” says Schneider. “I understood the thought process, but I was like, ‘This is the position of Jeopardy! host. This is a national institution. It’s not a game.’”

“You have to think Alex would not have loved” this sudden emphasis on the host rather than the players, Jennings admits. But, he adds, “the virtue of it is, people did see a bunch of different styles hosting Jeopardy!, and they realized, ‘Oh, if it’s Ken this week and it’s Mayim next week, it’s still Jeopardy!.’ The show can survive not being the force of personality of one lovely man.”

Jennings’ candidacy was reportedly hampered by some insensitive old tweets that resurfaced in 2020, including one where he joked, “Nothing sadder than a hot person in a wheelchair.” (Jennings later apologized for all of these.) But that became moot when, in a strange twist, executive producer Richards decided to put himself in the running for the job, à la Dick Cheney leading the search for George W. Bush’s running mate and deciding the best man for the job was Dick Cheney. On Aug. 11, 2021, Sony announced that Richards was the new full-time host, and that Bialik would emcee prime-time specials and potential spinoffs. The result of this seemingly fixed contest — on a show that had always been about merit — was not received well.

“It’s a bad look, man,” says Schneider. “If you’re gonna do that, it better be a slam dunk. It’s not like you could look at all the people that auditioned and say, ‘Oh, yeah, [Richards] was clearly the right choice.’”

Richards had prior experience hosting other game shows, and had performed decently in the episodes he hosted during that audition season. But his tenure lasted just a single day. On Aug. 18 — the day before Richards was to tape the first five episodes of the new season — The Ringer published an article by Claire McNear, author of the Jeopardy! history Answers in the Form of Questions, exposing a variety of scandals in Richards’ past. Among the damning revelations were discrimination lawsuits from his time producing The Price Is Right as well as offensive, misogynist comments he made in 2013 and 2014 while hosting a podcast called The Randumb Show.

Amodio, who was a contestant during the Richards kerfuffle, says the actual taping “went fairly normal.” The next morning, though, while he was putting on his suit at the hotel, he got a text stating that the day’s taping had been canceled. “I went in and talked to the Sony employees,” Amodio says. “They were clearly freaked out, which I don’t blame them, because this is their livelihood.… But for me, it was a realization that I am definitely living through history right now.” The day after that, Richards stepped down as host; by the end of the month, he was stripped of his executive-producer title.

The Power Broker

While the perennially good-natured (or, at least, politically savvy) Jennings has kind things to say about Richards’ work as a producer during that first post-Trebek season, the Jeopardy! family in general is reluctant to discuss Richards’ stint. Amodio jokingly refers to him as “He Who Shall Not Be Named.” Loud politely declines to talk about Richards at all. “It was just uncomfortable,” McGuire says diplomatically. “No one really knew what was going to happen. Our leadership was in question at the time. And it came on the heels of Alex’s passing, so it was just one bad thing after another. I think there was a panic amongst the troops.” Then, he says, “Michael [Davies] came in with a breath of fresh air, as an innovator.”

The U.K.-born Davies was a TV veteran who had brought Who Wants to Be a Millionaire to America in 1999. His mandate from Sony when he took the job on a temporary basis was, he says, simple: “Make sure the show gets on the air. Initially, it was that stark. The show had been through the trauma of Alex’s passing. For the staff and crew, that was not just losing a host, it was losing the father of the program. The center that the whole show rotated around was Alex. And then all of the guest hosting and all of those elements, the staff was in something of a spiral. And it was literally, ‘Can you just come in and make sure the show gets on the air?’”

Davies elevated Bialik to full-time host, but her Fox sitcom Call Me Kat overlapped enough with the Jeopardy! taping schedule that Jennings had to be brought in to split the job with her. (The nature of Bialik’s contract meant that, for the rest of that season, announcer Johnny Gilbert introduced her as “the host of Jeopardy!,” while Jennings was “hosting Jeopardy!.” “I believe the gerund was a carefully hammered-out compromise,” Jennings observes wryly, “because nobody was happy with either ‘host’ or ‘guest host.’” Bialik declined to comment for this story.) For a while, Jeopardy! had stability again. But soon enough, fans and even players began picking favorites.

Amodio, who eventually played in front of both hosts in tournaments, says Bialik “was a great person to be around on the stage. Very nice, very fun.” But, he adds, she “clearly is not the Jeopardy! fan that Ken is, and was just unable to bring that same level of knowledge and energy. As an experienced player, like myself, it’s a little frustrating when the host doesn’t know to do something that I would have known just as a viewer of the show.”

Soon, Davies decided the syndicated show would be better served with a single host, and that it should be Jennings. Despite internal research indicating that Bialik was a well-regarded and likable host — “a really gifted television force,” as Davies puts it — Jennings, while “incredibly raw,” brought some compelling intangibles and Jeopardy!-specific expertise. “I saw the look that the contestants would have when he’d walk out on the stage,” Davies says, “or his facility with the material. I remember at one point, somebody buzzed in and gave the wrong response, and they said, ‘Who is Gainsborough?’ And he said, ‘Oh, no, I’m sorry, it’s Gainsborough’s great rival,’ and named some other obscure artist. It was just a moment, [but] who on earth other than Ken Jennings could have that moment? As time went on, we started to hear more from our television stations that they were starting to see Ken was making a lot of progress as he got more attempts. And then Mayim, which was absolutely her right, elected not to cross the picket line during the [SAG-AFTRA] strike. And as Ken got more reps, I think he got better and he earned the job.”

Though Jennings has no illusions that he’ll ever supersede Trebek in the minds of the audience, some people who have appeared on the show with him appreciate that he’s not trying to be a clone of the erudite but sometimes caustic man for whom the stage is named. Liz McKenna, an English teacher who finished third in a game that aired last July, says Jennings “made a really clear point of being kind.” During the audience Q&A, Jennings took a question from McKenna’s eight-year-old daughter and responded “the way a dad would,” McKenna says. “It was such a thoughtful, warm answer. He never acted like he was smarter than anybody — although he is, right? I think he brings a level of humanity to it that maybe Alex didn’t always have.”

A New Era

Davies’ current contract is up in May, though it remains to be seen whether he negotiates to stick around. As he fell in love with the show and opted to stay well past the original plan, he began introducing a slew of new ideas: the new video board; an official podcast where he, Whitcomb Foss, and former contestants offer behind-the-scenes insights and sports-style analyses of the show; a Second Chance Tournament, where players who lost in memorable ways compete for a spot in the annual Tournament of Champions; and Pop Culture Jeopardy!, hosted by SNL “Weekend Update” anchor Colin Jost, which features teams of three competing. Davies would also like to see additional spinoffs, starting with a new attempt at Sports Jeopardy!, which came and went quickly in 2014.

“I’m not the producer you hire if you want it to be exactly the same every single day,” Davies says. “I’m a change agent.”

(In part due to the Mike Richards mess, Jeopardy! has improbably become tabloid fodder, with some recent anonymously-sourced stories claiming that Jennings is upset that Jost, not him, was named to host Pop Culture Jeopardy!, and/or that Sony executives want Jost to take over the main show. “Quite apart from there being absolutely no tension between Colin and Ken individually,” scoffs Davies, “I have no interest in Colin Jost being the host of Monday-through-Friday syndicated Jeopardy!, nor would Colin expect me to have any interest in him, nor would he be necessarily good at it. He is phenomenally good at hosting Pop Culture Jeopardy!, and now that he’s done it, I can’t imagine having anybody else do it.”)

Davies has steered the ship out of its roughest waters, but now he faces fears from a notoriously change-averse fandom that he may be doing too much. Entertainment journalist Samit Sarkar, who was a contestant in the fall of 2021, has “concerns” about Davies and his team “trying to blow out Jeopardy! into a multiplatform all-consuming brand.” He recalls a run of tournament episodes earlier this year that lasted so long, “I was like, ‘When are we going to get back to seeing new faces on the Alex Trebek Stage? New contestants, fresh blood, just the normal Jeopardy! experience, instead of bringing back various old contestants for a second chance.”

Davies, though, sees tremendous upside to turning repeat contestants into characters in whom viewers can emotionally invest. He points to Amy Schneider, who is trans, as an ideal example of this, and not just because she also speaks to his desire to make the contestant pool more diverse and reflective of an evolving audience. “Amy changed a lot of minds,” he says, “because Amy was superb on this program. Whatever your thoughts about what Amy represents, the one thing that you could not argue with is how effing great at Jeopardy! Amy Schneider is.” (For her part, Schneider has been pleasantly surprised that the vast majority of the response to her has been positive, and often from trans people who say that her stint on the show helped them win over family members. “I didn’t think that just being on TV and playing Jeopardy! would have that much of an impact,” she says, “and the fact that it did is so gratifying.”)

The biggest change still to come isn’t about the content of the show, but how to see it. Jeopardy! at the moment has no streaming home. You either need to set up an antenna or subscribe to a cable package or digital bundle to access the syndicated episodes. Davies has research showing that 14 percent of the show’s viewership comes from people watching episodes illegally uploaded to YouTube. But Pop Culture Jeopardy! is on Prime, and Sony has secured the ability to sell the next-day streaming rights for the main show starting in the fall.

“To protect Jeopardy!, we have to expand,” argues Davies. “We can’t just leave it exactly where it is. We mustn’t change the format; we must continue to go back to the values that Merv and Julann and Harry and Alex put into the program. But we have to expand or it’s going to be in trouble.” He even speaks “here and there” with Friedman, who he says has endorsed his vision. “Harry was quite vocally conservative in not expanding,” Davies says, “but he himself has said, ‘Based on where the world is now, you have to go off and do these things to keep it in the public attention.’”

A category in one of the rehearsal games I observe in September is “It’s a Fact.” This is, in many ways, the ethos of the show, and yet another reason its ongoing popularity feels so at odds with the current culture. We live in a time when facts themselves are under siege, when too many people are conditioned to shrug off any provable piece of evidence that conflicts with something they believe. Yet no one comes gunning for Jennings or anyone associated with the show for implicitly arguing that knowledge has value, and that facts are absolute. Somehow, Jeopardy! has remained politically neutral over the years, even though its very existence now feels political.

“Jeopardy! is a weirdly unifying thing,” says Jennings, with “young people, old people, red states, blue states — it’s an institution that has this universal acceptance. Whatever the forces of anti-science and fake news and whatever are, they seem to have some carve-out for Jeopardy!. Maybe because it’s a game? This is a place where nobody says, ‘Why are you doing a category about dinosaurs? Dinosaurs aren’t real.’ Or, ‘Why are you mentioning the moon landing? We never went to the moon.’ For whatever reason, Jeopardy! seems to be immune from that, and maybe that’s a good sign. Maybe we will at some point get back to a more unified culture that agrees on basic facts of the universe. What a dream for America!”