If You Want To Boycott The New Season of Jeopardy, Don't Do It Because of 'Recycled Clues'

 

Anyone who has read my column knows what a devout fan of Jeopardy I am. Those of you who have read my column in recent months know my position on the WGA and SAG strikes.  So I have a very clear perspective on Jeopardy’s decision to proceed with its fortieth season as if it was business as usual.

By the most charitable definition, this is a completely tone-deaf decision by the part of the producers.  They’ve already made a mess when Ken Jennings chose to cross the picket line and film the final episodes of last season. There should have been a clear message when the participants in the upcoming Tournament of Champions said almost to a person that they had no intention of participating until the strike was resolved. The fact that the show decided to nevertheless try to keep filming real shows their obliviousness. Even now, several participants who have been offered to take place in a Second Chance or Wild Card tournament have said they don’t want to cross the picket line. Fans have already made it clear that they plan to boycott the new season when it finally begins to air next month.

Considering all of the controversy the show has gone through the last two years, you’d think Jeopardy would use common sense and decide to at least delay filming the next season.  At best, their decision to do so will hurt the reputation that they’ve managed to rebuild in the last two years. At worst, it truly hurts the studios position when it comes to taking a firm line in negotiating.  By refusing to participate in a game show, ordinary people are making it very clear that they are on the side of the strikers.  This gives at least a partial advantage to the guilds that they could use for PR from a source they honestly wouldn’t have expected.  SONY should have at least considered the optics of this before they decided to let this happen.

So to be clear, Jeopardy’s decision to film a fortieth season is clearly a bad one. Where the writers, however, lose some of the high ground is when they claim that decision to use ‘recycled clues’ is a violation of the WGA. I get why they’d do it: it’s an easy claim to make and the show has not helped its cause by publicizing that’s how they’d do things.  However, as someone who has been watching the show for more than thirty years, I have to throw some cold water on the outrage. Because Jeopardy has been recycling clues ever since it began its run forty years ago and would no doubt have done so even had there been no work stoppage.

First some simple math. Over the course of one season, Jeopardy records 230 episodes. For each game sixty clues are required for a Jeopardy and Double Jeopardy round as well. (They are written but that does not mean that they will all be used in every game: there have been categories called LEFTOVERS for this very reason.) That is a total of 13,800 clues in an average season along with 230 Final Jeopardys.

Furthermore, as should be obvious, Jeopardy does not have the same group of writers it did when it premiered forty years ago. And one never knows if there has ever been a fact checking record going back to the first decade of the show.  I seriously doubt that when a writer creates a clue for English literature today he goes back and checks that it wasn’t previously used in 1991, if for no other reason then, given the schedule for filming, there isn’t sufficient time to check all sixty-one clues. As it the show has to make sure that these clues are factually accurate so that alternative responses might be acceptable. In that sense, recycling a clue from ten years ago makes sense because its already fact-checked and there is less chance of it being challenged later on. (The show has made mistakes throughout its existence that have led to several contestants having to be invited back because of these mistakes.) And considering that these writers have access to same bases of knowledge, there is the simple possibility of coincidence.

All of which is a roundabout way of saying that as a fan of Jeopardy I have noticed that the show regularly reuses the same clues over the course of its run, often word for word. There have been clues about the opening notes of Beethoven’s fifth Symphony used both for the Double Jeopardy round and Final Jeopardy.  I remember two Final Jeopardys that used the exact same wording in order to refer to the Gadsen Purchase, and in both cases it stumped all three contestants. I remember a SHAKESPEARE category where the writers uses two exact clues that they had used in the Million Dollar Masters word for word nearly five years later and two clues in OPERA from that same tournament they used six years later. (A clue involving Porgy & Bess, which had been a $400 clue in the Masters, was used as a Daily Double in a game for easier players. Sometimes there isn’t even a huge passage of time. I remember when a clue referring to Agrippina being murdered by this Roman Emperor, her son (Nero) was used as an $800 clue in the Ultimate Tournament of Champions and two years later was used as a Final Jeopardy clue in the 2007 Tournament of Champions.

 I am, frankly, surprised that no one has caught on to this by now. I realize that not everybody is the rabid fan of Jeopardy that I have been, not even the greatest Jeopardy champions. The thing is, while the writers could have gotten away with this in the twentieth century, this information is literally on an official Jeopardy site right now for all to see.  The Jeopardy archive has an increasingly complete list of almost every game that the show has recorded over its run. Over the last several years knowledge of the episodes that aired in the first decade has been absent from the record. But even if you were to start in from the 1990s, its pretty clear that the show will often, sometimes word for word, use the same clue every few years.

To be clear, I’m not accusing any of the writers of plagiarism or even laziness. I seriously doubt the show had a complete record of its clues and even if I did for all the fact checking Jeopardy has, I doubt they have the ability to compare this week’s clue to one they might have written in 1993. It’s the idea that somehow the show is decided to use ‘recycled clues’ as proof that the show’s producers are Philistines when the writers have been essentially doing the same thing for decades, unintentionally or not. I also think using this as a false flag to turn this as a symbol of everything wrong with the studios attitude towards the WGA  is a horrible idea since, as I mentioned, there are already so many reasons where Jeopardy has lost the high ground by shooting a new season despite the strike.

All of this is to say that if fans want to boycott the new season of Jeopardy, you have a plethora of reasons to do so that are more than valid. The producers have made a truly wretched decision by going about business as usual, and if you decide not to watch because you consider the show operating in bad faith, you have every right to keep that belief. Certainly some of the champions are operating on that principle, and it’s clearly costing them to do so.  As I mentioned Ken Jennings decision to keep hosting is hypocritical on at least one level, probably two. And by framing the show as using recycled clues for their new season, the producers aren’t making their case any better.

All I’m asking you to keep in mind is this: the recycling of Jeopardy clues has been going on since the show’s inception, was happening before the strikes and will happen in some form afterwards. Jeopardy is clearly making a lot of mistakes filming its fortieth season that deserves the wrath of the fans.  But they’ve always recycled clues. Don’t stop watching just because they’ve told you as much.