The Jeopardy Producers Decision to Film The New Season is, Well, Clueless

 

 

I think the only way to deal with the upcoming season of Jeopardy is to take the approach of the show. I will give you readers the situation in Final Jeopardy form.

The category is BIZARRE GAME SHOW DECISIONS. Here is the clue: Despite the ongoing the strikes in Hollywood, this was the reason Jeopardy has given for starting to film the new season.

Now while the Think Music is playing I will give the uninitiated a review course so they might have the information at hand. The WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes have affected Jeopardy the same way they have every other show in Hollywood: the writers have been on strike and have made it clear that they will not write any new clues for the upcoming season.

The producers of Jeopardy have made it clear that they have every intention of going forward with the 40^th season and have decided that they will use ‘recycled clues’ going forward.

Now if you read my column this past week, you know that I feel very strongly that while this was a bad choice of words for the producers to use, Jeopardy has been, in fact, recycling clues for decades and will do so well when this strike is inevitably resolved. That said, there are numerous reasons why the decision to go forward with the new season would be bad for the show on so many levels – and in fact already has been.

Mayim Bialik, as fans well know, chose not to host the final weeks of Season 39 because SAG-AFTRA had gone on strike and she is a performer first. Ken Jennings returned in the final weeks and took a fair amount of heat for that, some of it from actors (undeservedly, in my opinion) and some of it from the WGA (more than deservedly, particularly considering he once wrote for the show.)

It has already wreaked havoc on the planned schedule for the new season. In what I considered a poor decision even before the strike, Jeopardy had decided to begin its new season with ‘the postseason’, culminating in the 2023 Tournament of Champions.

This plan ran afoul of the labor stoppage when Ray Lalonde, a thirteen game winner who works as a set designer for many TV shows, made it clear that he would not participate in solidarity with the guilds. Within in quick succession, nearly every player who has qualified for the Tournament of Champions made it public that they too refused to cross the picket line – a decision which shows a surprising solidarity from the working person with the Hollywood elite. (This leads to another glaring problem I’ll get to down the line.)

Scrambling Jeopardy announced it would postpone the Tournament of Champions until after the strike.  However, they have been struggling to find contestants to participate in the new season. Apparently making the decision to repeat last year’s controversial Second Chance Tournament, they have been making offers to several former contestants to appear this year.  Many have either turned them down or have been ambiguous about the idea of appearing given the labor stoppage.

And even though I have illustrated that the recycled clues claim is a false flag, it does not change the fact that many long-time viewers have made it clear in internet chat rooms that they will boycott the new season anyway.  Whether this actually happens remains to be seen, but the fact that it is a topic of open discussion among fans would be something you would think would give the producers pause.

And that’s all before you get to the controversies that the show has been struggling with since the passing of Alex Trebek.  The problems they had before coming up with a new host; the controversial decision to hire producer Mike Richards, following by the behind-the-scenes controversies that led to his ouster, the decisions to split hosting between Jennings and Bialik, the Second Chance Tournament.  Jeopardy has managed to overcome these difficulties and manage in the past year to come out the other side. The decision to act in a way that can only bring more bad publicity would seem fool-hardy.

That’s before you consider what the decision to film another season despite the work stoppage does to the balance of power.  The studios have managed to hold an upper hand of sorts by arguing the work stoppage is a sign that the writers and actors are hurting Hollywood by not allowing the filming of TV and movies to go forward. The decision of Jeopardy to film would hurt this position in many ways because: 1)by filming it seems that there is a break in unity, 2) the backlash by going forward among fans is contrary to the anger of so many that shows aren’t being filmed and 3) the position of both fans and contestants not to violate the picket line would seem to indicate that there are a fair amount of people on the side of the talent.

The only argument that the producers could make going forward is that they had an obligation to the other people who worked for the show. But that doesn’t hold up because when the pandemic was at its height in 2020, Jeopardy shut down early in Season 36, only began filming again to an empty studio the following fall and didn’t let an audience in until last season.  They were willing to adapt to something far larger, why couldn’t they do something that is far smaller?

So with all that in mind, the correct response to the clue is…I have no fricking idea. Seriously, I’m an intelligent man with less awareness of the facts on the ground, but all of this seems more obvious to me than the kind of clues that SNL did for its Celebrity Jeopardy satires. So the decision to go forward is a decision so clueless that I imagine James Holzhauer or Amy Schneider would be similarly baffled.

There are no positives as far as I can see for Jeopardy by going forward with a new season. Short-term or long term. This will hurt them with the fans, the writers, the champions – and for all we know, future contestants. It will hurt them with both sides on the labor stoppage. So the decision to go forward has neither internal nor external logic, makes neither rational nor irrational sense and certainly can’t be the kind of thing that will create a very good work environment when all of this inevitably ends.

What kind of mindset are the producers thinking by going forward? The entertainment equivalent of ‘if we don’t do this, the terrorists win?”  Even that makes no sense considering that’s the logic on both sides that has led to the strike in the first place.  That this same decision helps the strikers is even more nonsensical.

If someone has even a dumb guess as to what the producers are thinking, I welcome any responses to the quandary I put forth at the beginning of the article. Please tell me in  some form if you know what the producers of a show that is the bastion of intellectualism is making such a moronic decision. And I won’t  penalize you if you don’t phrase it in the form of a question. Because trust me, when it comes to tis decision, all I have are questions.