Try not to
judge me for this but I know almost nothing about Taylor Swift, either the
performer or her music. I know all too well what a force of nature she is and
how she’s taken over the world, but that doesn’t mean I would recognize her
songs or her voice. So that is why I did not make the immediate connection when
I saw the category’s for the Jeopardy round this past Wednesday.
LOVE STORY,
OUR SONG, BAD BLOOD, SHAKE IT OFF, WE ARE NEVER EVER GETTING BACK TOGETHER and
finally THE ERRORS TOUR. Even the fact that one of clues in OUR SONG
deliberately referred to Taylor Swift did not cause it to register with me. It
was not until I looked online and I saw how overjoyed ‘Swifties’ were about
Wednesday that I finally made the connection.
As a fan of
Jeopardy I was glad to learn of this for a reason independent of any feelings I
have for Taylor Swift: this board confirms that the Jeopardy writers are back
at work. I knew that, given how taping of the show works, that after the WGA
strike officially ended in late September, that there would be a delay before
we knew for sure that there would be new clues. There have been signs of it
over the last couple of weeks – one category was actually titled: THE WRITER’S
STRIKE. (It had to do with writers who had written on strikes.) But Wednesday’s
Jeopardy round demonstrates officially the return of the writers.
One of Alex
Trebek’s many frequent comments over the years whenever a certain set of
categories that had a theme came up was: “Oh, the writers are having fun.” You get this frequently watching any game of
Jeopardy because of how the clues are presented. The writers have to hide the
response they want in plain sight and they have endlessly creative ways of
doing so. And in order to make it not seem like a dry recitation of facts, they also know they have to entertain the
audience as well. Since I have been spending much of this season essentially
very annoyed at the producers of Jeopardy, I think it is worth spending some time
celebrating the writers of Jeopardy.
I should
have probably done this before because I know that as much of a presence as
Alex Trebek was over his tenure over the show, a major factor in the show’s
success involved the writers. It is a difficult job to recite sixty clues in
the course of thirty minutes; it’s just as difficult to come up with that many.
So the writers need to have fun when these clues are read out and the audience
needs to be entertained by them. Sometimes it’s more obvious than others – when
they laugh at certain clues when they are delivered – but just as often it
comes as to presentation.
Over the
last thirty years, I have noticed two critical ways as to how the writers have
made the show work, beyond the vast array of trivia they demonstrate. One has
been the theme boards which they have done almost since the show began, and the
other is how they bring out certain very tricky categories in certain
tournaments to, how shall I put it, torture the players who come back. In this
part of the celebration, I will deal with the theme board.
Now as any
long term fan of the show knows, the writers did not make the theme of
Wednesday’s board based on Taylor Swift because they are all Taylor Swift fans.
(They might be but that’s not relevant.) They did it because the theme board on
Jeopardy is frequently built on pop culture. Over the past decade they have
done boards that have categories relating to Game Of Thrones, the 100 greatest Movie Quotes
according to AFI, 1990s Rock & Roll Hits, Oscar Nominated Films (usually
based on the year) and even The Brady Bunch. (Sort of: GRIEG, PETER,
BOBBY SIN.D JAN. and MARTIANS!MARTIANS! MARTIANS.)
The thing is
to just decide to create a board with a theme is easy enough. You then have to
come up with clues that fit it. And that is the show’s genius. I could give
countless examples of this but I think the best example has been in the
Ultimate Tournament of Champions in 2005.
For one
thing, that tournament involved 76 games and was one of the longest special
tournaments in the show’s history. Just as important was the fact that, since
all of the contestants were going to be returning champions, the writer’s had
to make them more difficult than they might end up being for an average
contestant. In both cases, they succeeded admirably.
The first
one occurred in the Jeopardy of the fifth quarterfinal match: ROCK GROUPS, THE
MAMAS AND THE PAPAS, KANSAS, THE STONES, GUNS N’ROSES and U2. U2, it’s worth
noting had come up before; it meant 2 U’s were in each correct response.
GUNS N’ROSES
showed the writers versatility; a clue about the Gatling Gun was followed by
one referred to Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy. And some of the clues managed to crack
up not only the audience but Alex. The best one came in ROCK GROUPS:
“Bon Scott
of this hard rock group was rejected by the Australian army as ‘socially maladjusted.”
(What is AC/DC?) I’m not sure whether Alex was amused about who it reflected
more on: Bon Scott or the Australian Army.
A little
more than a week later, the next theme board came up in the Double Jeopardy
round: DESPERATE HOUSEWIVES, WITHOUT A TRACE, CSI, ACCORDING TO JIM, ‘COLD’
CASE and HIT TV. In CSI, they went through some of the methods that CSIs use in
real life. In WITHOUT A TRACE, they talked about some famous people who just
vanished off the face of the Earth, as you’d expect Jimmy Hoffa was one of
them. And the DESPERATE HOUSEWIVES category had more to do with housewife being
desperate for more benign reasons than the soap opera; answers has to do with
the Microwave oven, Avon and Weight Watchers.
Two weeks we
got a different kind of theme board in DOUBLE JEOPARDY, one that might have
been hinting at the difficulties of the tournament: PARTICLE PHYSICS, LET’S
VISIT PALAU, JAMIE FOXX ROLES, AFRICAN CUISINE, LATIN LEGAL TERMS & ONE
LAST ‘EZ’ CATEGORY. The writers were no doubt tweaking the contestants for this
tournament as to just how much they’d studied and whether they’d studied these
categories. (For the record, the three contestants were only stumped by two of
these clues.)
The following
week, the theme in the Jeopardy round was obvious. THE NEWSPAPER, THE SPORTS
PAGE, THE BOOK REVIEW, THE FOOD SECTION, THE PERSONALS, and THE ‘C’ROSSWORD
PUZZLE. The last category was a rewording of a common category CROSSWORD CLUES ‘C’.
About a week
and a half later they got even more focused in Double Jeopardy: THE ORCHESTRA,
AROUND THE HORN, SYMBOLS, THE VIOLENCES, PLAYING THE BUFFOON and ‘P AN ‘O’s. In
the latter category, you needed a two word response, the first word starting
with P, the second with O. The AROUND THE HORN category dealt with Cape Horn in
Africa, and it was almost verbatim repeated earlier this year. Some of these
clues were very tricky; Tom Nichols and Chacko George, two of the players each
made four mistakes. Here are a few:
THE
ORCHESTRA $2000: “A gold ‘concert grand pedal’ one of these instruments from
Lyon and Healy costs $42,000.” Chacko thought it was a piano, Tom knew it was a
harp.
SYMBOLS for
$800: ‘The long symbolic history of the pentacle includes representing Jesus’
five of these.” When Tom said nails, he was ruled incorrect. They wanted wounds
or stigmata.
THE VIOLENCE,
$1600: “In World War II he headed the Gestapo in Lyons, France; in January 1983,
he was arrested in South America.” Chacko thought it was Goebbels, Tom knew it
was Klaus Barbie.
I mention
this because at the time I was a skilled Jeopardy watcher and I didn’t know any
of these three clues.
Three days
later we got a different kind of theme board which really showed the Jeopardy
writers being inventive: FOUND IN SPACE, CANADIAN IDOL ‘MISSION’ POSSIBLE, WILL
& DISGRACE, THAT’S CREDIBLE and WISCONSIN 3-0.
WILL &
DISGRACE had to due with some of the truly awful behavior that we can Shakespeare
was capable of, ending in violence or death. The Daily Double will prove that:
“Demetrius &
Charon rape and mutilate Lavinia; this general, her dad, bakes them in a pie
that he serves their mom.” This clue refers to the very early tragedy Titus
Andronicus.
And in what
might have coincidence, the last theme board of the first round also dealt with
the Bard and showed just how far the writers could go:
SHAKESPEAREAN
WORDPLAY, THE MERCHANT OF TENNIS, AS YOU ‘IKE’ IT, THE COMEDY OF ERAS, McHENRY
THE FORT, PART I and ALL’S WHALE THAT ENDS WHALE. Is it possible Jeopardy
invented the dad joke? Maybe not: all of these are way too smart.
Most of
these categories are self-explanatory but COMEDY OF ERAS, you had to name the comedian.
An example you might know: 1990s “You might be a redneck if your family tree
does not fork.” Who is Jeff Foxworthy?
In the
second round the gameplay got more serious, but the theme boards didn’t go
away. In the Jeopardy round of the fifth game we had a clear theme: CHICAGO,
CAB ARRAY, MOO-VIN’ OUT, FAN TOM, AVENUE ‘Q’ and WE’RE TALKING BROADWAY.
FAN TOM, for
those who might not guess, dealt with famous Tom or Thomases and things or
people they were fans of. $800: “This Jude The Obscure author admired
Browning but was said to be too shy to meet him” Who is Thomas Hardy?”
Two games later
we got another, slightly more obscure theme board: THE BIG BAND ERA, STARDUST,
TUXEDO JUNCTION, SOUTH OF THE BORDER, DEEP PURPLE and TAKE THE ‘A’ TRAIN. Sean
Ryan, who selected the first clue, clearly got the references: ‘I’m an
Ellington sucker. TAKE THE ‘A’ TRAIN.
This involved
a lot of creativity. TUXEDO JUNCTION involved places involved formal dress. SOUTH
OF THE BORDER meant they gave you a country and named the neighbor on its southernmost
border. STARDUST actually came up a few months ago basically repeated verbatim
and Sean, who found it, had no more luck getting in than the contestant nearly
eighteen years earlier:
“A faint
constellation in the northern sky, Camelopardalis represents this animal.” It
was not until Ken revealed that the combination of camel and leopard was meant
to refer to a giraffe, something that had puzzled me for nearly eighteen years.
There was
only one theme board in the quarterfinal match and in this case, it was a
throwback. Anyone who remembers Cheers remembers when Cliff Clavin appeared on
the show. Pam Mueller, Phil Yellman and Brian Moore were the ones who finally
got to deal with the categories in Double Jeopardy:
CIVIL
SERVANTS, STAMPS AROUND THE WORLD, MOTHERS & SONS, BEER, ‘BAR’ TRIVIA and
CELIBACY.
Now I’m
guessing the Jeopardy fan wants to know how the show handled the last category.
In fact it was how that category played out that was critical to how Double
Jeopardy.
It had been
a close game much of the round and Pam found the last Daily Double with it
almost over. At the time she had $12,800 when she found it in CELIBACY:
“This 20th
Century leader wrote, “For me the observance of…Brahmacharya has been full of
difficulties.” She knew it was Gandhi and went up to $14,800” which gave her
the lead.
Her
opponents then made costly errors in that same category.
“These 12th
century councils named for a Roman palace declared priestly marriages invalid.”
Phil thought they were the Councils of Trent and lost $2000. It was the Lateran
Councils. (I hadn’t heard of them either.)
“This adjective
for one celibate type of life comes for the Greek for ‘alone’
Phil thought
it was solipsistic. Brian thought it was ascetic. It was actually monastic. It
cost each of them $800. I guess these guys didn’t know enough about celibacy.
Pam would
eventually win the game and her performance in the semi-finals has made her a
feature in every anniversary tournament since.
The final
theme board of the tournament came up in the Jeopardy round of the first game
of the final where Ken Jennings had been waiting for Jerome Vered and Brad
Rutter. The board was set up in honor to them as Alex said:
THE SMART
SET, EGGHEADS, SHEER GENIUS, SHREW-ED. HIGH INTELLIGENCE and ‘BRIL’-LIANT.
For those of
you who are curious, EGGHEADS dealt with famous TV and Movie geniuses (Doctor
Who was among them) HIGH INTELLIGENCE had to do with intelligence gathering and
THE SMART SET was about an influential literary magazine that H.L Mencken
edited from 1915 to 1922. It’s worth noting that’s where the Daily Double was
and appropriately Ken found it:
“This
ex-sailor published early sea plays in the magazine, including The Long
Voyage Home”. Ken knew it was Eugene O’Neill.
A theme
board by the Jeopardy writers showcases their creativity as well as challenges both
the viewer and the contestant. But as someone who has watched many tournaments
over the years, I have noticed that every time some of these tournaments come
along the writers decided to have a different sort of fun – the kind the
champions might not appreciate but by this point should have come to expect.
I will deal
with that in the second part of this article.
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