Jeopardy! Needs to Cool It With the Tournaments

I can’t tell you the last time I turned on the television and watched a regular episode of Jeopardy! gameplay. I think it was last year? My air conditioner was running? Season 40 of the buzzy game show — mercifully now free of Mayim Bialik as co-host — has shifted its focus away from introducing new players at the lecterns to a rotation of increasingly ESPN-esque tournaments to lure back popular contestants and boost ratings: Second Chance, Champions Wildcard, the annual Tournament of Champions, and, in the coming days, Jeopardy! Invitational, which will reunite decades of mega-players and fan favorites. In prime time, Celebrity Jeopardy! cropped up again in late 2023, and another Jeopardy! Masters tournament will follow this spring. It’s exhausting.

According to J! Archive data, the last time we met a new trio of players was July 28. This is not a mistake; it’s current Jeopardy! design. If it were up to executive producer Mike Davies, there would perhaps be even more events like these in the show’s expanding universe. “I’m managing Jeopardy! as though it’s a sport,” he said of his ambitions in May. “I want to build an elite pyramid of competition that plays a postseason every single year at the same time that allows our best players to compete against each other.” Davies insisted his plan wasn’t going to compromise the standard Monday-through-Friday games, “but I do believe our very best players deserve to be in competition with each other. I think it makes Jeopardy! an even more appealing and important program.” This mind-set has, seemingly, come at the expense of the more established tournaments: The last Teachers Tournament aired in early 2020, and there hasn’t been a College Championship since winter 2022. “There’s a very healthy pushback against me,” Davies also admitted. “More conservative voices question my radical and overexcited ideas.”

All-star Jeopardy! gameplay isn’t without its thrills, of course. Just last week, actor and comedian Ike Barinholtz defeated two geniuses in the Tournament of Champions in an astonishing quarterfinal upset; Barinholtz told me Davies “saw an opportunity” to recruit him for the tournament after he won the inaugural Celebrity Jeopardy!. The upcoming Invitational also reads like a dream journal of Jeoplebrities: Amy Schneider, Austin Rogers, Alex Jacob, Larissa Kelly, and original disruptor Chuck Forrest are among those competing for the grand prize. But you know who I’d really like to see again? Lucas Partridge, a school counselor from Las Vegas who won three games before the tournament blitz began and has been hanging in a very blue purgatory since summer. Maybe he’ll find his way atop the leaderboard of legends. Maybe he won’t come close. But that core suspense — the slow climb from normalcy to GOAT — is the reason we keep watching. Without it, Jeopardy! risks becoming a contestant-recycling center.

Related

• Ike Barinholtz Owes His Big Jeopardy! Victory to Eyes Wide Shut
• ‘I’m Managing Jeopardy! As Though It’s a Sport’