The franchises newest executive producer relishes the very healthy pushback against him.
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Americas favorite game show of objective, blue-tinted truth has given us a new spectacle to behold.Jeopardy!
(Hes the one who broughtWho Wants to Be a Millionaire?stateside.)
I have lots of ideas, Davies tells me.
There are limits on my power, there are limits on my knowledge.
But Ive spent a career developing shows and adjusting based on feedback.
Im truly open to it.
Jeopardy!debuted theSecond Chance Tournamentnear the end of last year.
I was compelled to produce it because I love the concept.
So this was the timing.
It wouldve been hard to do this before now.
Now we look at their buzzer data.
We can see their buzzer attempts and their buzzer speed.
I thinkJeopardy!deserves to be a prime-time brand.
We can afford to make a prime-time version of the show and a syndicated version of the show.
Im managingJeopardy!as though its a sport.
I want a real postseason.
That is where I see it going.
But I do believe our very best players deserve to be in competition with each other.
I think it makesJeopardy!an even more appealing and important program.
I took the job on an interim basis thinking I was going to stay for three months.
It says everything thats great about this country.
A lot more people are available to watch it.
Were all six of these champions open to the idea immediately or did it require convincing?
I felt that I had buy-in.
Some of them had legitimate points about the prize structure and the format of the competition.
I wouldve liked to truly test out the masters in this tournament seen every single combination of three-play game.
We were close to every combination, but you cant get every combination in seven quarterfinal episodes.
That was the major thing, as well as a charitable component to the first-place prize.
James Holzhauer deserves credit for that.
Im interested to see how the tournament is received.
How was the point system settled upon forJeopardy!
More conservative voices question my radical and overexcited ideas.
I was questioned hard about the points format, specifically about its relatability to an American audience.
Would that format give somebody such an unassailable lead that they could never be caught?
I felt it wasnt enough to give someone two points for a win and one point for second place.
Winning is a major difference.
We also talked a lot about the tiebreakers.
We got them mostly right, which is that first tiebreaker would go to the amount of games won.
That encourages risk, especially in the finals.
ABC gave a very good note.
Im very confident that it will be on again this time next year.
This is the pinnacle of our game, the top of our pyramid.
While Im in the chair doing this job, this is my contribution.
Why did you want to include this more interactive element?The genesis came from the Tournament of Champions.
We have these big grids printed out of the game board, which is how we read the material.
We were constantly following where the Daily Doubles were and how they gutted around them.
You could feel us gasping every time they just missed a Daily Double.
Within this elite competition of players, thats the difference between winning and losing.
We felt we should be offering fans and viewers the same opportunitywe have as producers.
The jury is still out.
There have been some people who love it and some who dont.
But it’s possible for you to just turn away and not look at it.
I know thisMasterstournament has been on your franchise wish list for a while.
What other ambitions now replace it?My dream is to have a second-screenJeopardy!experience.
The other thing Im quite fixated upon is the game board.
The speed of these games move so fast that I often lose track of what category were in.
Listen, the live experience of watching television is really about sports andJeopardy!at this point.
Its become the end use.
It sits and competes with sports for eyeballs and viewers.
But the player base has changed.
All right, lets hear it.
Im intrigued.I think the nature of trivia and general knowledge has changed, so the canon has changed.
In the 1990s,Jeopardy!was just another game show because everybody knew the same general knowledge.
It was a test between three people.
At this point in 2023, theres so much more knowledge in the world.
We have a much broader view of culture.
Its so hard for anybody to know everything.Jeopardy!is harder than ever.
People think weve eased up the material, but we havent.
This seems reasonable to me.
But that was when everybody was reading Steinbeck and Fitzgerald.
Now the reading list the canon that people read in literature is much broader.
We have to push people against a better range.
The effect thats happened onJeopardy!is on our contestants.
You dont get onJeopardy!unless youre really good.
You need a really good test score to get on the show.
But the delta between our really good contestants and our elite super champions is enormous on any statistical basis.
That sort of forced the sport.
We certainly have more writers.
This past season, we had more Guild writers than ever before.
With the demands on writing between the additional franchises, we promoted a couple of researchers into writing positions.
I think the job has become harder because of our material.
Our clues become famous.
Every night, a bunch of our clues get laser-focused on social media.
They get endlessly taken apart and discussed.
We have 61 clues per half-hour.
The quality of the writing has never been stronger.
I see it improving constantly.
Each clue has to test an audience and entertain in and of itself.
Last year we didnt write about Edward Hopper at the Whitney.
I was like, How do we not write about Hopper at the Whitney?
It was one of the cultural events of the year in New York and we didnt cover it.
I felt we should have.
Its hard because were often writing in advance.
But Ken is hosting this one.
How was that decision made?Im not being evasive, I just dont know.
That wasnt the decision I came in to make.
When I joinedJeopardy!, there was already a deal that existed with Mayim to do all prime-time events.
At that point it was just theJeopardy!
I dont think anybody had thought about any other prime-time events.
ThenCelebrity Jeopardy!happened, which became natural for Mayim to handle.
To me, it was pretty clear from the start that Ken was going to host.
Youve stated that youre active in monitoring online responses to the show and take audience feedback seriously.
We read data from everywhere.
There are some people who loveJeopardy!and will watch both.
We also have various fans who post that they dont like either of them.
Thats just part of the data we look at.
One of the biggest things is the ratings of the show.
When Ken is hosting and Mayim is hosting, theres zero difference.
Its exactly the same and thats the broadest part of the audience.
There was a lot of rebuilding to do.
I stand by the decision to bring Ken in and have Ken be a second host along with Mayim.
I back both of them.
They have my full support.
This show is so hard to host.
Alex made it his own, but it wasnt his own the first couple of years.
A lot of what happened onJeopardy!came from him possessing this job for so long.
I do read everything, and look, the strongest thing weve got is the passion of our fans.
I wish many of our fans were more patient in understanding that were dealing with two hosts.
Mayim is a very experienced actress.
Ken is a very experiencedJeopardy!player.
Theyre both at the beginning of their hosting careers.
Theres an idea that I hold absolute power in making decisions aroundJeopardy!, but I dont.
Thats not the nature of the job.
Im a caretaker for this.
Maybe thats why Im moving so fast to enact the things I want to do.
Im like a new coach on a basketball team.
Ive got to get in and do it very, very fast before I get fired.
James has repeatedly teased Ken about wanting a rematch after theirGreatesttournament.
Every now and then I bump up against them.
One of those rules is once youve hostedJeopardy!, you might never playJeopardy!again.
Ken has very directly told me hes retired fromJeopardy!.
I understand the reason that no one whos hosted can ever play again.
But Arnold Palmer and Jack Nicklaus played the Masters long after they were hosting tournaments on the PGA.
Im probably more open to the idea than other people, but that would never be my decision.
Would I like to see Ken and James play again?
James said something to me the other day, though, which really made me laugh.
What he wants more than anything else is to go back on the show.
We dont allow anybody back on the show whos played before.
There could be another James Holzhauer out there who just had a bad day.
