Welcome to my latest “Andy’s Weekly Thoughts” installment, where I give some of my thoughts about happenings in the world of Jeopardy!.
The Jeopardy! Episode Count
On Friday, Episode #8900 aired. You might think that this means that 8,900 games of Jeopardy! have taken place, but this is not the case. Over the airing history of the post-1984 version of the show, there have been a number of deviations from this:
- After Season 1: Due to the fact that it took a few affiliates until January to settle into their famous early-season channels and time slots—most notably Los Angeles, where KCBS canceled the show mid-October (after about 25 episodes) and KCOP didn’t pick up the show until episode #86 in January—the summer reruns were given their own duplicate episode numbers—196 through 260.
- Battle of the Bay Area Brains: In conjunction with Jeopardy! taping the 1998 College Championship at the University of California, Berkeley, an 11th game, a charity exhibition match for the American Red Cross between Beverly Spurs, Michael Rankins, and Leslie Frates. It aired on the local San Francisco affiliate, KGO, at 4:30 PM on May 3, 1998.
- Episode #4088: To celebrate the show’s 4,000th episode in 2002, Alex Trebek hosted what amounted to a clip show from Radio City Music Hall. No actual game was played, but an episode was still produced and aired.
- The IBM Challenge & The All-Star Games: In order to provide for extra “behind-the-scenes” content, both The IBM Challenge in 2011 and the All-Star Games in 2019 split games into two episodes; thus, on three occasions, we have a single game split into two episodes;
- Hour-Long ABC Prime Time Episodes: For Jeopardy! Greatest of All Time, Jeopardy! National College Championship, and Jeopardy! Masters, viewers saw two games in a single hour-long episode.
Thus, if you consider a “game” to be “a series of clues ending in a Final Jeopardy! clue”, I would say that, including all prime-time spinoffs (Super Jeopardy! (13 games in 13 episodes), Jeopardy! Greatest of All Time, Jeopardy! National College Championship, the 2022–23 Celebrity Jeopardy! (13 games in 13 episodes), and Jeopardy! Masters, we have seen 8,903 nationally-aired games of Jeopardy! over 8,884 nationally-aired episodes. (If you want to include Battle of the Bay Area Brains, you can add 1 to that number.)
Why doesn’t Jeopardy! pay airfare and accommodations?
This has been a longstanding Jeopardy! policy and has generally been presented as an issue of fairness by the show. A 1994 Oakland Tribune article quotes then–contestant co-ordinator Kelley Carpenter as saying, “Because we have both out-of-towners and locals appearing on the show, if we were to pay for an airfare and a hotel, we would have technically given away money to some contestants coming from the East Coast, which wouldn’t be fair to someone who only lives 20 minutes away.” Thus, the show’s policy is that everyone in regular play pays their own expenses to get to the studio in Culver City. (Tournament contestants do get their flights and accommodations paid for.) I should also note that this doesn’t mean I think the current consolation prizes are sufficient—I would love to see an increase in this going forward—I am just presenting this historical research as a reason why the show has always acted as it has in this regard, not paying airfare and accommodations for regular-play contestants.
Why I Think We’re Seeing “Harder” Games
The “hot” talking point of the past couple of weeks has been clue writing. There has been an increased variance in clue difficulty and several cases where clues—including Finals—could have been pinned better. And I think there’s a good reason for that: the WGA strike.
I would like to preface this by saying that I believe that Jeopardy!‘s writers are the most important part of the show’s staff; their work has caused Jeopardy! to become the institution it is today. However, I think the overall quality of their work has suffered over the past few weeks because they were forced to prioritize quantity over quality. Because there were so many games that needed to be finalized before the writers went on strike—a full four weeks’ worth of boards had to be finalized before the strike, in addition to the 1,220 extra clues that needed to be written for Jeopardy! Masters—the overall quality of the material has fallen. It seems clear that the writers and producers, forced by a massive deadline crunch, greenlit material that ordinarily would have been sent for significant revisions—either for difficulty or pinning reasons. Once the strike is resolved and the writers return to work—hopefully sooner rather than later—I’m sure we’ll see a resumption of the higher-quality writing for which the show is known.
Sausage, Rutabaga, & Potato Soup
Last year when I moved to Newfoundland, we ended up with an abundance of rutabaga shortly after my move. As someone who generally enjoys rutabaga, this didn’t feel like a terrible thing—however, I felt the need to find ways to cook with it. One day, after determining that I had a surplus of rutabaga and potatoes, I decided that a soup needed to be made. After finding an inexpensive protein with sausage, I ended up with the following recipe:
Chop up half a large onion, 3 carrots, and 6 celery stalks. Sauté in a generous portion of olive oil in the bottom of your large stock pot. After about 10 minutes, add as much minced garlic as your heart desires.
Meanwhile, take around 1.5 pounds of uncooked sausage, cut into bite-size pieces, and brown the sausage.
When the sausage is almost browned, take about 45mL of beef Better Than Bouillon (I usually get it at Costco), add it to the stock pot, and stir until incorporated. Now add your spices. I use salt, pepper, thyme, herbes de Provence, rosemary, basil, and (most importantly) ground cloves. Again, stir until incorporated. Here I’ll add lots of Worcestershire sauce (if you think you’ve added enough of it, you haven’t. Add more.) Now, add your sausage, about 4-5 medium-sized potatoes, peeled and chopped into 1” cubes, and 1 medium-sized rutabaga, peeled and chopped into 1” cubes. Stir to coat.
When everything is mixed together well, add 4-6 cups of water, basically enough to ensure everything is covered. Add some bay leaves, bring to a simmer, and let it simmer on medium-low heat for 90 minutes to 2 hours. About 15 minutes before it’s ready, add more Worcestershire sauce.
Serve and enjoy!
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I didn’t know the stuff about why Jeopardy doesn’t pay airfare, very interesting! And I definitely agree with your part about increasing the consolation prizes. I still remember the fact that I fell for your April Fools joke about that from over two years ago.
What would be fair in your mind? The $5,000/$3,000 split you claimed in the April Fools post might be a bit much, but how about $3,000/$1,500?
I think the show should pay whatever amount necessary so that no potential contestant would lose money if they competed on the show and came in 3rd (so maybe doubling the 3rd place prize will solve this?). With the current prizes pretty much anyone who doesn’t live in LA ends up in the red after taxes, travel, and lodging, not to even mention childcare and missing work hours. This is an issue for fairness, but also hurts the show by unintentionally screening out some high-quality contestants.
Also, Andy, I really enjoy these weekly thoughts. As a MN kid who listened to a lot of Prairie Home Companion growing up I especially got a kick out of a recipe involving rutabaga, which I will definitely attempt this fall.
Am I correct in remembering that the show does pay for airfare and/or accommodations for champs who have to travel home over a taping break and back to LA for their next show?
Airfare, yes, accommodations, no.
The Cheers video is still one of my favorite pieces of media on TV and the entire internet, so I’m glad it’s still alive!
Interestingly, had Cliff’s response been accepted (as Alex later said it should have been) he would’ve finished with $44,000. Accounting for doubled dollar values, that means the one-day record before James Holzhauer would’ve been held for almost 30 years by a guy who didn’t even know the answer to his Final Jeopardy question. (The date of that episode airing – January 18, 1990 – as well as the fact that the game had three new contestants, makes me think that Cliff might have been influenced by Frank Spangenberg’s extremely aggressive betting; problem is, there’s very much such a thing as “too aggressive”.)
This is just a test comment because I tried to leave a comment about an hour ago and it said something like the site was down (saying so in a browser response way, not in a webmaster way).
In regards to the Cheers clip – notice the continuity error at 2:26 into it (the pre FJ! is shown for Cliff’s opponent).
I never thought that Jeopardy! wo7ld ever start paying for regular season contestants. I was a season 3 contestant (show 561) and paid everything for my audition in August ‘86 and taping in November. And the secondary prizes and parting gifts were press-on nails, Mr. Turkey coupons and toilet tank pucks. No cash to refill the bank account.