Changes could be afoot for the syndicated iteration of Jeopardy!
Michael Davies, the iconic game show’s executive producer, has some ideas about how to make it easier for viewers to play along at home.
In the latest edition of the Inside Jeopardy! Podcast, he revealed his belief that some audience members “get very lost in our gameplay.”
“Now, with all of the Daily Double hunting, people jump all over. They go to the deeper dollar value first and jump all over the board,” he added.
“I don’t think it would ever be natural to dictate players to play in a certain order.”
Celebrity Jeopardy! previously tried to remedy this by using clues displayed on a split screen instead of a whole screen.
Jeopardy! fans struggle with change
Changing anything regarding the show usually comes with caveats because fans have watched the show for many years, so they expect most things to remain the same.
The change on Celebrity Jeopardy! didn’t cause as much controversy as he anticipated, which could mean he will implement it in the daily iteration of the show in the near future.
“One change we made in Celebrity [Jeopardy!] that I still find remarkable is that we didn’t get more people commenting on was that we left the three contestants on the right side of the screen,” Davies explained.
“So you could see the full game board when people choose the categories, and we also highlighted where people chose them so you had a real geographical sense of where the clue was coming from,” he added.
Jeopardy! has had many changes over the last few years
Davies believes it will help viewers understand “where the category is,” but he stressed that he and the show “have to be quite careful with changes.”
Jeopardy! has been undergoing significant changes since Alex Trebek’s death in November 2020.
After weeks of featuring a rotating panel of guest hosts, The Big Bang Theory’s Mayim Bialik and former winner Ken Jennings became the show’s official hosts.
That all changed last year when Bialik announced she had been let go from the syndicated version. It later emerged that Jennings became the sole host because affiliates were looking for consistency in the hosting panel.
Could Mayim Bialik return to Jeopardy?
There have been teases that Bialik could return for one of the various primetime iterations of the show, but it’s been all silent on that front since.
In the meantime, Bialik is returning to The Big Bang Theory universe with an appearance on the upcoming series finale of Young Sheldon.
Jeopardy! is currently airing a Tournament of Champions in its daytime slot because new contestants won’t be on the show this season until April due to the SAG-AFTRA and WGA strikes.
The creatives felt bringing in new contestants with old questions would be unfair.