(featured image via jeopardy.com)
My mom was an enormous fan of “Jeopardy!” and it turns out that later in his life my dad was, too. For the last 20 years, no calls between 7:00 and 7:30 pm.
My first memories of the show were that of a mid-morning game show hosted by Art Fleming. For many years, Mom and I referred to Alex Trebek as “the new guy.”
It’s hard to explain what the addictive appeal is but I’ll go with this -simplicity. Merv Griffin – the emperor of television daytime talk before Oprah ever touched a microphone – thought it would be fun to play a trivia game with one simple twist. He’ll give you the answer, you ask the question. That’s it.
In an AP interview, Griffin explained how he came up with the idea:
“My wife Julann just came up with the idea one day when we were in a plane bringing us back to New York from Duluth. I was mulling over game show ideas when she noted that there had not been a successful ‘question and answer’ game on the air since the quiz show scandals. Why not do a switch and give the answers to the contestant and let them come up with the question. She fired a couple of answers to me: ‘5,280’ and the question of course was how many feet in a mile. Another was ’79 Wistful Vista.’ That was Fibber and Mollie McGee’s address. I loved the idea, went straight to NBC with the idea, and they bought it without even looking at a pilot show.”
This became America’s most wildly successful and almost entirely unchanged game show. The money has increased, but not wildly so. You can win a lot in one game, but only with a daring strategy that we’ve seen deployed in the last year or two — taking the highest dollar (and most difficult) clues in each category first, then going all-in when you hit the Daily Double.
Typical winnings for a well-played single game of “Jeopardy!” are in the $30,000 range. Using this strategy, champion James Holzhauer shattered previous records with a single game total of $110,914.
Fans of the show have marveled recently at our current hero, Matt Amodio – a Yale PhD candidate. He’s at more than a million bucks now, but his run is unique in the show’s history for a hopefully unrepeatable reason: He has gone through many hosts for the show as producers have gone through guest hosts and the first and only week of Mike Richards’ hosting just before getting fired.
Who’s reading the clues might seem minor, but it’s not. Players can’t ring in until the host has finished reading the clue. In order to win big, you have to ring in first a lot of the time (and know the correct answer). That requires the player to anticipate the host’s pattern of speech to know when to hit their button. Champion Matt has done this successfully across many hosts. It’s spooky how good he is at it.
I always appreciated Merv Griffin’s sense of fun and he sure gave us a lot of it (and some brain food) with “Jeopardy!” He was also the composer of a little instrumental called “Think.” That’s the little tune that’s played during the final round.
Griffin died in 2007. I think his gravestone is the funniest ever. It reads:
“Merv Griffin
July 6, 1925 – August 12, 2007
I will not be right back after this message.”
Jean Bolduc is a freelance writer and the host of the Weekend Watercooler on 97.9 The Hill. She is the author of “African Americans of Durham & Orange Counties: An Oral History” (History Press, 2016) and has served on Orange County’s Human Relations Commission, The Alliance of AIDS Services-Carolina, the Orange County Housing Authority Board of Commissioners, and the Orange County Schools’ Equity Task Force. She was a featured columnist and reporter for the Chapel Hill Herald and the News & Observer.
Readers can reach Jean via email – jean@penandinc.com and via Twitter @JeanBolduc
Chapelboro.com does not charge subscription fees. You can support local journalism and our mission to serve the community. Contribute today – every single dollar matters.
Comments on Chapelboro are moderated according to our Community Guidelines