[On March 30, 1964, the legendary game show Jeopardy debuted. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy that classic and a handful of other game show histories! Add your thoughts, obviously in the form of a question, in comments!]
On two
ways the legendary game show echoes topics from earlier in the week, and one
way it stands out.
Maybe it’s
an apocryphal story (TV game shows are a mixture of reality and fiction, people
and performance, as this whole week’s series has hopefully reflected), but in
any case as the story goes Jeopardy! was
created in direct response and contrast to the 1950s quiz show scandals about
which I wrote on Tuesday. As creator Merv
Griffin described it in a 1963 profile published while the show was still
in development, “My wife Julann
just came up with the idea one day when we were in a plane bringing us back to
New York City 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?” Sounds
likely enough, and I love the thought that the longest-running and most
successful quiz show in TV history was inspired to flip the traditional question-and-answer
format (the innovation that made it stand out) by a cultural need to flip
narratives of fixed quiz shows.
Across that
long-running history, Jeopardy! has likewise
connected to both the daytime and primetime varieties of game show about which
I wrote in yesterday’s post. The original 1964 iteration,
hosted by Art Fleming and running until January 1975, was a daytime show that
aired weekly; the 1984
reboot, initially hosted by Alex Trebek and still on the air today despite
Trebek’s 2021 passing, was and remains a primetime show that airs daily. As
those hyperlinked clips indicate, the two versions were in gameplay and many
ways identical to each other, but I would argue that (just as I argued about Deal or No Deal in yesterday’s post) the
primetime version of Jeopardy! did nonetheless
feel distinct, both in heightened production values and in higher stakes
(relatively speaking—Jeopardy! has
never had the million-dollar
payouts of some other quiz and game shows). Most of the other long-running
game shows have stayed on one side or the other of this duality, so it’s
particularly interesting to see how a single show has evolved from daytime to primetime.
While Jeopardy! is thus very much in
conversation with TV game show trends and topics from throughout the genre’s
nearly 100 years of history, I would say that it has achieved a level of
cultural presence and influence beyond any other such show (it’s not a
coincidence that both Rosie
Perez’s character in the film White
Men Can’t Jump and Ann
Dowd’s [SPOILERS in that clip] in the TV show The Leftovers have dreams of appearing on Jeopardy!, for example; nor that Weird Al wrote a song
about it!). The question of why is of course an open-ended one, but if I were
to boil it down I would emphasize two factors related to my two prior paragraphs
in this post: the flipped “answer and question” format that we apparently owe
to Merv Griffin’s wife; and the host who took over for the show’s primetime
reboot and became very much a celebrity in his own right (with the Saturday Night Live parody to prove it). As someone who
tried out for Jeopardy! multiple
times (and who was in fact invited to be on the show but was frustratingly
unable to do so, which is a story you’d have to draw out of me with an
AmericanStudies beer or two), I can say that I fully understand the show’s
unique appeal, and am happy to celebrate it here on its 60th
birthday!
March
Recap this weekend,
Ben
PS. What
do you think? Other game shows you’d highlight?
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