Screenshot from “Jeffpardy!” clip.
Everyone I know is now on Jeopardy! As someone who writes about crossword puzzles, constructs puzzles, and teaches courses on writing and games, I have found that my connection to trivia champions is an occupational hazard, since puzzles and Jeopardy! share an enthusiastic audience (including the most recent Jeopardy! Tournament of Champions winner, Paolo Pasco, who also currently holds the trophy for the American Crossword Puzzle Tournament). It’s also in my genes: my brother was a Jeopardy! champion in 2017; my mom was on the show last summer.
But it’s not just my own Baader-Meinhof phenomenon of an ever-expanding Jeopaverse. Jeopardy! is one of the few legacy media franchises that isn’t in jeopardy. Over the past few years, there have been more iterations of Jeopardy! than ever before, well beyond the classic show. The growth is exponential, as though that trademarked exclamation point had taken on the mathematical property of a factorial, multiplying the game into so many more versions than seemed possible. It’s the Cambrian explosion of Jeopardy! that nobody asked for. Jeopardy! is too good at its brand. TikTok loves Jeopardy!
Still a last gasp of nightly cable programming, the show is now also streaming on two major platforms at once, Hulu and Peacock, which is basically unheard of, but Jeopardy! transcends the laws of television. This show isn’t a 7 P.M., five-days-a-week dose; it’s much more than that. But Jeopardy! being everywhere doesn’t necessarily mean it’s a better show.
Quiz shows were huge in early television, but in the late fifties, the FCC cracked down on programs like Twenty-One and Tic-Tac-Dough for feeding certain players the right responses. So the producer Merv Griffin had a brain wave that would leave the authorities with nothing to protest: a show that provided all the contestants with the answers, letting them provide the questions. Jeopardy! launched in 1964, and save for a few brief years—1975 to 1978, and 1979 to 1983—“America’s Favorite Quiz Show” has aired continually ever since.
Trivia shows provide an engrossing escape, allowing viewers to experience frustration and triumph in a thoroughly absorbing yet inconsequential space. Other than contestants giving answers in the form of questions, Jeopardy! basically follows a standard quiz-show formula, with players earning or losing money as they solve clues, category by category. The “answers” get progressively difficult as they get more expensive. The only moment when Jeopardy! steps out of game face is during a few minutes of aggressively awkward banter between host and contestants right after the first commercial break. The host, currently the cherubically snarky Ken Jennings, tees up each contestant to narrate some preplanned anecdote about their lives. The contestants offer anecdotes of awkward banality in these anecdotes (one eats food counterclockwise around the plate! Another once mixed up the sun and the moon in the sky!) that provide moments of pleasantly dull humanity.
When longtime host Alex Trebek died in 2020, the Jeopaverse firmament shook. The seemingly ageless silver-fox Canadian, who did crosswords at 6 A.M. on taping days, and who flirted with something friskier than a G-rating but never crossed into either lecherousness or nerdiness, was the indelible heart and soul of the show. But Jeopardy! has stood the test by regenerating itself from within, like an axolotl. The most famous superchamp, Ken Jennings, has become the heir to Trebek. Jeopardy! is bigger than us all.
Jeopardy!: A Partial Taxonomy
Spinoffs include Rock & Roll Jeopardy!; Jep!, a children’s version; Sports Jeopardy!; and Pop Culture Jeopardy! There are special tournaments: Jeopardy! Masters, a Champions League–style supergroup competition; Celebrity Jeopardy!, in which celebrities compete to raise money for charities, and which used to consist of special episodes within the original season, but graduated into its own series; Jeopardy! The Greatest of All Time, a gladiatorial showdown between Ken Jennings, Brad Rutter, and James Holzhauer; Jeopardy! College Championship; Jeopardy! Kids Week; and Jeopardy! Teen Tournament. Other quiz shows, like The Chase and Master Minds, feature Jeopardy! alums as hosts and marquee contestants.
Per Jeopardy!’s broadcast records, the countries with their own Jeopardies!, to date, are the United States, Argentina, Australia, Azerbaijan, Belgium (Flanders), Canada (Quebec), China, Croatia, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Hungary, Indonesia, Israel, Italy, Japan, Latvia, Mexico, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Poland, Romania, Russia, Slovakia, Spain, Sweden, Turkey, the United Kingdom, and Uzbekistan. An Arabic-language version, El Mahaq, also broadcasts to the Arab world.
Jeopardy! varietals each exaggerate an element of the show to an increasingly absurd degree, and force us to reckon with the age-old, answerless question: What are we really talking about when we’re talking about Jeopardy!?
The Chase (U.S. version) (2021–present)
Question Difficulty: $200–$800
Contestant Skill: Solid second place against a Tournament of Champions qualifier
Zen or Pachinko?: Video-poker slot machines (the tall kind, with curved screens)
The Chase perverts superchampions—contestants like Ken Jennings or James Holzhauer, who defeated opponents for several nights in a row—into supervillains, making us root against the very people Jeopardy! taught us to revere as folk heroes.
The Chase leans into the showmanship rather than the game, remixing trivia with a simulacrum of suspense by creating a team to fight a common enemy—often someone that viewers will recognize as a Jeopardy! winner. Contestants compete individually, but they’re all on the same team. Each contributes to a prize fund split among all the successful contestants. The more winners there are, the more money everyone gets. The team’s playing to beat the Chaser, who is a Mycroft Holmes–meets–Lex Luthor type, both guru and nemesis. The show’s drama comes into play, regardless of whether the contestants know enough questions to put up a fight against the Chaser. If the Chaser happens to get a question wrong, a weird fissure opens.
The first American version of The Chase, in 2013, had a black, all-caps AXE body deodorant, Power Outline aesthetic. Booming lights, a thrumming drumbeat, music that signaled high stakes. A laugh track from a live audience, a little faux back-and-forth with the contestant after they answered a question but before viewers knew the correct answer.
In this iteration, the Chaser was a Brit of brains and brawn: “The Beast,” a.k.a. Mark Labbett, a six-foot-six former mathematics and physical education substitute teacher from Salisbury, England. The Beast had been part of a quizzing ensemble on the original UK version of The Chase, but got his break on the U.S. series as the sole Chaser for several seasons.
Unlike Jeopardy!’s precisely pinned formula, The Chase’s multiple-choice clues played faster, looser, stupider.
A sample question: You walk in on a chef shaving his pecorino. What’s he doing?
- Tenderizing his meat
- Cutting the cheese
- Sautéing his nuts
In January 2021, the show rebooted in America and became an honorary extension of the J! universe. The new Chasers were some of the most notorious Jeopardy! alums, including Buzzy Cohen, Ken Jennings, Victoria Groce, Brandon Blackwell, and James Holzhauer—who himself had been a contestant on the previous iteration of The Chase. Aesthetically, The Chase replaces the goofy-gallant charm of Jeopardy! with both the high-stakes mania of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? and the wicked-stepsister psychodrama of The Weakest Link. There’s maximum choreography in the stop-start timer function: “two minutes” on The Chase might take as long as the final two minutes in the fourth quarter of a basketball game.
It works—sort of. Viewers get to see people answering questions rapid-fire, sweating under the lights. They get to root for some people and boo others, while always cheering for the real winner here: trivia. It’s more stressful than Jeopardy!, and even though it’s supposedly a team sport, there’s no way for the audience to participate—the questions go by too fast; the Chaser’s too quick; the contestants aren’t quick enough. The Chase is television, not a conversation.
Jeopardy! (UK version) (2024–present)
Mood: Bouffant
Chat: Soggy chips
Fashion: Clashing tie patterns
UK Jeopardy! engorges the game’s prattle, turning it into a prime-time pub night.
There’s already a huge subculture of really hard quiz shows on British TV. On the diabolical University Challenge, teams compete to solve multipart, obscure questions at increasingly breakneck speed. On the other hand, there’s also a subculture of hygge-inducing trivia; viewers searching for a cozier trivial romp look forward to the end-of-year Big Fat Quiz of the Year.
UK Jeopardy! pays homage to both and none of these. The show in its latest iteration is less quiz show and more David Attenborough documentary: it’s essentially an hour-long riff by the comedian and actor Stephen Fry, punctuated by contestants. UK Jeopardy! is plenty boring, but it’s also far too long: where original Jeopardy! is a half-hour religious rite, this slog goes from snappily dull to Biblical plodding.
In the UK version, there are two rounds of Jeopardy! and one round of Double Jeopardy!, with lots of chitchat. On the U.S. show, the only chatty bits come from the anecdotes. If the American Jeopardy! anecdotes lie somewhere on the spectrum between benevolent and bemusing, the UK ones are both tepid and cringey, with the aesthetic of limp, wet fries. Fry asks Rachel, a business analyst: “Tell us about being the only woman on a men’s boat at uni! Did you win your bumps?” As another contestant, Miles, a student from Wimbledon with painful-looking teeth, tells Fry about his school’s Combined Cadet Force, Miles’s smile becomes increasingly forced. “How did you know about Finnish wife-carrying sports?” Fry asks Miles, but doesn’t wait for an answer, and Miles’s face grows more strained; by his third day of play, Miles is keeping his lips pressed together to conceal his dental disarray.
UK Jeopardy! takes everything that’s charming in a twenty-two-minute format and extends it, running on the theory that more is better. But sometimes, more is just more.
Pop Culture Jeopardy! (2024–present)
Taste Level: Airhead (mystery flavor)
Aura: Electric purple
Aesthetic: Kindercore
The intro sequence to Pop Culture Jeopardy! is wonderful. The classic Jeopardy! logo, in the iconic font (in the same family as the phototype face “Anonymous,” and recreated by fans as “Geoparody,” though the actual typeface remains under wraps), fills the screen, but then it’s remixed in rapid succession: comic book–style graphics, old-school Mario Kart, the Blockbuster logo, the Dunkin’ Donuts font with “PCJ” instead of “DD” on the little coffee cup. At the end of the few-seconds-long burst of logos, Johnny Gilbert’s voice comes on: “This …! Is …! Pop Culture Jeopardy!”
But that’s where the fun stops.
Pop Culture Jeopardy! is the enshittification of Jeopardy!, the consequence of tournamenting the show into oblivion.
Pop Culture Jeopardy! was born into a streaming world. Season one of PCJ aired in 2024 on Amazon Prime. Season two is slated to run on Netflix. PCJ, per Sony Pictures Television, is “the first-ever Jeopardy! for people who get upset when contestants miss clues about rappers and reality TV.” There are nine contestants—three teams of three that compete as a three-headed monster. Each team squashes into one podium like people flying coach: aisle-middle-window. For most questions, one person buzzes in from each team; on Daily Doubles and Final Jeopardy!, the team collaborates; and on a new Triple Play–format question, all three give responses to a question with three possible correct answers.
The show is a bracket-style knockout tournament, so that each night different teams compete, and then the winners advance to compete again.
Tournament-loading Jeopardy! robs Paul to pay Peter. Tournaments should be special events, so they can be aired during prime time. A tournament is very legible to the world of Jeopardy! fans who moonlight as bracketologists or Reddit sabermetricians. But tournaments sacrifice the much more satisfying king-of-the-hill drama, the nightly serial nail-biter of whether any one winner can return. No multiplex bracketology, just a distilled thrill.
The host, Colin Jost, is more milquetoast than must-roast, coasting on his bright eyes and open grin. He goes down easy, but as such, he’s easily forgettable, just as soon watched as flushed from the system. Though the pop culture questions can admittedly be kind of amusing, they also make the show feel like eating a bag of Airheads: many flavors, but one sticky-sweet note.
Jeffpardy! (2015–2015)
Skill Level: Jeff
Longevity: Jeff
Stupidity: San Francisco
Jeffpardy! is perfect.
At fifty-one seconds long, it’s one of the shortest adaptations, the Jeff’s kiss. Jeffpardy!’s three contestants are Jeff, Jeff, and Jeff (different handwritings on-screen). The show grabs most of its Jeff audio from the October 9, 2014, episode with the category “Jeff.” The eight-hundred-dollar question deviates slightly with “What is Jeffrey Katzenberg?” The content here, spliced from many shows, has been beautifully distilled into a Jeff-only space. Each category is “Jeff,” every monetary value is “Jeff.” “Jeff,” says Trebek, introducing the first category. “Jeff. Jeff. Jeff! Jefffff. Jeff.” “Jeff” is every answer, every question, every contestant. “Jeff” is always correct. “What is San Francisco?” one contestant tries. Nope. It’s an edited-down version of the show, turning Jeopardy! into a kind of performance art, and highlighting what’s actually the best part: its rhythm. When you stop caring what the answers are—when every answer and every question is “Jeff”—the routine itself becomes soothing, and captures what all the elaborate spinoffs miss. Jeopardy! is, at its heart, more than a quiz; it’s a reliable rhythm. In the multiverse of Jeopardy!, in the trivia hell of heaven and heaven of hell, in this sphere of facts in an increasingly unreliable media sphere, let there be Jeff.
Adrienne Raphel is the author of Thinking Inside the Box: Adventures with Crosswords and the Puzzling People Who Can’t Live Without Them, Our Dark Academia, and What Was It For.
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Gaming center adalah sebuah tempat atau fasilitas yang menyediakan berbagai perangkat dan layanan untuk bermain video game, baik di PC, konsol, maupun mesin arcade. Gaming center ini bisa dikunjungi oleh siapa saja yang ingin bermain game secara individu atau bersama teman-teman. Beberapa gaming center juga sering digunakan sebagai lokasi turnamen game atau esports.
