Familiar faces, harder questions, higher stakes …
There’s a lot to like about Jeopardy tournaments that bring back the show’s top-performing contestants and pit them head-to-head in single-elimination battle royales.
But as the film studio execs who kept blowing up the superhero franchise until it exploded have recently learned the hard way, too much of a good thing can lead to alienated audiences.
And now more than ever, once you lose ’em, it’s hard to win ’em back.
To be clear, there’s no indication that Jeopardy’s recent string of tournaments — the longest in series history — has had a negative impact on the show’s ratings.
But “tournament fatigue” has become a buzzword in the Jeopardy-obsessed corners of social media, and media outlets have begun running editorials alleging that the show has lost its way by focusing too much on past victors.
On the heels of the Tournament of Champions, and the Jeopardy Invitational Tournament, the show is now gearing up for Jeopardy Masters!
As The Ringer recently noted, this week marks the first time in eight months that Jeopardy has aired episodes featuring first-time contestants, rather than past winners.
Some fans are vocal about their fondness for seeing beloved champs return to the Alex Trebek Stage, but others miss the old-fashioned populist appeal of a bartender going up against a teacher and a bus driver.
You won’t see any such proletarian lineup in the tournaments, as they mostly feature contestants who have won so much money and gained so much fame that they’re basically professional Jeopardy players at this point.
Of the contestants who are still conventionally employed, many — like Victoria Groce, who’s best known for her recurring role on the ABC game show The Chase — are full-time trivia pros.
The latest Tournament of Champions even featured an unexpected Hollywood component, as actor Ike Barinholtz — winner of last year’s Celebrity Tournament — competed against other past champs.
It was an amusing change of pace, but some viewers feel that the show loses some of its populist appeal when all of the contestants are no strangers to the stage lights.
The Masters Tournament — which debuts on May 1 — the six highest-ranked current “Jeopardy!” contestants battling it out in two games per hourlong episode.
It’s great news for Jeopardy viewers who enjoy seeing their old favorites return to the podium.
But for many longtime fans of the show — especially the older demographic, which makes up a sizable portion of Jeopardy’s viewership — the Ken Jennings Era of the show might bear an uncomfortable resemblance to a genre they don’t particularly love — namely, reality TV.
No doubt many old-school Jeopardy fans are unfamiliar with the segment of our society where fame trumps wealth as the ultimate aspiration, and we’re guessing quite a few of them would prefer to maintain that unfamiliarity.
And in an ironic twist, the Kardashian-ification of popular game shows comes at a time when the reality genre is alienating viewers with authenticity and relatability issues of its own.
This week came word that Golden Bachelor stars Gerry Turner and Theresa Nist are divorcing just three months after their televised wedding.
The news followed reports of Turner signing with a talent agency and allegedly letting the sudden fame of reality TV go to his head.
According to The Hollywood Reporter, the specifics of Turner’s career plans are unknown, but he’ll likely be “going down the paths of publishing, speaking engagements, and of course, more TV appearances.”
Fans of the show were drawn to Turner because he seemed like a regular, relatable guy — a retired widower looking for love in his seventies.
The revelation that he has aspirations of a career in Hollywood — and that his search for a wife may not have been as sincere as it seemed — struck some as a shark jump moment for the long-running ABC franchise.
And what does Gerry’s heel turn have to do with Jeopardy’s tournament extravaganza?
Well, they both speak to a current trend in television that owes much to the increasing cultural dominance of social media:
Fame is its own currency nowadays, and for a growing number of reality stars and game show contestants, a bigger following is the real prize.
“Influencer” is now the number one career aspiration among members of Gen Z, and with good reason — as more traditional forms of media die off and AI threatens some conventional career paths, TikTok stars represent a viable alternative to the old ways.
Even social media outlets that used to focus more on news than notoriety — a la X/Twitter — have introduced options that allow creators to make money by posting popular content.
The result, of course, has been a rise in “engagement bait” content and bots offering explicit services to new followers.
But we’re used to the “no such thing as bad publicity” mentality on social media — it comes as more of a surprise in the context of a long-running series.
In other words, Jeopardy and the Bachelor franchise are merely responding to new issues within the culture and economy rather than creating them.
Still, widespread though it might be, the trend toward fame replacing love or money as the true reward is likely no less unsettling for some longtime fans of these decades-old shows.
Obviously, the desire for fame is nothing new, and there are far more egregious examples of our growing obsession with self-promotion.
But these two shows demonstrate that no corner of our media landscape is exempt from the spread of influencer mentality.
On The Bachelor, the situation has become so dire that it’s almost a cliche.
Fans frequently joke about contestants being accused of auditioning “for the wrong reasons” (i.e., for fame), something that happens at least once a season.
On Jeopardy, the returning champs still show up with the hope of winning large sums of cash.
But in many cases, the contestant interviews — in which they converse with a host who started off in their shoes before Jeopardy fame enabled him to ditch his career as a software engineer — reveal that the publicity they gained from the show has proven far more valuable than their earnings.
Some viewers who have complained of tournament fatigue have been accused of bitter jealousy or a boomer-ish desire to leave the world unchanged out of some warped nostalgic impulse.
But consciously or otherwise, those critics might be unfavorably responding to a shift in the show’s aesthetic.
Where the buzzed-about Jeopardy narratives once involved surprisingly skillful performances by ascendant unknowns, now they tend to feature affluent stars of the show returning to reassert their dominance.
We’re not saying the show should return to the old model, in which contestants were automatically bounced after five consecutive wins — after all, nothing gets the Jeopardy faithful fired up like an unexpected streak!
But maybe more room should be made for newcomers to have their turn to shine.
After all, fewer non-tournament shows means it’ll be that much harder for the next Ken Jennings to shake off the dust of working-class obscurity and claim his place as the new king of Jeopardy Nation. We just hope it happens naturally and gradually, as it did with Ken.
What do you think, TV fans? Is Jeopardy astroturfing its contestants’ paths to stardom? Is the desire to become an influencer ruining reality TV? Hit the comments section below to share your thoughts.
Tyler Johnson is an Associate Editor for TV Fanatic and the other Mediavine O&O sites. In his spare time, he enjoys reading, cooking, and, of course, watching TV. You can Follow him on X and email him here at TV Fanatic.