I don’t get why they’re trying prime time and/or celebrity versions of the show again. They’ve done them before and they didn’t work as anything other than a brief variation on the regular game. What’s different this time?
To the extent Jeopardy fans and prime time audiences differ, I suspect that non-Jeopardy prime time viewers are only likely to watch for the novelty or to see favorite stars, neither of which seems like a reliable audience. Regular Jeopardy fans probably have enough of the game with five daily shows, and may not be interested in adding more every week.
How will Celebrity Jeopardy be scheduled? I think it is unlikely to have a daily half-hour slot in prime time, and so will probably be one hour (two games) weekly. I don’t know about you, but I find an hour of Jeopardy to be a little tedious.
Prime-time game shows have become a thing in the past few years, with shows like Celebrity Family Feud, Match Game, Press Your Luck, and Pyramid all having prime-time versions that run for limited times, mostly during the summer. There are also relative newcomers like The Weakest Link and The Chase. It seems like Jeopardy is trying to get in on some of that action.
The article that Wheelz linked to quotes a tweet about Celebrity Jeopardy saying “Join us on Sunday evenings,” so I assume that like other prime-time game shows, it will be weekly. They probably won’t do returning champions, just one-off games with three celebrities each.
Is the Celebrity version going to become a full-season show now? It always used to be just a week, so I assumed it still would be, just in prime time rather than the regular syndicated time slot.
I found some of the celebrities quite tiresome (coughRegiscough), but others were awesome. As I remember, Kareem Abdul Jabbar and Cheech Marin were both great players, although Kareem missed a question about himself.
I mostly don’t like Celebrity Jeopardy, because the contestants are so dumb! And slow. I watched Celebrity Wheel of Fortune exactly once. Dumb dumb dumb.
The articles I’ve seen have been pretty vague, but it seems as though it will be a full season of Sunday shows, I’m guessing an hour long. Not a one- or two-week tournament, like the previous incarnations.
The production pattern for most of the last four decades has been two tape days a week, five shows a day. It would seem they could shoot a season of twenty hour-long shows in eight tape days. I don’t know if the regular production staff could work four days a week instead of two, but if so, they could record the full season of the celebrity show in four or five weeks alongside the regular show.
Another reason I’m not sanguine about the success of Celebrity Jeopardy: a lot depends on the quality of the celebrities. Aside from the entertainment value of famous people either appearing smarter than expected, or as dumb as expected, a show full of dumb-downed clues will not keep regular fans watching. And after a few stars are made to look really stupid, others who may have been thinking about going on the show will have second thoughts. “Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to open your mouth and remove all doubt.”
So the level of “celebrities” will decline to has-beens and never-weres on par with Sean Spicer. And the downward spiral augers into the ground. Six months, I tell you.
ABC’s other prime-time game shows have seasons of 10 to 13 episodes. If Jeopardy follows that lead, it may not be enough to get tired of it. We’ll see.
Pluto has added a Jeopardy channel, dozens and doznes of episodes, including some from the first couple of seassons, with a very fast talking Alex. It has commericials which you can’t skip through
Haven’t watched them, but having watched other shows on Pluto, I know that they show their own, current commercials. They’re a streaming service that’s paid for with ads. It’s not like they’re just showing a half hour of programming that was taped off some local ABC affiliate in 1984.
