I wonder if an otherwise correct answer like “Cathy Bates” or “John Stewart” would be ruled incorrect. Those are different names as well, but pronounced identically.
My wife believes they are grooming Jennings to take over for Alex when he retires. At 80 with his medical condition, it’s gonna be soon.
I noticed that in the Tuesday game, all three contestants were from LA. (I didn’t notice Monday if that were true, but the returning champion didn’t want to travel, so at least one of the three was.)
I’ve seen a couple articles about this here and there. The first group of contestants will all be within driving distance of LA, so no one has to fly. I don’t know how long that will last.
Alex mentioned in Monday’s game that the champion from the end of last season wasn’t able to travel for the new season, so they started with three new players and the champion will return at some point in the future.
I think your wife is probably right. Or that it’s at least a tryout of sorts: if it just doesn’t seem to be working out, they can hire someone else without the awkwardness of ever having said he was hired as a host.
(9/16) Kelly is too bubbly, but I love her dinosaur dress.
Brian
Fetch me my dart guy, boy; I think I can bring her down from here.
LOL! She is/was* a bit hard to take. Very small doses.
*Was. Didn’t even make it to FJ, after it was the other woman next to her who looked like she might not.
What was Kelly’s story? I walked into the room just as she was finishing it.
No, because those are variations of spelling of the same name that do not chance the pronunciation. John=Jon and Cathy=Kathy in every accent I’ve heard. Barry and Berry are two different names (and are pronounced differently.) If the answer was “Hank Aaron“, and a contestant wrote “Hank Erin”, they’d be incorrect. If they wrote “Hank Aron”, they would not be penalized.
I noticed that today there was another music clue, to which the correct response was “Berry”. This time it was Chuck Berry.
Jon & John are not the same name. They’re different names.
Jon is the short version of Jonathan and John isn’t. They have different origins.
They do sound alike (in my dialect) - but they’re not variants of the same name. They’re just as different as Berry & Barry (which also sound alike in my dialect).
Again - it didn’t have any effect on the outcome. But, it was a weird call.
Yeah, I don’t think it’s as simple as saying “they are different names”.
Word. I felt like someone should have told her “Wheel of Fortune is down the hall, sweetie.”
… And one is an actor and one is a dentist.*
*Seinfeld reference. Sorry, I couldn’t resist it! 
Whenever she travels she brings her collection of plastic toy dinosaurs along (apparently those are something both she and Alex are fans of), and once it got her detained by TSA.
She also recommended that Alex should travel with his toy dinosaurs as well.
I don’t begrudge her her bubbliness. She’s having a once-in-a-lifetime experience, at a time when most of the news is unrelentingly depressing. Let her enjoy it.
You make me feel like a curmudgeon for chafing against it. But it just doesn’t fit the Jeopardy tone, IMO. And Jeopardy is above all a TV show, a piece of entertainment. As kaylasdad said upthread, it’s better suited for “Wheel”. (And her intellect, frankly, also seemed better suited for that competition.)
She did get off to a fast start, and answered quite a few clues correctly. If she’d just laid off the buzzer when she didn’t know the answer she’d have done fine.
Personally, I’d love to see more contestants being excited and bringing a sense of fun to the game, even if Kelly may have been a bit too large a swing of that pendulum.