In the wee hours of Wednesday morning (December 4), Pop Culture Jeopardy!, hosted by Saturday Night Live’s golden boy Colin Jost, arrived, splashed on the above-the-fold front page of Amazon Prime Video. The brand-new, streaming-only addition to the Jeopardy!-verse is here. Its three-episode premiere meant fans woke up with some binging to do. Here’s what went down:
Episode 1 was a thriller match with a come-from-behind victory in Final Jeopardy. Episode 2 featured a surprising score reversal involving an alternate film festival title of the Paul Rudd comedy Our Idiot Brother (yes, it’s that niche). Episode 3 was a battle royale of teams of all former Jeopardy! contestants. The reception has been generally positive from fans, one Redditor putting it, “Just watched the first episode. I’m hooked. What a wild finish!”
Jost is a winning fit as host and the gameplay, featuring teams of three (or nine players at once) buzzing in separately with only one answering the extremely online clues in 30-minute installments like the nightly show is palatable, enjoyable, ready for the embrace of Gen-Z.
The production decisions are a different story, there are logos everywhere you look. It’s busy. There’s no Final Jeopardy monitor, since the hunky podiums didn’t leave room, meaning the Final clue is shown on the new LED screen in a smaller frame. There’s also a new feature on the board called a Triple Play, which involves a three-part answer and a chance to steal a-la Family Feud. Experimental Executive Producer Michael Davies couldn’t resist a twist (see the hidden Daily Doubles from Masters, Triple Jeopardy! from Celebrity Jeopardy!).
Pop Culture Jeopardy! starts with 81 teams that get eliminated until there’s one champion and a prize amount of $300,000, so there will be 40 episodes. Jeopardy! fans who want to stay caught up now have four games to watch every Wednesday; three from PCJ, and one from the syndicated nightly show with Ken Jennings.
This also means in January, the Tournament of Champions, Celebrity Jeopardy!, and Pop Culture Jeopardy! will all be airing airing at once. Those weeks, there will be 10 episodes of Jeopardy!. This begs the question: Why wasn’t Pop Culture Jeopardy! moved to over the summer to tide fans over during reruns? It also presents a bigger question about the direction the brand is going in.
Many viewers still have PTTD (Post Traumatic Tournament Disorder) from 2023. The WGA strike hurled the iconic quiz show into show-must-go-on mode, and EP Davies’ solution was months upon months of confusing tournaments, causing what fans coined “Tournament Fatigue.” There is a more existential problem on the clue board: “Jeopardy! fatigue.”
RelatedColin Jost Addresses Rumors He’s ‘Trying to Steal Ken Jennings’ Job’ on ‘Jeopardy!’
Davies took over as EP in 2021, following the revered Harry Friedman (and someone in there named Mike Richards) who lifted the five-win cap and doubled clue values, otherwise not changing anything else during his 20-year tenure that modernized the quiz show. Davies’ resume has an astericks in the form of the supernova Who Wants to Be A Millionaire, its over-saturation in primetime led to its cancelation. Fans have long grumbled about Davies giving the Millionaire treatment to the Jeopardy! franchise and focusing on anything but improving the main show. What reason has Davies given fans not to be?
Here are just a few Davies creations: Jeopardy! Masters, Celebrity Jeopardy!, an expanded three-tiered ToC, some sort of bar league, the weekly Inside Jeopardy! podcast, a live tour, and now Pop Culture Jeopardy.
As the outlet BuzzerBlog wrote in their Pop Culture Jeopardy! review, “Michael Davies is running the Jeopardy! brand into the ground.” They continued, “Michael Davies, this is an intervention—please stop. We don’t need this show. We need you to take all this energy you have and make the primary Jeopardy! show the best it can be.”
Let us know what you think of Pop Culture Jeopardy! in the comments section below and vote in our poll.
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Pop Culture Jeopardy!, Wednesdays, Amazon Prime Video
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