‘Jeopardy!’ Host Ken Jennings Shares His Thoughts on ‘Cringey’ Contestant Interviews
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Jeopardy! host Ken Jennings knows how things feel both behind and in front of the podium, and there is one aspect of the show he doesn’t like, both as a host and a contestant.
In a new interview with the New Yorker, the Jeopardy! Greatest of All-Time champion, who went on an unprecedented 74-game victory streak in 2004, shared his views on the contestant interviews portion of the show, which comes before the Double Jeopardy round.
“I never liked that part,” Jennings revealed. “It’s a little cringey. And, even if the players tell an amazing anecdote perfectly, I mean, that’s just not the time for it, like when they interrupt a football game for Jennifer Lopez or to salute the troops or whatever. Like, why is this happening now?”
Jennings said former host, the late Alex Trebek, wasn’t a big fan of the interviews either. “I think he was kind of ready to get back in the game,” he explained.
It’s not just that the segment is awkward, but it’s also tricky coming up with interesting anecdotes for television, something Jennings himself is well aware of, having to provide 75 different stories across his run on regular syndicated Jeopardy!
“I have nothing but sympathy for [the contestants], because I did not have seventy-five good stories. I didn’t have three good stories,” he joked. “Every time I had to fly to L.A. to do more shows, I’d get a call from the contestant coördinator: ‘Hey, just in case you tape ten new shows, can you give us twenty new stories?'”
Jennings’ comments echo something fellow former champion Buzzy Cohen said on the Inside Jeopardy! podcast earlier this year regarding the contestant interviews.
“It just feels, I don’t know, there’s something, it breaks up the game a little bit, and maybe that’s good, maybe it allows some contestants a break to get back into it,” Cohen stated. “It definitely feels like it’s a little bit of a relic of a bygone game show era… I mean, you don’t stop and in the middle of a soccer game interview the players and ask them, like, you know, what their favorite pizza topping is.”
As for Jennings, he also knows how intense Jeopardy! can be for new contestants, which is why he was a big fan of the more relaxed Masters tournament, which saw six former champions returning to the show, including Jennings’ former rival James Holzhauer.
“I think at home [the show] plays as kind of calming and cerebral, but in person, for these poor civilians, it’s very intense. They’re doing it for the first time, and this thing is going to be on national TV,” he explained.
“With Masters, these are people who have played… They’re the only people in the world who are that comfortable on Jeopardy!,” he continued. “So they can tease each other, they can tweak the host, they can take a second for observation.”
While things are tough for the contestants, being the host of such an iconic game show isn’t easy either. “It’s a very hard job, and Alex made it look easy,” Jennings said. “So it’s kind of a no-win thing — the only other person we’ve seen do it looked incredibly confident and graceful for thirty-seven years, and we all loved him.”
Jennings explained that part of what makes hosting a difficult job is the speed of the game and making sure the clues are read “flawlessly” and the responses are “adjudicated” correctly. This sometimes means consulting with the show’s judges, though Jennings recognized this can sometimes slow the game down.
“There’s a table of judges that I can appeal to. But, in practice, Alex made a lot of those calls on the fly, just because he knew the game and knew it had to keep moving,” he shared, adding that being a host means you are the referee, the manager, the play-by-play guy, and the stadium announcer all in one.
“And really the way to do it, it turns out, is just to play the game as if you were a contestant,” he continued. “I’m kind of playing along in my head, like, Oh, I know this one! Let’s see if they know it. Hey, they do, great! We did it! We get to go again! And I don’t know if that’s the right—it’s definitely not Alex’s energy, but nobody can do what he did.”
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