‘Jeopardy!’ Almost Had a Completely Different Name & Format

What is… Jeopardy! had a different name at first? Creator Merv Griffin toyed with many ideas before settling on the one-word title and the current format.

Griffin’s first choice for the game show was What’s the Question? How Jeopardy! got to be Jeopardy! is a winding story. In 1963, Griffin brainstormed ideas with his wife, Julann. As they planned, they thought about the scandals that came with other game shows, including producers giving their favorite contestants the correct answers. The producers of Twenty-One and The $64,000 Question were called out for it and it left a bad taste in fans’ mouths, which lowered the viewership of game shows.

The creator harped on the controversies, but Julann suggested that they change the idea for the show where “the contestants are given the answers to start with,” according to The Jeopardy! Book. “She was kidding, but the thought struck me between the eyes,” Griffin wrote in the forward.

The early version of Jeopardy! was very similar to what is seen today except it included one round of 100 questions. The usually Jeopardy! game has 61 questions. They are split up between two rounds and then a final question.  The questions would have been split into 10 categories with 10 questions in each in Griffin’s original concept. They still would have been displayed on a big board like the game show has today.

NBC had a positive reaction to the trial run, but they were worried that the 100 questions wouldn’t fit on a screen that could be seen on TV. So, Griffin fine-tuned his ideas and made the categories shorter.

However, the name “Jeopardy!” didn’t come to Griffin until he sat down with NBC producer Ed Vane.

“He told me that he liked the premise but that it lacked enough ‘jeopardies,’” Griffin wrote in his 2007 memoir, Merv: Making The Good Life Last. Griffin, who died of prostate cancer in August of that year, wrote “Ed had inadvertently given me the perfect name for the show.”

During this meeting, the creator also came up with the idea that if a contestant buzzed in and answered incorrectly, they would lose money. So, then Jeopardy! was created and it premiered on March 30, 1964, with host Art Fleming.

After Art Fleming left in 1979, Alex Trebek took over and was the host until 2020 when he died of pancreatic cancer. Ken Jennings and Mayim Bialik cohosted until Bialik was fired in 2023. Now, Jennings hosts the game show solo.