‘Jeopardy!’ Contestant Recounts Filming Last Shows Before Pandemic: ‘It Was Scary’ [Exclusive]
Pandemic protocols are now another part of life on set, but what was it like to film one of the hottest game shows in America only days before the world shut down? Senior Showbiz Cheat Sheet writer Megan Elliott recalled competing on a March 2020 taping of Jeopardy! and the feeling of overall eeriness on set.
“It was like March 10th or something like that,” she recounted. “So I want to say a day or two before filming, they were like, ‘We are taping. But there will be no studio audience that day.'”
The usually engaged audience was replaced by a few production assistants and a sprinkling of family members. “Maybe they limited the number of people you could bring, so that kind of made the vibe a little different. It was also so early in the pandemic that nobody knew what was going on. There was a lot of hand sanitizer. But it was pre-masks. Maybe there might have been a couple of production people that were wearing masks. It wasn’t like a studio-mandated or production-mandated thing. But there were a lot of concerns.”
‘Jeopardy!’ producers were being ‘extra cautious’
The episode, which ultimately aired in May 2020, was one of the last episodes of Jeopardy! taped before the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic shut down the world.
At the time the virus was still a mystery, but producers knew their star, host Alex Trebek was especially vulnerable.
“Obviously, I think they were a little more concerned than some of the other shows initially because at that point, Alex Trebek had cancer and everybody knew that his health was not good,” Elliott said. Trebek was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in March 2019. The Jeopardy! host died in November 2020.
“So they were being extra cautious,” she continued. “I think he wasn’t shaking hands with people at that point. [Trebek] normally would go in and shake hands with the winner.”
Also, producers were faced with another dilemma. “There was one woman in my group who had recently been abroad, so they needed an alternate because she ended up not taping that day,” Elliott said, adding that the woman agreed with production’s decision and was offered a spot for a later taping.
“They were about to go into a hiatus anyway,” she said. “But it was strange because nobody knew what was going on. And it was scary. And then, three days later, everything shut down.”
Megan Elliott appeared on one of Alex Trebek’s final ‘Jeopardy!’ shows pre-pandemic
Other than taking a few cautious measures, the gameplay went on normally. Elliott was one of the last few contestants to be on the show while Trebek was host. But she and the other contestants didn’t interact with him much.
“He was off in his dressing room doing his own thing,” she said. “Obviously, you saw him if you watched the games, you saw him on stage. But he didn’t interact with the contestants before the game,” she recalled.
“Everything’s on the up and up on the legal side … He didn’t come out on stage when you did your rehearsal,” she added. “Instead, they had Jimmy [McGuire] from the Clue Crew or other people come in and pretend to be Alex during rehearsal.”
However, she recalled a sweet encounter she had with Trebek after her game.
“I stuck around for a couple of games and I think he saw that I had to sit down at one point,” Elliott laughed. Toward the end of her game, Elliott felt lightheaded so producers got her a chair during one of the taping breaks.
“He saw me in the audience and he’s like, ‘You’re still here!’ He was really nice about that.”
Even though contestants had minimal contact with Trebek, he had a huge presence on stage, she said. “When he came out it was like, ‘Yeah, this is real.'”
