‘Jeopardy!’ Writers Learned Some Clues Became Obsolete
Jeopardy! has been on the air since 1984. When you’ve been challenging contestants and viewers for that long, the game inevitably changes and evolves. The show avoided staying stuck in the ‘80s by paying attention to those sorts of changes. Head researcher Suzanne Stone explained in a recent interview how the Jeopardy! pays attention when clues become obsolete.
Stone was a guest on the June 29 episode of the Hollywood and Levine podcast. Discussing her decades on the show before she retired in 2021, Stone explained how the show knows when to move on from certain topics.
‘Jeopardy!’ has people analyzing every show
Viewers watch Jeopardy! for 30 minutes a night, but each episode takes much longer to come to air. Besides writing all the clues and answers, sometimes tapings stop for up to an hour over one question. It was also Stone’s job to analyze and evaluate every episode.
“When the show is being taped, that was part of my job is we’re watching on a monitor in our office while several hundred feet away is the stage and the studio,” Stone said on Hollywood and Levine. “We’d watch the feed and we have the script of the actual game and we keep score on what’s happening, who answers what, all three contestants. Then all that’s put into our database and can be analyzed by the producers and the head writers at a later date.”
How ‘Jeopardy!’ clues become obsolete
As part of her analysis, Stone would note if certain references became too obscure for contestants.
“But yeah, over the years you find out certain things are obsolete,” Stone said. “In 1984 if you mention the term Westinghouse, people would know that’s a man [who] was an inventor of air brakes and then the name became a brand to a lot of appliances and things like that. But today, you wouldn’t know what that really means unless you’re an old timer. So over the years, certain things evolve and change.”
The audience is someone else’s territory
Stone did clarify that it wasn’t part of her job to monitor the audience at home’s reaction. She was focused on how smoothly the show went, and if Westinghouse stumped everyone, that would be no fun for anyone in the studio or at home.
That’s the domain of the market research people that report to the producers. If it gets filtered down to the head writers, but I don’t recall anything really like that. Because Alex [Trebek] and his passing was a demarcation point, and with the pandemic and my retirement, I don’t have the current situation as well as I remember from working there. But there’s always going to be people who say, ‘Oh, you’re not fair to the contestants’ or ‘the home audience would never get that.’ Especially now with social media, we’re getting immediate feedback from people who love to Twitter, who love to go onto the various fan sites. They do pay attention to what’s being fed back to them from the audience.
Suzanne Stone, Hollywood and Levine, 6/29/22
