Final Jeopardy (7 page)

In movie studios on this Sony-Columbia lot, men with the bookish mien of Harry Friedman are cast as professors, dentists, and accountants. His hair, which recedes toward the back of his head, is still dark, and matches the rims of his glasses. His love for television dates back to his childhood. His father ran one of the first TV dealerships in Omaha, and the family had the first set in the neighborhood, a 1950 Emerson with a rounded thirteen-inch screen. Friedman's goal as a youngster was to write for TV. While he was in college, he pursued writing, working part-time as a sports and general assignment reporter for the
Lincoln Star
. After graduating, in 1971, he traveled to Hollywood. He eventually landed a part-time job at
Hollywood Squares,
a popular daytime game show, where he wrote for $5 a joke.

Friedman climbed the ladder at
Hollywood Squares,
eventually producing the show. He also wrote stand-up acts for comedians and entertainers, people like Marty Allen and Johnny Carson's old trumpet-playing bandleader, Doc Severinsen. He got his big break in 1994, when he was offered the top job at
Wheel of Fortune
. The show, a sensation in the 1980s, was stagnating. Friedman soon saw that antiquated technology had slowed the game to a crawl. The spectators, hosts, and audience had to sit and wait for ten or fifteen minutes between each round while workers installed the next phrase or jingle with big cardboard letters. Friedman ordered a shift to electronic letters. The game speeded up. Ratings improved.

Two years later, he was offered the top job at
Jeopardy
. The game, which today radiates such wholesomeness, emerged from the quiz show scandals of the 1950s. “That's where we came from. That's our history,” Friedman said. Back then, millions tuned their new TV sets to programs that featured intellectual brilliance. Among the most popular was
Twenty-One,
where a brainy young college professor named Charles Van Doren appeared to be all but omniscient. The ratings soared as Van Doren summoned answers. Often they came instantly. Other times he appeared to dig into the dusky caverns of his memory, surfacing with the answer only after a torturous and suspenseful mental hunt. Van Doren seemed to epitomize brilliance. He was a phenomenon, a national star. This was the kind of brainpower the United States would be needing—in technology, diplomacy, and education—to prevail over the Soviet Union in the Cold War. Knowledge was sexy. And when it turned out that the producers were feeding Van Doren the answers, a national scandal erupted. It led to congressional hearings, a condemnation by President Eisenhower—“a terrible thing to do to the American people”—and stricter regulations covering the industry. For a few years, quiz shows all but disappeared.

In 1963, Merv Griffin, the talk show host and entrepreneur, was wondering how to resurrect the format. According to a corporate history book, he was in an airplane with his wife, Julann, when the two of them came up with an idea. If people suspect that you're feeding contestants the answers, why not devise a show that provides the answers—and forces players to come up with the questions?

It was the birth of
Jeopardy
. Griffin came up with simple, enduring rules, the sixty clues, including three hidden Daily Doubles and the tiny written exam for Final Jeopardy. To fill the thirty seconds while the players scribbled their final response on a card, Griffin wrote a catchy sixty-four-note jingle that became synonymous with the show. He hired Art Fleming, a strait-laced actor in TV commercials, as the game's host. In March 1964,
Jeopardy
was launched as a daytime show. It continued through 1975 and reappeared briefly at the end of that decade.

Griffin brought
Jeopardy
back in 1984 as a syndicated evening show hosted by a young, mustachioed Alex Trebek. A new board game, Trivial Pursuit, was a national rage, and the mood seemed right for a
Jeopardy
revival. The new game was much the same—the three-contestant format, the (painfully) contrived little chats with the host following the first commercial break, and the jingle during Final Jeopardy. It took time for the new show to catch on. In its first year, it was relegated to the wee hours in many markets, including New York. But within a few years, it settled into early evening time slots. It was eventually syndicated on 210 stations and became a ritual for millions of fact-loving viewers.

Still, when Friedman arrived at
Jeopardy
in 1997, he saw a problem. Too many of the questions still focused on academic subjects. They were the same types of history, geography, and literature clues that had captivated America four decades earlier, when Charles Van Doren paraded his faux smarts. But times had changed, and so had America's intellectual appetite. Sure, some of the most dedicated viewers still subscribed to the show's mission, to inform and educate. They wanted reminders on the river that separated cisalpine Gaul from Italy in Roman times (“What is the Rubicon?”), the last British colony on the American mainland to gain independence (“What is Belize?”), and the 1851 novel that contained “a dissertation on cetology” (“What is
Moby Dick
?”).

These were the
Jeopardy
purists. They tended to be older, raised in Van Doren's heyday. But their ranks were shrinking as other types of information were exploding on the brand-new World Wide Web. As Friedman put it: “Anything that veered off the academic foundation was deemed to be pop culture. And to purists, that was heresy.” But he feared that
Jeopardy
would lose relevance if it relied on academic clues in an age of much broader information.

So he leavened the mix, bringing in more of the topics that consumed people on coffee breaks, from sports to soap opera. If you remembered the person who conspired in 1994 to “whack Nancy Kerrigan's knee” (“Who is Tonya Harding?”), you probably didn't learn about her while reading
Bartlett's Quotations
or brushing up on the battle of Gettysburg. Sometimes Friedman blended the popular and the scholarly. During the 1999 season, one category was called Readings from Homer. It featured clues about the other Homer, author of the
Odyssey
and the
Iliad
, read by Dan Castelleta, the voice of the lovable dunce of TV's
The Simpsons
. The clues were written in the dumbed-down style of the modern Homer: “Hero speaking here: ‘Nine days I drifted on the teeming sea . . . upon the tenth we came to the coastline of the lotus eaters. . . . Mmmm, lotus!'” (“Who is Odysseus?”)

From the perspective of a
Jeopardy
computer, it's worth noting that Friedman's adjustments to the
Jeopardy
canon made the game harder. Instead of mastering a set of formal knowledge, the computer would have to troll the ever-expanding universe of what modern folk carried around in their heads. This shifted the focus from what people
should
know to what they
did
know—collectively speaking—from a few shelves of reference books to the entire Internet. What's more, for a computer, the formal stuff—the factoids—tended to be far easier. Facts often appear in lists, many of them accompanied by dates. One mention of the year 1215, and any self-respecting
Jeopardy
computer could sniff out the relevant document (“What is the Magna Carta?”). But imagine a computer responding to this clue: “Here are the rules: if the soda container stops rotating & faces you, it's time to pucker up” (“What is Spin the Bottle?”).

Yes, Harry Friedman turned
Jeopardy
into a tougher game for computers, and he also built it into a breeding ground for celebrity champions. Throughout its history,
Jeopardy
maintained a strict limit of five matches for returning champs. This seemed unfair to Friedman, and he debated it with colleagues for years. The downside? “You get somebody on the show who is there forever,” he said. Imagine if the person was unlikable or, worse, boring. Nonetheless, he lifted the limit in 2003. And the following year—wouldn't you know it?—a contestant stayed around for months and months. It seemed like forever. But this, it turned out, wasn't a bad thing at all. Ratings soared.
Jeopardy
had hatched its first celebrity.

His name was Ken Jennings. Nothing about the man suggested quiz show dominance. Unlike basketball, where a phenom like LeBron James emerged in high school, amid monster dunks, as the Next Big Thing, a
Jeopardy
champion like Jennings could surprise even himself. A computer programmer from Salt Lake City, Jennings had competed in quiz bowl events during high school and college. A turn on
Jeopardy
would be a kick. So in the summer of 2003, he and a friend drove from Salt Lake City to the
Jeopardy
studios in Culver City and took the qualifying exam. Jennings was pleased to pass it. And he was surprised, nine months later, to get the call that he'd been selected to play. He promptly started cramming his head with facts and dates about movies, kings, and presidents.

His first game came a month later. Before the game, Jennings, like every other contestant, had to tape a short promotion, a “Hometown Howdy,” to be played in Salt Lake City the day before the show aired. It is typically corny, and his was no exception: “Hey there, Utah. This is Ken Jennings from Salt Lake City, and I hope the whole Beehive State will be buzzing about my appearance on
Jeopardy
.” Little did he know that within months, not just the Beehive State, but the whole country, would be buzzing about Ken Jennings.

In his first game, he wrote in
Brainiac,
it was only through the leniency of a judge's ruling that he managed to win. After two rounds, he held a slim $20,000 to $18,800 lead over the next player, Julia Lazerus, a fundraiser from New York City. The reigning champ, a Californian named Jerry Harvey, trailed far behind, with only $7,400. The category for Final Jeopardy was The 2000 Olympics. Though Jennings had been on his honeymoon during the two weeks of the Sydney Olympics and hadn't seen a single event, he bet $17,201. This would ensure victory if Lazerus bet everything and they both got it right. If she wagered more modestly—betting that he'd miss—and won, a wrong answer would cost Jennings the game.

Trebek read the Final Jeopardy clue: “She's the first female track-and-field athlete to win five medals in five different events in a single Olympics.” Jennings wrote that he was racked by doubt. He knew that Marion Jones was the big medal winner in that Olympics. (In 2007, Jones would admit to doping and surrender her medals.) To Jennings, Jones seemed too obvious. Everyone knew her. There had to be some kind of trick. But he couldn't come up with another answer. In the end, following common
Jeopardy
protocol, he skipped her first name and wrote: “Who is Jones?” A botched first name or middle initial, players knew, turned a correct response into a wrong one. “Mary Jones” or “Marianne Jones” would be incorrect. But a correct last name sufficed—or it usually did. The trouble was that Jones was such a common name, like Smith or Black, that someone who didn't know the answer might have guessed it.

In the end, Jennings could have won the game by betting nothing. Lazerus flubbed the clue, coming up only with “Who is Gail?” a reference to Gail Devers, a gold medal sprinter in the 1992 and 1996 games. She wagered $3,799, which left her with $14,801. It was still more than enough to win if Jennings missed it or if the single name failed to satisfy the judges.

He showed his response: “Who is Jones?” Trebek paused and glanced at the judges. If there had been another prominent female track star named Jones, Jennings, like thousands of others, would have been a one-time loser on America's most popular quiz show. But the judges knew no other stars named Jones and approved his vague answer. “We'll accept that,” Trebek said. Ken Jennings won the game and $37,201, becoming the new
Jeopardy
champion.

Millions of viewers witnessed the drama that June evening. Many of them probably figured that, like most champions, the skinny computer programmer who snuck through in Final Jeopardy would lose the next day or the day after that. In fact, by the time the “Jones” show aired, Jennings was already well into his streak.
Jeopardy
recorded its games two or three months ahead of time, and Friedman's team usually taped five games per day—a grueling ordeal for winning contestants. Between games, Trebek and the winner left the stage to change clothes, appearing ten minutes later with a new look—as if it were another day. Within an hour of his first victory, Jennings won again. In two days, he won his first eight games, then headed back to Salt Lake City. During his streak, he commuted between the two cities without disclosing what he was up to. Like all
Jeopardy
players, and even members of the studio audience, he had signed legal forms vowing not to disclose the results of the games before they aired. His streak was a secret.

As the weeks passed, the games seemed to become easier for him. He grew comfortable with the buzzer, could pick out the hints in the clues and read the signals of his mind. More often than not, Jennings did not just beat his competitors, he blew them away. After the first two rounds of a game, he had usually amassed more than twice the winnings of his nearest rival. This was known as a lock-out, for it rendered Final Jeopardy meaningless. As time passed, Jennings fell into a winning rhythm.

Millions of new viewers tuned into
Jeopardy
to see the summer sensation. In July, as Jennings extended his streak to thirty-eight games, ratings jumped 50 percent from those of the previous year, reaching a daily audience of fifteen million.
Jeopardy
rose to be the second-ranked TV show of the month, trailing only the CBS prime-time crime series
CSI
. In an added dividend for Friedman,
Jeopardy
's rise also boosted ratings for its stablemate,
Wheel of Fortune,
which followed it on many channels.