I Look At Season 39 of Jeopardy After 200 Episodes…
And Like All Fans, Kind of Wish The Last Twenty Hadn’t Happened
It is an inevitability that, at some point during any season of Jeopardy, there comes a phase when there is a truly wretched series of games. Sadly, ever since Ben Chan ended up controversially being defeated a little more than a month ago, the current season of the show seems to have reached that point.
The nadir of the season seems to have come last Wednesday in a game so wretched even the shows producers said on the official podcast that they wish it hadn’t happened. One could hardly blame them. On that show, we had a grand total of twenty-three clues that stumped the contestants, a number so large it sounds like it would be more fitting for a SNL parody of the show. That may very well have the worst show on Jeopardy on a very long time — certainly in the post Alex Trebek era. Unfortunately, it was merely the worst one in a truly wretched series of games.
Two games after Ben left us, we had a game where Diandra D’Alessio ‘won’ with $3299. On Memorial Day she repeated as champion when Travis Lee took too long to write down the response ‘Tomb of the Unknown Soldier’. The next day Ilhana Redzovic won in a runaway in a final regarding the Lake Poets which nobody got right and were subsequently mocked online because they did not know the Taylor Swift song that referenced the clue. (I didn’t know it either, for the record.) That would start a run for the rest of the week where only one contestant got Final Jeopardy right. Jared Watson who got both of the Final Jeopardy and became a two day champion. He won on the third game in a runaway, despite not having the correct response in Final Jeopardy involving POTUS and the next day was defeated despite after writing down The United Nations in a clue that invoked NATO.
This led to the rise of Suresh Krishnan, who the last two weeks managed to win six games despite only playing truly well in two of them. Both of which, to be fair, involved very impressive come from behind victories involving Final Jeopardy that were very difficult.
On his third game, the category was BUSINESS HISTORY. “What is dubbed ‘the world’s first initial public offering’ took place in 1602 in this current European capital.” He was the only player to know the clue referred to Amsterdam (The Dutch East India’s Initial Public Trading Company.)
On Monday, he was really lucky. His major opponent Michael Vallely, played brilliantly from the beginning of the game to the end. Indeed, it was mere luck that Suresh was still in range of him at the end of Double Jeopardy. Michael had $26,400 to Suresh $14,195.
The Final Jeopardy clue was even tougher than some of the recent ones. The category was WOMEN IN MYTHOLOGY. “The name of this woman, the product of an incestuous union, means ‘against birth’ I am astonished that he managed to know that this referred to Antigone, the daughter of Oedipus.
Suresh’s streak came to an end Wednesday with six wins and $96,595. It is a measure of the skill of Jeopardy champions in recent years that Suresh’s record is the least impressive of Season 39. Only David Sibley, who won four games and $78,098 has won less money than Suresh in his run. Luigi De Guzman and Matthew Marcus, who won fewer games than him, won considerably more money in their tenures, both winning more than $100,000 in five and four games respectively. Not since Megan Wachspress won only $60,000 in six games last June has any player put together such a poor track record in such an extended streak.
Still, as Suresh becomes officially the eleventh player to qualify for the Tournament of Champions, it is important to note his streak and that of the previous two champions as the start of another promising direction for Jeopardy. As I mentioned in an earlier article this year, Jeopardy has never had a promising track record with minority contestants until fairly recently. This was beginning to shift near the end of Alex Trebek’s time with several superb minority contestants including Alan Lin, Andrew Pau and Pranjal Vachaspati, all of whom won six games and were semi-finalists or better in the 2018 Tournament of Champions.
This year’s Tournament of Champions was a high-water mark for minority contestants as well as female champions and members of the LGBTQ+ community. Brian Chang, Ryan Long and Andrew He were among the most successful Jeopardy champions last season and Jaskaran Singh, the winner of 2022 National College Champions was the first Sikh to participate in one. Ben Chan’s nine wins and more than a quarter of a million dollars won are records for a player of Asian descent and prior to that Hannah Wilson won eight games and became the second transgender champion in consecutive years to qualify for a Tournament of Champions. Relatively speaking these may seem to be minor achievements but for a series that has been accused in some circles of having bigoted attitudes, this is a significant accomplishment.
Admittedly the last few weeks watching the show has become something of a slog with so many failed Daily Doubles and so many Final Jeopardys stumped the contestants, leading to increasingly small paydays. Suresh’s win on Monday $27,195 was not just the high point for the week but in the last month; not since Ben Chin won $31,000 on May 18th has anyone won as much money as that. I’m not sure whether this is a flaw in the contestants or rather that so many of the Finals in the last month or so have so maddeningly difficult: I am a veteran viewer of the show, and I concede that the lion’s share of the Finals over the past week have driven me mad trying to peace them together. But sadly, these stretches do seem to come every so often, and having been granted the pleasure of the Masters Tournament the previous month, it would be petty of me — and most fans of the show — to complain. There are ebbs and flows with everything, even Jeopardy. Let’s hope the season comes to a better conclusion.