Jeopardy! Getting Rid Of Show Segment After Fans Call It Excruciating?
Fans and contestants have expressed their dislike of the contestant interview segment, but there is no word that producers are nixing that portion of the beloved show.
NBC’s Jeopardy! has stuck to a certain formula for many years, and it seems to work pretty well. However, contestant Lisa Sriken recently revealed that she finds one long-time component of the quiz show “excruciating.” Specifically, Sriken called out the part of the show where the host briefly interviews the contestants and gets some personal anecdotes from them.
As Jeopardy! fans know the show consists of two rounds of questions, the aforementioned interview portion after a commercial break, and Final Jeopardy to wrap things up. Sriken ended up losing the show and had some enjoyable stories of her own, but she admitted she was “thrilled” to lose. The reason she was thrilled was that she hated doing the interviews so much, saying “Being there and having to come up with anecdotes was really — and I said this to [production team] — in the end, it was excruciating.”
Former Jeopardy! champion Buzzy Cohen also appeared on a podcast with producer Sarah Whitcomb Foss, and he shared that he understood Sriken’s comments. Whitcomb Foss assured fans of the format that the format wouldn’t be changing and defended it a bit, speaking to the point that it allowed fans to get to know the contestants. The show is already not prone to major changes, so it’s no surprise that she took this stance.
Overall, Jeopardy! fans are fairly divided on the interview portion of the show. While many appreciate that it gives you a chance to learn more about the contestant, others feel that it slows down the flow of the show. Some straight-up skip the portion as they find it boring (via The Sun).
The Jeopardy! fanbase can be a nitpicky bunch, but that doesn’t mean that there isn’t some credence to their complaints. The long-beloved quiz show continued to draw in plenty of viewers, even after the passing of Alex Trebek. Replacing the iconic host was no easy feat, and fans are still divided about the co-hosting situation of former champion and record-holder Ken Jennings and The Big Bang Theory star and real-life neuroscientist Mayim Bialik.
One thing is for sure — there’s never going to be a perfect version of Jeopardy! that fits the preferences of every fan. Sometimes fans and contestants are going to be just a little frustrated with certain aspects of the show. The contestant interviews have been around longer than most people have been alive, so don’t count on this section being dropped anytime soon.
Still, there are some solutions that could work and please both sides of the debate. For instance, the contestant interviews could be held at the beginning of Jeopardy!, so the flow of the show isn’t interrupted. However, this wouldn’t be a solution for contestants that just hate doing the interviews altogether.
In the end, a lot of Jeopardy! complaints are just going to be fans shouting into the void of the Internet. The show remains popular, it’s still plenty watchable, and contestants are going to want to test their trivia mettle regardless of the other hoops they have to jump through. The ethos of the series format can pretty much be summed up with “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.”
