This was Jeopardy!

So that happened.

The Jeopardy experience goes fast, and then it goes slow. The inevitable loss is like getting blown out of an airlock into space, where you can chew on the experience for the first time.

This is because in Jeopardy’s concentrated shooting schedule the Wednesday game is the last match before lunch, over which you can savor a victory, and the final winner of the day will have at least one night to bask in a champion’s status. But aside from these two conditions there is no time to think about it; you’re either playing or you’ve lost.

Such is the story of almost every contestant. Jeopardy’s once-a-day airing schedule makes it seem like the experience is drawn out, but the fact is only seven people in history—out of well above ten thousand—have played more than two days’ worth of shows during their primary run.1

Ten general observations:

1. You meet Alex Trebek in the same sense that a young Bill Clinton met John F. Kennedy in 1960. He’s affable, and also on the clock. What you see of contestant-host interaction on the broadcast is the sum of it.
2. Grieve or exult afterwards, not during the game. Do your best and meet what follows with composure, no matter how desperate the situation seems, for strange things can happen.2 And when play goes well, remember many have been derailed by clues that could easily have toppled you, and think lightly of your superior performance.3
3. To a surprising degree, a decent analogy for the Jeopardy experience is jury duty. Contestants report early, are kept in a group of roughly a dozen, allowed no interaction with outside parties, and called up to participate in unpredictable fashion. They receive an in-depth briefing on finer points of rules in an environment colored by legalese, including the presence of an actual lawyer. Johnny is the bailiff introducing Alex, who appears at the culmination of the preliminaries and assumes his focal position like a judge taking the bench.4
4. Television takes its makeup super seriously. The frequency of retouching is baffling yet comforting—gameplay requires one to stand nearly motionless while the meat locker temperatures make perspiration unlikely. Just know that at each break someone will be there to gently massage powders into your face, and you will like it.
5. As with many competitive endeavors, peak trivia potential seems to correlate with youth. The longest streaks have without exception been assembled by people under 40, and usually well below that.5 With an average viewer age of 64 Jeopardy may be an old person’s show, but it is a younger person’s game. 
6. Train your instincts because you will inevitably fall back on them. Are you fully committed to finding Daily Doubles first? You had better be, or when the moment comes and you stand under the glare of studio lights you’ll revert to top down like most others, even though other strategies have been shown to work better.
7. Despite your best efforts many circumstances are out of your control, and they can be determinative in unpredictable ways. Players who might otherwise have put together tidy little runs instead had the misfortune of walking into the Ken Jennings buzzsaw, and now they will never know the alternate ending. Their only mistake was being born too early, but one may still ride the Jeopardy bus only once.6 Plenty of past contestants watch the show shaking their fists at the screen, wondering how the players are missing [clue so obvious even the cat knows this] and ruing the bad luck they had to instead be given [clue so obscure that of course I biffed it, but you can’t blame me for not knowing who paid to dig out King Tut’s tomb7]. There is a spare beauty in this permanence: no do-overs.
8. Jeopardy is a game show but also a regular workplace, full of the quirks inherent in every job, which manifest themselves in ways both noble and uninspiring.8 Remember that the machine is there to take care of business. Herein lies that peculiar asymmetry inherent to television—its familiarity and intensity is entirely one-sided. For you this is a once in a lifetime experience; for them it’s another day at the office.9
9. Notwithstanding the above, and considering that the Jeopardy crew has seen you a thousand times before, the attention focused on you is admirable. A water bottle with your podium number marked on the cap, a makeup pouf with your name on it, a screen bearing your signature, a very expensive camera trained solely on you: for a moment Jeopardy becomes highly personalized.
10. The money at stake is surprisingly unimportant during play. As a child I watched contestants casually dispatch clues representing sums far larger than what I had cumulatively touched in my lifetime. During the game it is mere scorekeeping. Some might play with visions of mortgage payments dancing in their heads, but this is a recipe for ruined focus. If a gimmick in the rules were contrived such that players could choose between a win with $1 or a loss with $10,000, I suspect I would not be alone in choosing the former.

With thirty-plus years of proving behind it, Jeopardy remains the archetype of the game show. The original run of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire had bigger prizes, but its drama needed assistance, drummed up by the relentless thump-thump of a heartbeat soundtrack and the forced precipice of a final answer.10 Such shows are also more susceptible to one-off hiccups that can derail an otherwise worthy contestant. Never heard of “Laugh-In”? Good luck trying to guess that from the context.11

Wheel of Fortune is more accessible, with lots of literal bells and whistles to jazz up the puzzle solving, along with a far greater element of chance.12 Deal or No Deal took this to the extreme, removing all skill and making the entire program one long meditation on caprice. The rise of reality competitions took the basic competitive formula and bred endless variations: taxi rides! riffs on Robinson Crusoe! cupcakes! (pretend) love!

In contrast Jeopardy sets you against a pitiless board, its structure and dynamics unchanged for decades. Its cameras will not pan to the anxious family member. Its producers never countenance something so brash as The Price is Right’s audience’s shouting of prices and semaphoric hand waving. That show maintains its defiantly retro stylings as kitsch, while Jeopardy remains static because the formula itself has something of the timeless in it: three acts of rising stakes, testing against both one’s peers and self, and a dash of fortune that threatens to upend it all in a moment—layered on top of all the (readily-encapsulated) knowledge in the world.

Alex Trebek serves as the touchstone for a game show host, a role he’s filled since midway through the Reagan administration, and remarkably he is still at it five presidencies later.13 The show’s hold on the culture is such that Jeopardy’s parodies have themselves become ripe for parody, reaching some self-devouring next level of pervasiveness. Even back in 1994, when needing an organizing principle for a middle school English presentation on bullfighting, my group chose a Jeopardy board, complete with a suit-jacketed stand-in for Alex.14

Jeopardy is the kind of program that would never make it through the gauntlet of network executives and related gatekeepers if pitched today. It persists now because it existed then, with room to truly soak into our consciousness. Tell a cab driver that you’re going to be on Jeopardy and he’ll know what you’re talking about, but that won’t be true for the next iteration of Who Wants to Deal America’s Family, hosted by Comedian With a Highly-Profitable Side Hustle.

Jeopardy is somewhere in the late end of of its arc but, unlike scripted shows that shudder to an ungainly halt when the creative momentum runs out, its descent has been gradual, with viewership evaporating as the audience ages along with its host.15 This is not unique to television, as attested by the tanking circulation of National Geographic and Reader’s Digest, or the falling evening news ratings for the Big Three.

Jeopardy is now an eminent member of that exclusive club of programs, forged in another era of television, which somehow managed to transcend their time. When this period comes to an end the void will be filled by smaller concepts or temporary revivals, and odds are they will be disposable.16

Yet the moment endures, and even when something is long passed from your radar unforeseeable twists can bring you back again. In becoming a contestant the stream of experience that bridged a curious child learning about the world and the adult I became temporarily closed back on itself, and such opportunities are rare and precious. Few youthful visions maintain their grandeur when encountered again through adult eyes, and on that score Jeopardy holds up pretty well.

The accretion of activity that accompanies adulting carries with it a weight that tends to sweep wonder away, but playing on Jeopardy helped break free of that. I once saw a mustachioed Alex Trebek on a set glowing blue through a boxy cathode ray television, and twenty-five years later it turns out he’s still there, still reading the clues, still ready with the occasional arch quip. For a day I was there too, in real-definition.

Who knows what else like that remains, waiting to be rediscovered? So launch into it, whatever it is, while the window remains open. Pick up what lies dormant and see if there might be something yet to explore. (Aspiring Jeopardy contestants, sign up for the online test here.)

And before you drop back into the vast stream of thousands of Jeopardy contestants who have appeared over the years, you might find yourself in Culver City for a moment, blinking into the lights, shivering in an arctic-cold studio, while not ten feet away Alex Trebek softly tap dances in his loafers.

Missed any? Read the full seven-part series here: All Jeopardy posts