Scoring at will
Sitting in a downtown restaurant Friday night, friends and I discussed Ken Jennings. The man was a Jeopardy machine, but he had frustratingly held back on breaking the single-day record total. He had banked $52,000 three times, tying the record but not going a penny further, even when he could've safely.
But if Jennings has done anything well, it has the destruction of expectations that he has done best. He has dominated from the buzzer and in the clutch, engagingly and tactically. That night as we ate dinner, he did the same, and we weren't even in the Sony Studios time zone. Jennings put his opponents out of reach and then took the plunge in Final Jeopardy. His total for his 38th show, the season-ender, was a round $75,000.
Now we have no Jennings until the fall, and inconsistently — but not surprisingly — we've heard little "good riddance" so far. While Jennings got heaps of criticism from some corners for this first run at the top, that criticism was awfully Jeff-Gordonesque. Back when Gordon was super-hot on the throttle, his NASCAR detractors generally hammered him on three points:
1) He dominated. He came up fast and took over.
2) He was bland. In a peppy kind of way.
3) He became the face of the game. He got the marketing and media to shift the core brand and draw in a wider audience.
The first two were the most directly maligned for Jennings this season. Americans have never enjoyed intranational domination — consider the Yankees, the Cowboys or the English — and Americans who speak loudly in public forums have never gotten along with the bland.
But the third Gordon objection has been the spot were I think most critics' troubles have lain. With his run, Jennings has won the recognition and success to uproot the show's identity and the dynamics of its discussion.
How? By becoming the eternal returning champion. And you know who used to hold that crown? We did. No matter how well the contestants fared on television, no matter how poorly we played along at home, we were the only ones who would be back week after week. While even the best TV folks could only five shows with Alex, we the atomized American viewing audience would compete and have a standing invitation to return, the next day or maybe months later.
That level of connection has probably been unique to Jeopardy during the most recent era of game shows. Wheel of Fortune has put money before answers; Millionaire and Weakest Link focused on hype. The Price Is Right, as always, has created spectacle. None of them have kept the viewer as intent on the game-play as Jeopardy has. None of them have so established the belief of participation — until Jennings came along.
In a way, Gordon faced the same situation with NASCAR watchers. Anyone who was a racing fan then would have developed a basic routine similar to the Jeopardy fan's: sit still, watch items of interest fly past, care more about some, know more about some, evaluate them all quickly, and comment to another fan sitting near and doing the same. Powering the whole process would have been one overriding thought: "I do what I'm watching, just not as well."
What Gordon eventually did, and what Jennings didn't so this season, was return to the pack. The driver never established an obscene winning streak, and other competitors emerged to dominate for similarly brief stretches. No critics today would call Gordon average, but they wouldn't still hold his presence against him. They've gotten back their role as the constant, win or lose or watch.
To the Jeopardy audience, Jennings hasn't allowed as much yet.
Three Links By Which to Feel Better About Ken Jennings
So, three links from the last week, for both the dissenting portion of the audience and the generally disconcerted whole.
Slate's Surfergirl blog and its readers created a drinking game, "Jeopardrink!: the KenJen Edition" (second item). Among the rules, everyone was required to take one drink whenever "KenJen's answer ends with a stylistic flourish, like last night's, 'What are the munchies, man?' in response to a clue about an 8-letter word for 'hunger pangs'."
In discussing how the game should work, one reader also made a point not mentioned much by Jennings-haters: We'll all probably miss the guy. "Something special needs to be in place for whenever Ken is finally defeated," wrote Steven Reynolds to Surfergirl. "I think either a bottle of the finest champagne for a quiet and modest celebration of this greatest of Jeopardy! champions … or maybe a few bottles of Mad Dog 20/20 to wash away the sorrow that comes with the prospect of Jeopardy! without Mr. Jennings."
Our second and third links came from CNN.com, where Entertainment Editor and one-time Jeopardy contestant Todd Leopold analyzed Jennings' success. "I come not to bury Ken Jennings, but to praise him," Leopold wrote. "Not that he needs it." The column also sent interested readers to TVgameshows.net, where a statistician was tracking Jennings and the raw dollars of brain-whupping.
