facsimile, Fry needed to reiterate those procedural quirks to contestants on multiple occasions, after they buzzed in without the proper phrasing. Answering trivia in the form of a question is bizarre, so good luck explaining that premise to anyone who hasn’t been watching Jeopardy! since they were a preteen.

These things can get lost in translation. But it is also, undoubtedly, replete with all sorts of maladaptive eccentricities that were ensconced in the rulebook years ago, and have never been excised for clarity. Jeopardy! is a North American institution, and probably my favorite television show of all time. This is actually the fourth time producers have attempted to kickstart the show across the pond after short-lived endeavors in the ’80s and ’90s, and unsurprisingly, none of those conversions found an audience. And then there is the problem at the podium.īut the truth is the British incarnation of Jeopardy! was in a no-win situation from the start. The cheapest answers score a dinky £25, while the most difficult clues-worth $1,000 in America-register at £150. The prize pool has been hemmed in to ridiculously piddly amounts. The show has been extended out to an hour, with two opening rounds of questions before moving on to the much more consequential Double Jeopardy board (similar to the current, misguided prime-time U.S. They have taken the greatest trivia show ever made-evidenced by its decades’ worth of continued syndication-and altered its DNA in small yet momentously stupid ways.

Jeopardy! has been a remarkably stable beast during a wobbly financial environment for network television, which is exactly why the show’s latest United Kingdom spinoff-which debuted earlier this month on ITV-has emerged as such an uncanny product. A typical episode rattles off 61 questions in a zippy 22 minutes, with brief intermissions for the get-to-know-ya contestant interviews, the Daily Double math, and the roiling anxiety of the final wager. The game show adopted its modern format in 1984, and little has changed since.

Jeopardy! has been on the air, in some form or fashion, for six decades.

All right triangles are isosceles