This TV quiz show features a pompous host, an answer-and-question format, and a freakishly smart contestant on a million-dollar winning streak
By ROBERT N. JENKINS, Times Staff Writer
Published July 20, 2004
[AP photo]
Software developer Ken Jennings poses with Jeopardy host Alex Trebek after Jennings soared beyond $1-million in winnings.
CULVER CITY, Calif. - Commanding a naval vessel must be like this: The captain strides onto the bridge, and everyone is poised to do his bidding.
When he makes an obvious mistake, no subordinate calls him on it in front of the others, but waits for an appropriate moment of downtime to remedy matters. His assistants may gently question a matter of his judgment, but they also are likely to defer to his final decision.
So this is much like running a ship, except that, when the captain approaches the bridge, no one belts out, in a voice booming with goodwill: "And now, the HOST of Jeopardy! ... AL-ex ... Tre-BEK!"
Of course, few ship's captains have ever been as well-known, or as much of a celebrity, as Trebek, who has started taping his 21st season on one of the most popular quiz shows ever.
And unlike a captain, Trebek has an audience watching his every move: 150 people sitting in the studio behind the three cameras that record Jeopardy!, plus millions of TV viewers at least five days a week.
This is an opportune moment to take a look behind the scenes. The show has its largest audiences as a 30-year-old software engineer who hasn't lost a game in more than six weeks may be challenging Trebek for everyone's attention.
* * *
The folks who will make up the studio audience often wait for more than an hour to be led inside. By then, Trebek has been at work for more than four hours.
Members of today's audience, mostly casually dressed tourists who have written in for free tickets, were told to be inside the entrance to sprawling Sony Pictures Studio's parking garage no later than 11:15 a.m. for the taping of five shows.
The producers schedule five shows on Thursday and five on Friday - the equivalent of two weeks of nightly competition - and then there is a break. Each ticket holder is given a neon-colored adhesive patch to wear at waist level. One color means VIP (which includes contestants' relatives), one means production guests, and one is for regular ticket holders.
The chief guide during my visit introduces himself as Mel; like the other guides, he is wearing what was once a flaming red shirt with the Jeopardy! logo over the left breast.
Mel is relentlessly upbeat even though he has to shout his basic instructions over the noise of cars coming and going. He cautions:
"If we see you in the audience with a cell phone or a picture phone, we will take it away, and the next time you will see it, it will be in the hand of some extra in a crowd scene of our next film ..."
But Mel also offers a carrot to balance the no-phones stick:
"Alex loves to talk to the studio guests. If he has time, he'll ask if anybody has a question. Please do not ask anything personal: Do not ask about his family or how much salary he makes. Would you want to tell a stranger how much you make?"
Mel and his colleagues then herd the audience to a magnetometer, like the ones used at airports. Each guest empties his pockets and turns over purses or fanny packs to be checked by two men in blazers.
During the searching, one of the guides cracks small jokes and says she is sure she knows one of the VIPs, that he was the director of a film on which she did makeup work, but she can't remember his name ....
* * *
Finally, our group is led around the corner of Stage 10, through a door and behind the risers holding the audience seating. Once seated - VIPs front and center - the audience has only a few seconds before a familiar voice issues from a man wearing a silver satin jacket with the Jeopardy! logo on the back. It is announcer Johnny Gilbert.
Though his face isn't recognizable, we know that warm baritone from his 40 years of introducing various TV shows and doing voices in commercials.
Gilbert, a small man with shoe-polish brown hair, basks in the attention that is his and takes audience questions while the studio technicians make final adjustments.
Behind Gilbert the set stands empty. To the audience's right are the podiums the contestants use. About 5 yards from them is Trebek's podium. Perhaps another 7 or 8 yards to the left is the wall of TV monitors that make up the categories and reveal the answers.
Jeopardy!'s captivating gimmick, one that has sustained it since 1964, is that the TV screens flash an answer and contestants are asked to give the question. The wall of monitors seems surprisingly large, but then, the contestants are expected to read each monitor from about 30 feet away.
Above the stage, crisscrossing racks hold dozens of lights. Several are covered by blue filters, and blue is the dominant color of the set's walls.
A big-screen TV flanks each side of the set out of camera range; these display to the studio audience which of the three camera shots the director has chosen for the at-home audience.
With an announcement from the director, Gilbert retires to his high-rise canvas chair (his name is on the back) at a tiny desk just offstage to the audience's left. Also to the left of stage center and behind the cameras, seven people take seats at a long desk. Their backs are to the audience.
Executive producer Harry Friedman occupies the far left chair, and his assistant sits at the far right. Between are the show's three judges, each seated in front of a monitor. Another person has a keyboard and tiny computer screen displaying the scoreboard; his job is to keep track of each contestant's dollar total.
The seventh person is there to thwart any speed-readers among the contestants.
Here's how:
Trebek's prime job is to read the answer when it is displayed. Each contestant may then press a signal button and take a guess at the correct question.
To prevent speed-reading contestants from interrupting Trebek's reading, the power to the signal buttons is cut off until he has finished. Restoring the power to the contestants' buttons is this staffer's chore. Over and over again he jabs the button, five shows a day, two days a week.
Just before taping of each episode starts, the contestants enter from behind the set on the right and go to their podiums.
Now it's time to tape the show. Gilbert voices the contestants' names as they face the camera, ending with the introduction of Trebek, as he has done for 20 years.
The host strides out from behind a center part of the set, offers his familiar smile and a brief challenge to the new contestants to try to unseat the returning champion. Maybe you've heard of him.
* * *
Never in the show's history has a returning champion been such a celebrity: While I was watching shows taped in late April, Ken Jennings was setting records for total quiz-show winnings and consecutive appearances.
At the end of one of the tapings I saw, Jennings gave an incorrect response to the Final Jeopardy answer. The man with the quick grin had become such a fixture that I heard one of the production personnel exclaim with dismay, "Oh, no, he got it wrong!"
(Jeopardy! executives required me to sign a form stating I would not disclose the specifics of what I observed that day because the shows were being taped for airing later. So, no, I can't tell you whether I saw Jennings lose, or how much prize money he had racked up by the time I saw him.)
(But it was a lot.)
* * *
Watching in the studio is challenging, for you don't know whether to watch the wall of monitors, the big screens displaying the selected answer, the contestants or Trebek. With so many choices, events seem to unfold much more rapidly than they do when watching at home.
And the electronic noise that signals the Daily Double questions is a startling break to your concentration.
During commercial breaks, Trebek chats with the audience. He proves to be far more congenial than his school-principal demeanor during the competition.
The Ontario native displays his knowledge of the NHL playoffs then under way, naming all the Canadian teams contending. He also tells some young women from the University of Connecticut that he enjoyed watching their women's team compete in the NCAA basketball tournament even more than he liked seeing the men.
Trebek also discusses the minor car accident he had some months earlier and how he now drives the freeways worried that he will hit something "and go hurtling through the air, wondering what I will land on."
That accident happened, he relates, while he was returning to Los Angeles from his vacation home on Lake Naciemento - "Four hours, door to door" - and how he is dismayed that drought conditions had dropped the water level.
"Anybody want to buy lakefront property on a lake that isn't there?" he asks jokingly. "Got a $75,000 dock sitting well above the water."
He answers my question about what he sees when he looks down at his podium: a 4-inch TV monitor and a printed version of each answer, as well as the correct question. He prepares for each show by going through each answer, marking where he should pause for emphasis and learning the pronunciation of foreign words and names.
During one break, while a makeup woman touches up a strand of Trebek hair apparently out of place, he recognizes a VIP sitting in the front row. Thus begins an odd series of conversations between the two that has the rest of the audience members feeling as if we are eavesdropping at a cocktail party.
The VIP is Randal Kleiser, who has directed actors from John Gielgud to Brooke Shields but is remembered by Trebek only for a movie he made 26 years ago: Grease.
Their discussion is not show biz but rather what life is like on the street where Kleiser lives, in a sparsely populated area near Hollywood's famed Mulholland Drive. Until recently, Trebek owned 80 acres there.
Trebek explains that he gave up trying to have a house built because acquiring various government permits proved too demanding. He says he donated the land to the county and is surprised to hear from Kleiser that it is now known as Alex Trebek Park. Who knew?
Also during these breaks, other makeup people primp the contestants, technicians roll in a powered ladder that lets them adjust or replace lights, and Trebek tends to his occasional misreading of a clue.
Because the camera never shows Trebek reading the selected answer, he keeps looking down at his podium. In the three shows I watched, he made about one mistake per contest, but the taping did not halt because the contestants could read the monitor for the actual wording.
During the breaks, everyone is quieted, and Trebek simply rereads the answer he stumbled on. This will be edited into the show's tape.
I saw the judges question Trebek once, about his decision that a contestant had given a wrong response to an answer about a building material. Trebek listened to the judges' reasoning for reversing his on-air ruling, then drew upon some personal knowledge about load-bearing properties and declined to change his ruling. There was no appeal to a higher court.
* * *
After the taping of three shows, roughly between noon and 2, the audience is allowed to leave the studio to find lunch or resume their lives. As I walked out that day, I noticed a man and a woman who were the most recently defeated contestants. The man carried two hangers holding shirts, so he could change in case he had won his game.
But he didn't win. That's all I can tell you.
And the next episodes of what has become the Alex and Ken show were about to be taped.
