How Merv Griffin Came Up( triunfo) With That Weird (extrao) Question/Answer Format for Jeopardy!

Champion Ken Jennings delves into what gives the virtually unchanged game show its lasting power In 1963, television host and erstwhile actor Merv Griffin was flying back to New York City with his wife Julann, after a weekend visiting her parents in Michigan. Merv was looking at notes for a new game show, and Julann asked if it was one of the knowledge-based games she liked. Since The $64,000 Question, the network (red) wont let you do those anymore, replied Merv. The rigging scandals of the 1950s had killed off American quiz shows, seemingly for good. They suspect you of giving them the answers. Well, why dont you give them the answers? And make people come up with the questions? Merv didnt know what she meant. OK, the answer is 5,280. He thought a moment. The question is, How many feet in a mile? The answer is 79 Wistful Vista. Where did Fibber McGee and Molly live? Those two simple questions changed TV history. We kept going, Julann Griffin remembers today, and I kept throwing him answers and he kept coming up with questions. By the time we landed(aterrizado), we had an idea for a show. Julann is now 85, and Ive tracked her down at her home, a 200-year-old plantation in Palmyra, Virginia. Charmingly, shes a little distracted because she had just put a loaf of pumpkin bread in the oven when I called.

Over the following months, she tells me, she and Merv play-tested their new game, which they called Whats the Question? around their dining room table. NBC executives thought the show was too hard, but bought it anyway. It made its debut, renamed Jeopardy! and hosted by the congenial Art Fleming, on March 30, 1964. It quickly became the biggest hit ever in its daytime slot. Fifty years later, remarkably, the Griffins simple answer-and-question game airs in syndication every single weeknight. There are a handful of other TV properties from the era that are still around, of course: Meet the Press, The Tonight Show. But Jeopardy! is different: Miraculously(milagrosamente), its survived Americas tumultuous half-century almost entirely unchanged. Tonights game will be of the exact same format, practically down to the second, as an episode from 1970 or 1990. Among (entre) the categories will probably be slightly square Jeopardy! staples like Opera, World Geography or Science. The hostsince the shows 1984 revival, dapper Canadian transplant Alex Trebekwill preside in metronomic, almost military manner. This is not the convivial cocktail-hour ambiance (agrafable ambiente de coctel)of most game shows. This is serious business. Lets go to work, Trebek sometimes says at the top of the show. Work! In short, Jeopardy! is an oddity, beamed into your home every night from an eggheaded(intellectual , alternate-reality America where television never dumbed (estupido) down. Its a reassuring sign, I think, that ten million people, according to Nielsen figures, watch the show every weekmost of whom, I can say anecdotally, seem to plan their evenings around it. The shows timelessness is its secret, Alex Trebek tells me. Its a quality program, the kind that you never have to apologize for admitting that you watch. Its a good show, Ken. You know that. I do, Alex. I grew up on Jeopardy!, running home every day after school to test my brainpower against the sweater-wearing librarian types behind the three lecterns(atriles). These people learned stuff, the show seemed to say, and look how theyre succeeding! The things they put in their heads actually came in useful! It was exactly what I needed to hear at that age. Of course, Jeopardy! changed my life again in 2004, when I passed a contestant audition and somehow ended up winning 74 games and spending six months behind the leftmost lectern. Some things, I learned, are different from the other

side of the screen: The game seems to move faster, the host is looser and funnier when the cameras are off, the signaling device is a fickle mistress. (If you ring in before Alex is done reading the clue, you get locked out for a fraction of a second. The contestants you see flailing wildly with the buzzers are actually pressing the button too soon, not too late.) But for the most part it was exactly as Id always imagined it, a childhood dream come true. Last year, Jeopardy! was asked to donate some of its history to the Smithsonian. Trebek personally chose a few props (left), including a buzzer and a Fleming-era contestant screen that had been sitting in his garage since he was first hired in 1983. And why not? The game-play items represent a cherished American tradition. Jeopardy! is the ultimate game show, says National Museum of American History curator Dwight Blocker Bowers. If Jeopardy! is the ultimate American game show, though, its because its an aspirational one. Jeopardy! shows us not as we are but as we wish we were, as we could be. Holding a buzzer, confidently pleasing Alex Trebekthe closest thing our culture now has to an infallible pope or an authoritative Cronkitewith our correct responses on the Battle of Yorktown, Troilus and Cressida, amino acidswhat could be better? Its no coincidence that when IBM wanted a sequel to its Deep Blue-Kasparov chess bout (see p. 21), the company chose Jeopardy! as the next arena. The show has become shorthand for smart. Even Julann Griffin is still a regular viewer, after all these years. But I feel like its my baby that went to school and graduated and then went overseas. Its not even connected to me anymore. Theres no question: Jeopardy! belongs to all of us now.