Ken Jennings Turns 20

You know what I mean

This June will mark 20 years since Ken Jennings began his dazzling winning streak on Jeopardy!, though really, since Jeopardy! episodes are filmed with about three months of lead time, we’re probably right about at the calendar point when in 2004 the man began his unforgettable run, what will doubtlessly remain the most iconic game show career in the past and future history of television.

It is a testament to the sheer span of years in between then and now that the phrase “the most iconic game show career in the history of television” itself feels dated and arcane. “Game shows” are themselves effectively a dying or dead breed, right? We still have Jeopardy!, of course, we’ll always have Jeopardy!, and Wheel of Fortune is still going strong, but the broad concept of the American television game format—the low-key network feature that functions as a sort of cultural lodestar, uniting households across disparate socioeconomic echelons and cultural divides with its corny high stakes, the kind of thing that used to contribute to what analysts called “water cooler talk” at business offices on Wednesdays and Thursdays—seems to have sort of vanished. It’s the same with most all broadcast television but I feel like the games have really taken a big hit. Who wants to watch that sort of thing anymore when you can, I don’t know, binge-watch another five episodes of Friends on Peacock? Or rewatch Breaking Bad for the third time (i.e., the fourth time)?

In 2004 you didn’t have that luxury. You watched what they gave you and that was that. If you wanted some options you put on a DVD you bought from Circuit City or a VHS you still had left over from Suncoast MPC. Or you watched Jeopardy!, which pretty much everyone was doing throughout the middle and end of 2004. It is hard to describe now what it was like at the time, tuning in every night, night after night, for what ended up being nearly 15 total weeks of just jaw-dropping performance by a fellow at the absolute peak of network performance. Nobody had ever seen a man know so much as Ken Jennings. It was as if he had not only written the clues himself but had somehow been responsible for the minutia behind them, like some sort of specter of historiography come miraculously to life as a Mormon nerd. Who was this guy, we all wondered? Where had he been all this time?

It was actually fair to speculate on that last question. Just prior to Jennings’s crackerjack run, Jeopardy! had limited its contestants to a strict five-day winning cap. They lifted that rule in 2003; Jennings came on just months later. There was speculation at the time that he had been waiting for the rule to drop before going on his run; certainly a man like Jennings would have been grossly underutilized in the old format, like putting a EuroSprinter on a Disney monorail. One rather got the feeling that he had been waiting for his moment in the sun. As it was, he became essentially the show’s transformative figure, more or less ushering in the present epoch of sweaty, high-stakes competition and long-term champions that become household names over the course of weeks and months.

In that respect Jennings essentially functioned as the Babe Ruth of Jeopardy!, leading the game out of its dead-ball era and into its modern live-wire variant. Is it better now than it was before? The short answer is yes, although at times the present show strays too close to tight-fisted gamesmanship for comfort. Players increasingly seem to favor the “Forrest Bounce,” that aggravating tactic of jumping around from category to category so as to throw one’s opponents off. It’s great for strategy but really lousy for thinking, and Jeopardy!, of course, is a thinking man’s game show. One can’t help feeling that something is lost there.

I suppose nobody wants to return to the old ways, the same as nobody wants to return to the days of inside baseball, though even the lively ball has had its critics: Wahoo Sam Crawford once remarked that “the old-time ballplayer” was “smarter than the modern ballplayer,” largely because at the time there was no other way to play the game. You can’t make it on Jeopardy! if you’re not smart, of course; that will never change. But one gets the distinct sensation at times that these days everyone is hoping to be the next Arthur Chu, the next James Holzhauer, and there’s something sort of lame about that.

It wasn’t just the competitive culture of the game that Jennings changed; it was the actual mechanics of the game itself. Ken Jennings was so good at ringing in with the Jeopardy! buzzer that they literally fired the guy who controlled the buzzer system. The producers subsequently added “much more rehearsal time … to ensure that everyone was comfortable with the buzzers,” and for good measure they added a second buzzer rehearsal “after lunch.” All of this because of one man! You don’t often think of Jeopardy! as a game of mechanics, but of course any knowledge-based competition, like any other kind of competition, is going to include some element of timeliness to keep it interesting. One doesn’t answer a Jeopardy! clue by committee.

There is something else notable about the binary of the world as it was before Ken Jennings and the world as it is now: Social media. Jennings was recording his very first Jeopardy! episodes just weeks after the launch of Facebook; many of us had signed up for MySpace accounts by the time he finished his run. Ken Jennings may very well have been the last true universal media spectacle before social sites became wholly ubiquitous in the modern economy. And it is not hard to picture how different, and how aggravating, his legendary run would be if it occurred today. 90% of the news coverage would be compilations of stupid social media reactions; Jennings himself would become an overnight Twitter meme, complete with endemic gifs; the progressive websites would run hot takes about how Jeopardy! is biased in favor of white men, the conservative sites would run clapback pieces arguing the opposite, everyone would switch sides once it came out that Ken Jennings was himself a left-wing progressive. It would all be exhausting and it would diminish the sense of wonder that suffused the entire experience when it happened. You just had to be there, back in a time before all of this noise made everything so much less pleasant.

Jennings himself is actually rather proof positive of the corrosive and stupid effects of social media: Some years after his meteoric run on Jeopardy! he became known for regularly posting offensive screeds on Twitter. I say “offensive” but I’m not sure that anyone was actually really “offended” by anything he ever wrote; being offended is itself a sufficiently rare experience that you can be reasonably sure most people who claim to be it are in fact not. Anger and indifference are far more common reactions to the unpleasant things that people often say. The problem with Ken Jennings’s social media posts wasn’t that they were “offensive” but rather that they were pedestrian, crass in a low-intellect sort of way, seemingly beneath a man of such considerable intellect. It lowered him, in other words, which has sort of been the function of social media in general for the past 20 years: It has lowered all of us, in some way or another.

That lowering matters in a small but vital way. Social media flattens everything to a grating degree. As one tweet some years ago put it: “I really miss not knowing every dumb thought of all my favorite actors.” Ken Jennings came of celebrity at the tail end of the era where we didn’t know all of those dumb thoughts. We could be satisfied with what we knew of these people from their public personas: We knew Ken Jennings, for instance, as an amiable, goofy, highly intelligent, rather funny fellow and nothing more. And that was great! There was no need for us learn that he was sort of inclined to lame shitposts and grubby little opinions. You get enough of that in your personal life, it’s something we all have to deal with from friends and family, and it takes a lot of energy. We shouldn’t have to deal with that from our public personas.

Ken Jennings is of course doing fine: He has taken over as the host of Jeopardy! following Alex Trebek’s untimely death, which, if we’re being honest, seemed sort of preordained after 2004. Nobody else seemed smart enough, and nobody else has ever seemed to enjoy doing Jeopardy! as much as he did and does. He’s the right man for the job. Bounces or not, Jeopardy! remains one of the great television shows of this or any era. It has earned that designation because of its very simple premise: That it is good to know things and to share that knowledge with others. People like to see big intellects do great things. At one point Ken Jennings was the biggest intellect any of us had ever seen, and for a brief moment a long time ago it was incredible to watch as he did something great with it. In an era where people increasingly seem to know nothing beyond what’s on their little phones, it is worth remembering what people can do with only their brains, if they put the work in.