Confession time: "Jeopardy!" was never my game show of choice.
See, I'm the worst kind of competitive person. As both a sore loser and a sore winner, there's no way for me to retain my dignity while playing a game, no matter the outcome. Since I know this about myself, I rarely partake in the time-honored tradition of bar trivia, despite liking both bars and trivia. If I don't know the answers, I even end up resenting those who do. "Jeopardy!," with its omnipresent cut-off buzzer and genuinely tricky questions, therefore, tends to spike my blood pressure rather than soothe it, as I know it does for so many people.
And so I left the alleged joys of "Jeopardy!" to those whose temperaments could take it — at least until the 2022 premiere of "Celebrity Jeopardy!"
The format of each episode (airing Wednesdays at 9 p.m. on ABC and streaming on Hulu Thursdays) is exactly the same as the mothership, with three contestants buzzing in to provide questions to the answers host Ken Jennings reads off the board. However, the celebrities — ranging from actors to athletes to journalists like Framingham native and first season finalist Katie Nolan — are playing for charities that are guaranteed money no matter what.
This twist not only takes some of the edge off when they lose, but encourages some wild Daily Double bets and engenders a looser camaraderie among contestants. While many of them were already "Jeopardy!" fans, few "trained" in the way that every civilian contestant now must in order to be competitive. Watching the likes of Macaulay Culkin and Lexington native Rachel Dratch fumble with their buzzers both makes me laugh and feel right at home.
This brings me to maybe the show's most crucial sell for those of us who aren't nearly as good at trivia as we'd like. With contestants who aren't spending every waking hour preparing, the actual "Celebrity Jeopardy!" questions hit exactly the level of difficulty I can handle.
This is, of course, a nicer way of saying "Celebrity Jeopardy!" is a solid 50 percent easier than its prestigious layman cousin. Its clues tend to double up on subtextual hints, leading people to the correct answer like patient owners leading skittish dogs to safety (e.g. "1 word, 1 syllable; if you don't speak Russian, it's your curt reply to a Russian who asks whether you speak Russian" — that clue long enough for you, or nyet?). I wouldn't blame "Jeopardy!" fans for feeling queasy about a perceived dumbing down of their favorite show, but for people like me, it's still a lot of fun to watch the flailing.
You might now be wondering why I don't have the same affection for "Pop Culture Jeopardy!," the latest offshoot of the franchise, hosted by "SNL" star Colin Jost and focusing specifically on pop culture knowledge, that ostensibly caters to my personal expertise. The simple answer is that only in "Celebrity Jeopardy!" will you get to see someone like Neil DeGrasse Tyson spend Final Jeopardy trying to remember which Muppet is known as "a whatever." (Jennings, somberly: "He's a very smart man, but does he know Gonzo?")
When I turn on "Celebrity Jeopardy!," I feel like I finally understand what everyone sees in the flagship franchise. With the usual questions cushioned in clues and the general stakes lowered, my inner competitive monster can never quite rev up to its usual fever pitch. Instead, I can just sink into an episode of softball questions like it's a comforting bath I know will never scald me.
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