4/30/2023 0 Comments Jokey magic word crosswordWhat good does it do the three people behind lecterns if they’re competing not just with one another but with their host? Trebek was a contestant’s friend: That he was rooting for great gameplay, from which he could largely stay out of the way, was the thing that paradoxically made him a superstar. For all his crisp and easily-parodied pronunciation of words like “genre” and his professorial presentation on-air, Trebek tended more to stand in awe of contestants’ knowledge than to position himself as their intellectual superior, to make the show’s knowledge seem interesting and accessible rather than worthy of hoarding. Trebek, after all, hosted a show that presented at-times-esoteric trivia to a truly robust mass audience. Additionally, Jennings’s presence on the new, strenuously overproduced ABC game show “The Chase” - in which he and fellow “Jeopardy!” stars James Holzhauer and Brad Rutter attempt to outbattle newbie contestants, when not delivering exaggerated, Statler-and-Waldorf-style roasts of these less accomplished trivia players and of one another - runs somewhat counter to what made Trebek great. Recent attention to Jennings’s history of misguided jokes on social media, for which Jennings apologized, suggests that Jennings, still, has some growing up to do. Ken Jennings, the famous “Jeopardy!” champion whose 74-win streak in 2004 made him a household name, will be the first guest host in Trebek’s stead. Having met and shared a moment with Trebek became the story of what had been a crestfallen day. Everyone on the stage, too: The embarrassment of having placed a distant third in my second appearance melted, at least a bit, when Trebek made small talk with the night’s biggest loser first. His persona downshifted one or two degrees away from the urbanity with which he read clues about art history and Shakespeare everyone in the room, one felt, was part of the experience. For years after my episodes taped, a favorite story of mine was the shift in Trebek when commercial breaks began, in which he answered audience questions in a jocular, friskily jokey and acid manner, describing his love for blockbuster movies and his homespun theories of gameplay. But it feels worth noting, as a 2010 “Jeopardy!” contestant myself, that Trebek’s magic trick of self-effacement extended beyond the cameras turning off. It would, perhaps, not be in keeping with the spirit of a host who tended to avoid making things about him to draw too heavily on personal experience here. For all that Trebek’s cancer diagnosis and his continuing to work in the face of health setbacks made him the object of renewed interest and deep sympathy, he was as averse to self-aggrandizement as he was assured in bringing focus back to the show and its three nightly stars. While it is easy to overstate the show’s importance - it is, in the end, a game, and one that this week featured both questions about 19th-century history and promotion for an upcoming Ryan Reynolds movie - it was a place in which contestant aptitude tended to win out over production zazz or host dramatics. Indeed, the final episodes of “Jeopardy!,” ticking down the week as the last of their kind and yet calmingly familiar, lent the sense that host and show were so attuned to one another’s rhythms that both could sail on forever, were it not for the matter of mortality. There’s little room in the show’s tight format for sentimentality, and Trebek, an emcee from the old school, seemed to revere the format above all. But in the main, Trebek’s achievement was to put the action of the show - three contestants and 61 pieces of trivia per night - first.
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