It takes a village. This is my War and Peace.
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I am late with this week’s newsletter for several inexcusable reasons. It has been a busy week with several events to attend on both coasts (and on a Caribbean island), and I have stayed out way too late. There has also been a lot of travel where I should have written on the plane, but ended up playing Scrabble and sleeping. And because of the number of games I’m covering here, this was never going to be a quick and breezy endeavor. Frankly, I’ve read novellas that are shorter.
So let’s get straight into it.
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Jeopardy! Masters: Behind the Clues – Quarterfinal Game 1
Four games to cover in this post. So many great categories. But let’s just focus on one or two per show.
JACQUES ON THE BOX – Jacques On The Box was a collaborative effort — initially, it was just guys named Jacques, but we were looking to diversify our “people named x” categories in this pool of games. One writer took on the “Jacqueses on TV” concept and then had to work to make it work, which was not easy! Some of the writers were skeptical that we would hear the full 10-word response “Jacques Brel Is Alive and Well and Living in Paris”. We did have support in the tape day writers’ meeting from our host. Ken had traveled recently to Brel’s native Belgium and told us the late great man’s music is indeed alive and well there – in fact, you can’t step into a supermarket or elevator without hearing some of it. We weren’t positive that we would have a Master on stage who had recently returned from Brussels or Antwerp, but it was still encouraging. And when Victoria nailed it, there were smiles on all of our faces.
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Stats and Analysis: Quarterfinal Game 1
This was the first time that these three players matched up, and there was a lot of anticipation on the producer’s table, seeing Game 2 of the Yogesh/Victoria series play out in this season.
Victoria (3) -Yogesh (1) – Roger (0)
Game Summary: Victoria led entering Final and was correct for the win. Strong J! Rounds from Yogesh, with another fast start, and Victoria, with a strong finish. Yogesh took a small lead into DJ! but only got in three times on the first half of the board, allowing both Daily Doubles to go to Roger and Victoria. Roger lost all his points on the first, and Victoria, after capturing the lead with some early high-value clues, found the last but opted for an unusually low 400-point wager. Victoria entered Final with a strong lead, followed by Yogesh in second and Roger in a distant third. All three players were correct in Final (“The Return of the Native”), and Victoria secured another win and 3 more match points, leveling the H2H Season 3 battle with Yogesh, 1 – 1.
Vita Rico, Cavitori, Victoria: When Victoria found the last Daily Double, the scores were: Yogesh 7,800, Victoria 12,600, Roger 0. The category was ANAGRAMS OF EACH OTHER. In her interview, Victoria said she has been practicing her wordplay ahead of Masters and recently competed in the American Crossword Tournament. Despite that, she opted for only a 400-point wager, surprisingly low. She joked that she was “a little slow” in the crossword tournament. Personally, I think wordplay categories on Daily Doubles favor the player because they have 8 seconds to work out the response. A more aggressive wager could have set her up for a runaway. Since this was the first QF game, I sense that Victoria was just playing it safe and was focused on maintaining her lead entering Final, while also setting herself up to guarantee, at the very least, 1 match point for second place. Either way, she ended up being correct at the very last second (Caterer, Retrace, Terrace).
Yogesh Smart in Final: As is his custom, Yogesh made a very savvy wager from second place. He wagered against Victoria’s anticipated wager (2,201) – the amount she needed to cover Yogesh’s total if he doubled up. If he were correct and Victoria incorrect, he would have won by one point. He also bet on himself because if he was incorrect, he ran the risk of falling to third place. But once again, with 6 match points already secured, he could afford that risk.
That rare Masters Game: Where nothing stood out statistically. The stats of each player reflected the finishing place each of them earned. Victoria won with the most attempts and corrects. Nine triple stumpers (three in J!, six in DJ!), proving that even with these elite players, the material is HARD.
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Jeopardy! Masters: Behind the Clues – Quarterfinal Game 2
Another couple of game boards of outstanding material.
SONGS ABOUT SINGERS – A topic of discussion and occasional diversion is when to require a “more specific” request from the host on a last-name-only response when there are multiple plausible people who also have that last name. For the most part, though not always, we only make the contestant give the first name in a few cases, for example, when it’s a Presidents category and they say, “Who is Adams?” or “Who is Roosevelt?”. Many years ago, the scripted response was the ballerina Maria Tallchief and Alex, rather than feeling the writers’ relief at hearing even that name, responded to “Who is Tallchief?” with “Which one?”. The poor player was unable to say whether it was Maria or her sister Marjorie and was ruled incorrect, losing out on a $2,000 clue. Especially when the stakes are high, Ken tries to make sure he knows when we’re going to ask for a first name, and he asked about it for “Who is Kim Deal?” in the Songs about Singers category. We unanimously agreed that even though Kim’s sister Kelley is a fine musician too, we should gratefully accept “Who is Deal?” and that was what we did.
AT THE HOSPITAL – Co-Head writer Michele Loud says she feels like she could almost play a doctor on TV. We’re glad to say this comes not from personal experience of hospitalization, but more out of a love for medical dramas from ER to The Pitt, as well as having a sister who’s a physician married to a physician. So writing categories like Around the Hospital that are challenging yet gettable come naturally to her. There was some internal discussion regarding this and other medical-related categories in the tournament about not making the material too negative and disturbing, and some adjustments were made in that direction. We decided to leave the graphic and brutal side of things to the side effects notifications in drug commercials.
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Stats and Analysis: Quarterfinal Game 2
This was the first-ever matchup between these three players. A lot on the line for our bottom 3, as a win would catapult any of them into the top 3.
Matt (3) – Juveria (1) – Isaac (0)
Game Summary: Come-from-behind win for Matt. Juveria took a small lead into DJ!. She then scored on the first five clues of the DJ! Round, which gave her a 10,600-point lead over Matt, who was in a distant second. However, Matt was able to find the first DD of DJ! Round and doubled up to 6,400 points (still a way to go to catch Juveria). A few clues later, he revealed the last DD of the game, went all-in again, and doubled up to 16,800 points. From there, it was a battle for the lead between Matt and Juveria. She managed to narrowly edge him out entering Final, BUT Matt was the only one correct in Final (Green Mountain Boys) to secure his first win of the tournament.
Matt “All-In” Amodio: When Matt hit the first Daily Double, Juveria had a massive lead that was heading towards runaway territory. When he hit the second, he was closer, but as the only player in the QFs that hadn’t won a game yet, he did what I think most of the Masters would have done in that situation and went all-in again. Perhaps this was all just part of his audition for Shark Tank, but a win here was crucial to him making a run at the semis.
FJ! Wagering Scenario: Juveria made an interesting FJ! wager. I believe she was assuming Matt would wager a maximum of 7,999 so that if he was wrong and Isaac doubled up, he would still finish in second place. If Juveria was looking to secure the win from the lead, she would have wagered enough to cover second place’s (Matt’s) double-up, but she opted for a minimal wager that at the very least would secure her a 2nd place finish. If both she and Matt were correct (she wasn’t) and Matt went all-in (he didn’t), Matt would have won. Matt ended up making a small wager of 3,000 and was the only one correct for the win. Matt’s wager would have also given him the win in the case of a Triple Stumper.
Juveria the Stat Leader: Whitby, Ontario’s biggest Traitors fan had the best stats in this game. Matt came through with the big Daily Double and the correct FJ! response to sneak the win.
Juveria had a 65% buzzer conversion rate (31 attempts / 20 buzzes) – tied for the third highest buzzer success % in Masters history.
Juveria ran the AT THE HOSPITAL category (she knows her way around a medical facility as a health care professional).
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Highlights of the Postgame Chat…
QUARTERFINAL GAME 2
Issac joked about how tough the material was in this game: “I just sat there a lot of this game thinking ‘boy, I don’t know what that is… I’ve never even heard of that’”. He also added, “The takeaway here is that after Masters I should start reading books again and stop playing Call of Duty so much.”
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Jeopardy! Masters: Behind the Clues – Quarterfinal Game 3
A few more stories behind the clues….ok, three of them, because I can’t choose just one or two.
WORDS FOR TRISKAIDEKAPHILES – Often, there is a binary choice to make about a category title. It can be straightforward and sound somewhat dull, or more elegant and run the risk of confusing the contestants without an explanation. Words for Triskadekaphiles could have been “13-letter Words,” but we enjoyed the sound of the title and decided to keep it, with Ken pausing in the category pan to tell the players what it meant.
HERE ARE YOUR KEYS – The Masters very often surprise us by coming up with a response on a bottom-of-the-board clue we had little hope for. Such was sadly not the case with the clue going for William Beanes, the doctor whose freedom Francis Scott Key was seeking when he ended up writing the words to “The Star-Spangled Banner”. But we’re still glad to have included Beanes. Why shouldn’t he be as familiar a footnote to history as Button Gwinnett (Declaration of Independence signer with an incredibly valuable autograph) or Edward Everett (the guy who gave a long-winded speech right before the Gettysburg Address)? To have the “Wow, how did they know that?” moments, you have to endure a few “Oh well, there was a chance” moments.
ENTERTAINING FOLKS – We try to cast a broad net in a category like Entertaining Folks, but it’s also an opportunity to showcase entertainers with whom we feel a connection. The writers are big fans of Ben Whishaw, even to the point of almost regretting that we can now go for him as a Masters response. After playing Q and Paddington, he is hardly a secret pleasure anymore. We liked it better when we could say, “You know, the guy who played Richard II on PBS. Have you not seen his work??”
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Stats and Analysis: Quarterfinal Game 3
This was the first time these three players matched up.
Victoria (3) – Yogesh (1) – Matt (0)
Game Summary: Victoria led entering Final and won on a Triple Stumper. Another strong J! round for Yogesh earned him the lead heading into DJ!. Victoria was beginning to close the gap in DJ! when she found the first DD, went all-in (11,800 pts), and was correct to take a commanding lead over Yogesh. Matt struggled most of the game (ended with just 11 successful buzzes). He had a chance to make up some ground on the last DD, but was incorrect, zeroing him out after he went all-in. Victoria was approaching runaway territory, but Yogesh battled and stayed in contention. Final was a Triple Stumper (“Brentry”), but the sizable lead that Victoria had built allowed her to wager minimally and still secure the win with an incorrect response. Victoria now leads 2-1 over Yogesh in their head-to-head series this season.
Groce at the Double: At the time of the first Daily Double in Double Jeopardy!, Yogesh was leading by a few thousand points. Victoria went all-in (11,800 pts) and was correct. She could have just wagered enough to take the lead over Yogesh, but she went for the throat… a different approach than her conservative 400-point Daily Double from the lead in her last game. Matt finding the last Daily Double really helped Victoria by neutralizing Yogesh. Had Yogesh found it, he could have gone all-in and taken a lead into Final.
Lies, Damn Lies and Stats: Victoria and Yogesh had comparable stats, but the big Daily Double swung the game for Victoria.
Victoria – 49 attempts / 25 correct responses / 21,400 coryatYogesh – 46 attempts / 20 correct responses / 19,000 coryat
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Jeopardy! Masters: Behind the Clues – Quarterfinal Game 4
And now four more…..
RECENT BESTSELLERS – Producing 230 shows a year of syndicated material, plus now several games of Masters and other versions, the writers try not to waste any material. The clues we wrote for New Yorker editor David Remnick to read about the magazine’s 100th anniversary that appeared in the syndicated show included one about the writer Miranda July, who has appeared in their pages several times. It didn’t end up getting used in the New Yorker category, possibly because it felt a bit difficult, but when it came time to fill out a Masters Bestsellers category, there was Miranda with an already cleared photo just waiting to be slightly rewritten and slotted in.
GOING IN CIRCLES – Ken Jennings is always attentive to even the humblest word in a clue if it strikes him as slightly off. For the clue about dogs in the Going in Circles category, he felt that “having zoomies” is more idiomatically correct than “doing zoomies”. This became a rather lengthy discussion at the tape day meeting – lengthy in part because it couldn’t be resolved by turning to a good source or making a phone call. The dog-owning writers felt more comfortable with “doing” – to us, it’s a behavior, where “having” makes it feel like a pathology, and Ken agreed to read it the original way. But if the home audience sits bolt upright at that point and says, “What do they mean, ‘doing zoomies’? It’s ‘having zoomies!’ Isn’t that right, Woofles? Who’s a good boy? Who??” we’ll know that Ken was correct, as he so often is.
JAMIE LEE CURTIS & HER MOVIES – Debbie Griffin did a great job writing clues for Jamie Lee Curtis. It’s not easy to choose which films to highlight in a long career, craft the clues so that they’ll be familiar to viewers yet challenging enough for Masters, and keep the performer’s “personal” voice in one’s mind so the readings feel authentic. If she wouldn’t mind us saying so, Debbie has been practicing her craft just about as long as Jamie Lee has been practicing hers – both amazing professionals.
AROUND THE BIG WATER JUST SOUTH & WEST OF FLORIDA – It’s not entirely comfortable for us now to either refer to the Gulf of Mexico or the Gulf of America, and we certainly don’t want to take any area of knowledge off the table by ignoring 600,000 square miles of ocean in our clues. We thought that titling the category “Around the Big Water Just South and West of Florida” might be a humorous way to treat the issue for this category. As for future clues about “the big water”, we will have to manage those case by case.
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Stats and Analysis: Quarterfinal Game 4
This was the first time these three players matched up.
Isaac (3) – Juveria (1) – Roger (0)
Game Summary: Come-from-behind win for Isaac. It was a low-scoring J! Round, and all three players finished with fairly low scores for Masters play. Juveria had a small lead when she found the first DD in the DJ! Round. However, she tried to double up but was incorrect and was never able to recover from there. Roger and Isaac then battled for the remainder of the round, and it was Roger who was able to enter FJ! with an 800-point lead over Isaac. Both Juveria and Isaac were correct in Final (Grover Cleveland), and Roger was not, giving Isaac the come-from-behind win and Juveria 1 match point for second place.
Non-traditional Roger: Conventional wisdom says that Roger should have wagered to cover second place’s (Isaac’s) double-up and/or third place’s (Juveria’s) double-up. Issac and Juveria both wagered appropriately for the situation. It appears Roger was not accounting for Juveria’s double-up to 12,000 points. He wagered to end with at least one more point than Isaac if Isaac were to wager 0. Isaac wagered appropriately to cover Juveria’s double-up and was correct. Roger should have been wagering to at least cover Juveria’s double-up, but instead, he set himself up to lose in the event all three players were correct (questionable from the lead). He ended up being incorrect, so it didn’t matter in the end.
What if Juveria? Juveria was best on the buzzer this game, however, her correct percentage (74%) prevented her from coming out on top. She had seven incorrect responses, including the Daily Double in DJ!. Had she responded to that correctly, she might have taken the lead into Final and won with a correct FJ! response.
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Highlights of the Postgame Chat…
QUARTERFINAL GAME 4 After his win, Isaac is now in the top 3 on the leaderboard behind Victoria and Yogesh. Isaac joked, “It feels a little like that meme from Breaking Bad that’s like ‘he can’t keep getting away with this!’”
Ken pointed out that it looked like it took Isaac a while to come up with the correct response in Final. Isaac explained that he recently looked at Wikipedia for Grover Cleveland but couldn’t remember if he was governor or not. Finally, he thought to himself, “Well, you don’t have a better answer, dummy, so put Cleveland and at least have something!”
Ken told Juveria that he was in awe of her buzzer consistency. She joked “Except for JIT, which was kind of a disaster.” She also explained “I think before JIT I was so excited to come back so I may have overtrained a bit, but training your reflexes when there is no stimulus is maybe a bad idea. I didn’t do any buzzer practice in the last few months,” She said that Masters alternate Luigi de Guzman had told her “not lights, not sound, just vibes.”
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Final Thoughts
One of the events I attended this week, and one of my favorites of the year, is the National Academy of Television Arts & Sciences Sports Emmy Awards held at Jazz at Lincoln Center’s Frederick P. Rose Hall in New York City. I attend whenever I can and especially when my on-air talent, producing colleagues, and I are nominated. And this year we were nominated twice – for Good Morning Football, the daily NFL talk show that I created and executive-produced for the NFL Network, and for some of the interactive work we did for the Olympics Group at NBC last summer for the Paris Games.
But for me, this is way less of an opportunity to win awards, and more about seeing all my friends in a very small business – talent, execs and producers, agents, managers, directors – and meeting some new people in the auditorium and at the bar.
I arrived at the auditorium with about five minutes to spare, picked up my ticket, said hi to some agents from CAA who introduced me to Adam Schefter, the ESPN NFL analyst (who was wonderfully friendly), walked up the elevator with my old friend Connor Schell, a veteran sports exec and producer who I’ve known since he graduated business school and is now one of the most influential producers in live sports and documentaries. He spent a long time at ESPN, where he co-created the iconic 30 for 30 series and then executive-produced O.J.: Made in America and The Last Dance. At some point along the way, we ran into Gabe Spitzer, the very talented executive who runs sports at Netflix.
I walked down the aisle and took my seat next to Angela Ellis, the NFL executive I have the pleasure to work with on a daily basis at NFL media and Tim Ellis the genius Head of Marketing at the NFL and looked around at all the surrounding seats with everyone looking fabulous, dressed to the nines.
A few rows behind me, across the aisle, was Mike Tirico from NBC Sports, a friend and sometime colleague for more than 20 years, whose work and kindness I so admire. Oh, and over there, Scott Van Pelt from ESPN, whose show I watch, in awe, almost nightly. Jamie Erdahl was right in front of me, and Kyle Brandt, on the other side of the auditorium, sitting with the CBS crew, my two extraordinary hosts on Good Morning Football. And then a hall of fame of sports execs – David Hill and Chase Carey, the Fox Sports legends, Eric Shanks, who runs that organization, and hired me to make a daily show with Regis Philbin several years ago. Molly Solomon, one of my favorite people in the business who runs the Olympics group at NBC (and has absolutely crushed it), flashed me her trademark smile, a quick wave to Jared Stacy and Jeff Kaiser from Amazon Sports. And then way down the other end of my row, the Thursday Night Football team of Charissa Thompson, Ryan Fitzpatrick, and Andrew Whitworth, who were definitely in the fun section. I think Charissa had a flask. Which was smart because this is always a loooooonnngggg show.
And surrounding all of them, so many producers, directors, writers and editors, sound professionals, and graphics designers whom I have worked with and met with over the years. And lots of agents. Many of the very best in the representation community happen to work in sports.
As the show started, I reflected on how many people in that room had been part of the community of my career. And then Roy Wood Jr. walked out to emcee the event, whom we’d had on this season of Celebrity Jeopardy!, and my sports and entertainment careers were united. And Roy absolutely killed it all night.
But the most striking thing was the theme that every presenter and every award recipient came back to again and again: How many people it takes, working collaboratively together, to make every opening title, every graphic, every minute of film, every moment of thrilling sports action come together on the TV screen that we watch on the edge of our seats from home.
Not a single award winner took the credit for themselves, they spread it around, including the Lifetime Achievement honoree, David Hill (a massive Jeopardy! fan by the way), who perhaps more than any one individual has changed the way sports are seen on TV in Australia, Britain, and America.
Not the incomparable Molly Solomon, who always credits anyone other than herself.
Nor the team from Southern University who made an Emmy Award-winning documentary with a grant from the Coca-Cola Company and the Academy, who gave so much of the credit to the subject of their film, the Human Jukebox, the marching band culture at Southern and the other HBCUs and notably to the faculty advisor who stood so proudly on the stage with them.
This is honestly what I love about television. Every single project, scene, moment takes a village, a group of people who perfect their processes and performance over years and years to make it just perfect. Who learn from everything that has come before. Who marvel at the innovation we see from the next generation and the possibilities of new technologies.
And Jeopardy! Is no different. More on that next week.
Stay in charge,
Michael
P.S. Whether you’re reading on Jeopardy.com or my personal Substack, thank you so much for your time and for all of your comments, kind words, and helpful notes!
P.P.S. For those keeping score, we won one Sports Emmy this year. Congrats to all 19 Embassy Rowers on the nomination list and the 17 of you for whom this is your first Emmy.
