On Monday’s episode of the “Jeopardy!” podcast “Inside Jeopardy!,” showrunner Michael Davies explained how the trivia series plans to handle its uncoming fall seasonin light of the ongoing WGA strike and announced a sweetening of the pot for second and third-place winners.
“I believe, principally, that it would not be fair to have new contestants making their first appearance on the Alex Trebek Stage with non-original material,” Davies said. “We’re going to open the season with a second chance tournament for players from Season 37 who lost their initial game. Winners from that will advance to a Season 37 and Season 38 Champions Wildcard.”
Davies explained that questions asked of contestants in these second chance episodes will be “a combination of material that our WGA writers wrote before the strike, which is still in the database, and material that has been re-deployed from multiple multiple seasons of the show.”
“Celebrity Jeopardy!,” on th other hand, will feature completely original material. Davies indicated that material for the spinoff’s second season was completed before the WGA went on strike.
“A major announcement we can make today,” Davies also said, “is that we are increasing the second and third place prize amounts by $1,000 each.” Now, second place winners will receive $3,000 and third place winners will receive $2,000. The move was made in response to growing criticisms over the fact that runners up must fund their own travel to participate in the show.
“This is something that we’ve been working on ever since I really took the reins of the show, something that obviously is discussed widely within our social communities and within the community of our contestants,” Davies added. “We understand that post-COVID, travel costs have increased. We understand how complicated funding a trip to ‘Jeopardy!’ is for many contestants within our community, and we think this is way about time that we did this.”
