Daily Double
The next lineup of Jeopardy! replacement hosts is here and we came up with better ideas on Slack in five minutes
All things considered, the post-Alex Trebek era of Jeopardy! has gotten off to a strong start. Temporary replacement Ken Jennings’ first episode on January 8th pulled in 14 million viewers, the most since James Holzhauer’s final day in June of 2019. Things cooled off a bit, dipping 5% in Jennings’ second week, but Jeopardy! remained firmly above ‘Wheel of Fortune’ and ‘Family Feud’, its next closest competitors, posting a 5.9 Nielsen ('Wheel' and 'Feud' came in with a 5.7 and 5.6 that week respectively.)
Still, that wasn’t enough to earn Jennings the starting job, and ABC will push forward with plans to host-by-committee, announcing its next slate of quizzers on Tuesday.
We gotta tell you, that roster is not exactly making us thirsty for knowledge. We have a TV guy calling himself a doctor in Dr. Oz, a doctor calling himself a TV guy in Sanjay Gupta, Today Show host Savannah Guthrie, and, of course, Anderson Cooper, who is, in all fairness, a pretty good pick. Clearly the audience analysis stiffs at ABC took a long, hard look at their demo and leaned into it, but boy if we didn’t come up with better ideas on Slack before our first sip of coffee. Here goes nothing . . .
1) Keanu Reeves
3) James Holzahauer??????
4) Dr. Fraiser Crane
5) Kenny Powers
7) Guy Fieri
8) Jim Nantz
9) The Flex Seal Family of Products Guy
10) Will Ferrell in character as Alex Trebek
The list goes on. The point is that it took us five minutes and while ABC's motley crew (hell, get Motley Crue!) took them months. We don’t want to disparage our favorite brain sport too much—you could put a rock up there and it would still be better than ‘Wheel’—but we bet we can do better. In fact, go ahead and make it a true Daily Double, Keanu.