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Comment by jedberg | Hacker News Reader

> Just like Alex Trebek is probably a big part of the reason for Jeopardy's longevity

Off topic, but I do wonder what will happen to their ratings when he retires in the next few years.

The Price is Right pulled it off, their ratings are apparently higher now than they had been, since they started putting clips on YouTube and other types of "millennial marketing".

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Trebek had a strong vision of what the show should be that would be at odds with what most studio execs might prefer. When he's gone, there will be pressure to dumb it down, make the questions easier and more trendy, make it more flashy. If they do that it will no longer be special and will wither away.

> there will be pressure to dumb it down, make the questions easier and more trendy, make it more flashy.

You could see this already in their recent GOAT primetime special. Someone did the numbers, it was like 12% of the questions were about Disney properties.

It was broadcast on ABC nation wide instead of the typical contracted station for any given local market, right? Normally the tournaments are broadcast during normal time slots on the usual market station. Definitely makes sense that the mouse would have insisted on a bit of extra coverage for something I bet they paid a lot for, but I would be hesitant to give that much weight for determining the direction of the standard show.

Yeah, it was on prime time.

But the point was that once Alex is gone, there won't be a strong force to keep them from doing that to the regular show. I just hope I'm wrong.

Jeapardy has always done shows like that over its many decades on the air.

But were the questions easier or just on a more modern topic?

Arguably the hardest quiz on TV (Only Connect) sometimes has stuff from kid's TV shows (e.g. the surnames of Scooby's human companions) but it's still stupidly hard. There's a difference between needing to know which Disney resort is in Florida and needing to be able to know the first four animated feature films Disney made in order.

Not easier, just "culturally relevant".

Do you have a source for that? I watched all the GOAT episodes and would both say that they were MUCH harder than typical Jeopardy games where I can typically answer 60-80% of questions and did not notice such a high percentage of questions being contextually about Disney.

Questions about Disney products sound more like efforts to promote Disney products than attempts at a trendy style.

Man, a dumbed down Jeopardy with trendy questions would be so depressing.

My hope is that they hire Ken Jennings and he carries on the tradition fully in honor of Trebek.

There was a whole discussion about this on reddit. It would harm them significantly to hire Ken. Due to game show laws, anyone he's ever played trivia with would be ineligible for the show. Since he's big on the trivia circuit, that would be about 1/2 of their contestants.

There were a couple answers about Charlie and the Chocolate Factory during GOAT Jeopardy, which made me hopeful that they were going to offer the host job to the winner, as Wonka did.

Reasons for hope are that Jeopardy fans (and the public) have a very specific idea of what Jeopardy should be. I'd optimistically like to think that it's strong enough to hold that line.

> Off topic, but I do wonder what will happen to their ratings when he retires in the next few years.

OT and somewhat sad but that... won't happen. He was diagnosed with stage 4 pancreatic cancer last year. I'm not sure on his exact prognosis of course but... it seems more likely than not that he won't see 2021 (Fs in the chat).

Perhaps. He said in October he was in remission, in December it was back, but they are trying some new experimental treatments. So maybe this will be one of those cases where everyone is happy about rich people having better medical outcomes.

Wasn't it Jobs who had a "rare form" of pancreatic cancer that was in a way more treatable than usual, leading to him living many more years?

Jobs's diet came from a 1971 book written by a very convincing yet irresponsible man who got kicked out of teaching at Harvard (this isn't actually a joke; Steve's comments on the book Be Here Now suggest exactly this, and I definitely can't blame him).

His diet and his refusal of treatment was what killed him.

For some reason I doubt Trebek is the easily-swayed college student Jobs was when the ideas that got him killed overtook him.

That's all interesting but I'm not sure how we got to talking about his diet.

I looked it up and indeed he had pancreatic cancer eight years before he died. Suggests that it's possible for Trebek to live for some time yet given not all forms are untreatable.

His diet was correlated with pancreatic cancer, and he doubled down on it after he had got it; foregoing treatment to use a more extreme version of it, until it was too late to be treated effectively.

Interesting thanks. I thought the course of events was: get cancer. Use quackery for a while to no effect. Get real treatment. Discover its a treatable form of cancer. Live half a decade more. Succumb to cancer.

Unfortunately, the doctors told him it was a (rare) treatable form of cancer that needed to be surgically treated immediately, he refused, preferred to treat with diet, didn't work, finally had to have a more much invasive surgical intervention (transplant). Helped, but he still died. If he would treated it correctly when he was first informed, he would probably still be alive.

There is a similar discussion going on about Just A Minute, since Nicholas Parsons died earlier in the month. Can it even survive without him, since the very few shows without him were, well, sucky...

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