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Comment by not2b | Hacker News Reader

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.

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> 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.

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".

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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