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"\n\n Here are the Double Jeopardy! categories from a 1991 episode of the famed game show, wordplay, and two jokes, one with a Jewish pedigree.\n\n This, as they say, is Jeopardy!. It was originally launched in 1964, and has aired continuously since 1984. According to ecutive producer Harry Friedman, it's been \"basically the same show for 27 seasons.\" But tune into any of its peers tomorrow\u2014Wheel of Fortune, The Price is Right, Let's Make a Deal, etc.\u2014and you'll see the same puzzles and challenges you would have seen twenty years ago, sometimes word-for-word. Jeopardy!, though, is different.\n\n \"High-concept categories like those wouldn't have been around ten years ago,\" said Ken Jennings, who, with 74 consecutive wins, is the record holder for longest winning streak on the show. \"You watch an old Jeopardy! and the categories alone are very plain. 'Poetry,' or 'Movies,' or 'Physics.' If you watch it now, though, there'll be a theme board where the categories are all Hitchcock movies. Lots more jokes, lots more high-concept categories and questions.\"\n\n \"The show has definitely changed,\" said Friedman. \"But it's very much changed along with the times.\" In other words, that movement seen above from \"World Travel\" to \"My Son, The Doctor\" is not willed into existence. Rather, it's a growing with culture. Jeopardy! changed, and changed productively (compare its success to other long-running and flailing stalwarts like the nightly news and soap operas), because TV changed. HBO, DVDs, and the web happened, and in the process, we've moved from a norm, sometimes called Least Objectionable Programming, to one in which viewers are trusted with the possibilities of the medium as showrunners explore complexity and nuance.\n\n The continuing evolution of Jeopardy! lets us see this shift happening in real time, providing a constant basis of comparison that isn't there if we just look at, say, Full House beside The Sopranos. From a straightforward trivia contest predicated on a set of largely academic knowledge, the show has become a repository for jokes, references (both to pop culture and to itself), and language games. The questions have become dense tangles of allusions that rely on contestants' ability to make connections and inventively parse language. Over the years, the show has been able to take advantage of the new complexity audiences were willing to accept, and the writers have seized the opportunity to turn this trivia show into something that intuitively probes the ways in which we understand the world.\n\n Like The Wire or Lost or any other standards-raising series we've seen over the last decade, Jeopardy! is driven by its writers. Billy Wisse, the show's editorial supervisor, explained that each category begins with a writer's idea. \"Either you have a cute idea for a concept, where the title is going to be a pun or it will sit next to another category,\" he said. \"Or you're interested in something like the history of Spain in the 15th century, so you start with one interesting fact and spin it out into an entire category.\" The categories are assembled into a game, researched, and subjected to a table read. The writers (including host Alex Trebek) gather in a room and read all of the clues aloud, and the group critiques each question carefully.\n\n \"There's some punching-up that goes on with the order and the wording, and generally people can agree on what's an easy question and what's a super-tough question, but even then there are disagreements,\" said Wisse. \"There are some very lively discussions around the table. It's similar to what the table read for a sitcom is like.\"\n\n The writers behind game shows are a rarely considered but crucial part of the machine.\n\n \"The writers have a sense they've honed over time for what will and won't work,\" said Friedman. \"They're some of the most creative people working in television today. They can take eight lines of text and tell a story, while at the same time using that piece of information to set up the clue for a specific response. It requires tremendous talent.\"\n\n Friedman remembered one category in particular that Wisse wrote. \"He did a category years ago called 'Readings from Homer.' The clues were, of course, from the poet Homer. But he got Dan Castellaneta to read the clues in the voice of [The Simpsons's] Homer. We've had sportscaster Joe Buck do a category on history. He delivered the clue as if he were calling a baseball game. The clue was written that way in order to give the information about a historical fact written in the way a baseball play by play announcer might call it. I have to give Billy credit for being one of the first adopters of that direction.\"\n\n Compared to the older incarnation of the show, \"It's something completely new,\" said Friedman.\n\n \"Things have certainly changed around here,\" Wisse agreed.\n\n Here's a $1,000 question from 1991: \"In the 1850s he came up with the first cheap, large-scale way of making steel from pig iron.\" Compare that to a question from earlier this month, during the Teen Tournament. A category on comedy featured this clue: \"Woody Allen said his parents hated him so much, 'they would put a live' one of these 'into my crib with me.'\" The answer is \"teddy bear,\" but what stands out is how the question doesn't draw on knowledge. It's possible that someone may have been familiar enough with Allen's work that they might recognize the quote. But the question is structured in such a way that you can figure it out anyway. What's typically found in cribs? What might be dangerous if real? What do you know about Woody Allen's humor? What sort of joke would Woody Allen make? That's not trivia in the traditional sense. It's not about recalling information. That's just having enough knowledge about how the world works to figure out a fact you don't already know.\n\n Few other quiz shows have pursued this direction. The big trivia contests of the previous decade, like Who Wants to be a Millionaire, The Weakest Link, and Are You Smarter Than a 5th Grader? all rely on more straightforward questions, in part by using multiple-choice responses instead of Jeopardy's! open-answer system. Thus, a question about the biggest lake in Africa allows contestants to guess what the most likely answer might be, while Jeopardy! requires a process of informed reasoning.\n\n \"The Final Jeopardy! questions seem to be, by design, things you can't know,\" said Jennings. \"And so it's not about who knows them, but who can figure them out in thirty seconds. I remember one of my last shows, the Final Jeopardy! clue was something like 'These two boys' names are top 10 boys' names in the U.S., they both end with the same letter, and they're both names of Jesus' apostles.' Now, obviously that's not a knowable fact. No one on Earth knows that. So the contest becomes who can figure that out in 30 seconds and who won't and will put 'Who are James and Judas?' and look like an idiot.\"\n\n In order to enable these types of questions, Jeopardy! can't just ask things people may or may not know. They have to use things people almost definitely do know as a way of getting at something they don't. And that requires a keen sense of what things most people know. Both Friedman and Wisse spoke of \"general knowledge\" as the guiding star in what the show could or couldn't do.\n\n \"The areas of interest we draw from aren't just what you learned in school,\" said Friedman. \"It's what you experienced in life. And the way we know what everyone else has experienced in life is through pop culture.\"\n\n Jeopardy!, then, changed because we changed. In this view, the show is a kind of arbiter of normalcy, a barometer of what we're expected to know. And if we see it shifting, then we shifted first. Pop culture, that common representation of common experience, opened up, becoming far more democratic, audience-driven, and varied. It turned out there were far more things we had in common than was being commonly represented. As space for new expression opened up, it was filled up with new but already-existing versions of the normal life. And these things filtered back down to Jeopardy!, to be reflected to us as a better self, a new affirmation of what we could take for granted. The world, as it turned out, wasn't just straight facts and figures. It is a vast but understandable network of interconnected ideas, a constantly-shifting space of generative content that we had to explore if we were to ever hope to locate ourselves within it. That vaunted complexity, in other words, isn't something given to us. It's something we located in ourselves. And Jeopardy! gives it back to us, one clue at a time."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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