The major change ‘Jeopardy’ fans have been waiting for is finally happening
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Get ready, Jeopardy! fans — you don’t have to wait too much longer for the beloved quiz show to finally hit streaming services.
In a recent interview with Rolling Stone, showrunner Michael Davies revealed that there are plans in the works that will enable viewers to stream Jeopardy! episodes the next day.
While Pop Culture Jeopardy!, the new iteration of the long-running game show, is currently available to stream on Amazon Prime, the only way to watch Jeopardy! itself is to tune in via cable, subscribe to a digital bundle — or watch it online from an illegal upload. (Davies told Rolling Stone that 14 percent of the show’s viewership comes from fans watching illegally-uploaded episodes on YouTube.)
Now, Davies shared with the outlet, “Sony has secured the ability to sell the next-day streaming rights for the main show starting in the fall,” Rolling Stone reports.
“To protect Jeopardy!, we have to expand,” the showrunner explained. “We can’t just leave it exactly where it is. We mustn’t change the format; we must continue to go back to the values that [Jeopardy! creator] Merv [Griffin] and [his wife] Julann [Wright] and [executive producer] Harry [Friedman] and [late host] Alex [Trebek] put into the program. But we have to expand or it’s going to be in trouble.”
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“Harry was quite vocally conservative in not expanding,” Davies pointed out, but noted that the Jeopardy! EP “has said, ‘Based on where the world is now, you have to go off and do these things to keep it in the public attention.'”
Jeopardy! coming to streaming services is something fans have been begging and hoping for, for years.
“Role playing having cable on an overcast summer afternoon and choosing whatever’s on by watching double jeopardy on one of my streaming services that plays movies all day,” one person once fantasized on X (formerly known as Twitter).
“If there were a streaming platform that was just Jeopardy, with a shuffle feature, I would pay somewhere between $5 and $10 for that,” another fan tweeted.
“Jeopardy! is a weirdly unifying thing,” host Ken Jennings told Rolling Stone. “Young people, old people, red states, blue states — it’s an institution that has this universal acceptance. … Maybe we will at some point get back to a more unified culture that agrees on basic facts of the universe. What a dream for America!”