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A: A disturbing trend returned to Jeopardy!

I

ixnay

Q: What is, failure of the contestants to clear the board before the end of the round?

Leaving a couple of clues uncovered each round was a trend during the Fleming years and also early on in the Trebek era. For the last few years, they tended to clear the board. Now they're not clearing the board anymore (at least on the shows my mother watches when she's not watching QVC).

I'll take "J! Round Time Tweaking Possibilities" for $2000, Alex.

ixnay
 
ixnay said:
Q: What is, failure of the contestants to clear the board before the end of the round?

Leaving a couple of clues uncovered each round was a trend during the Fleming years and also early on in the Trebek era. For the last few years, they tended to clear the board. Now they're not clearing the board anymore (at least on the shows my mother watches when she's not watching QVC).

I'll take "J! Round Time Tweaking Possibilities" for $2000, Alex.

ixnay
Click to expand...

How is that "disturbing"? Are you truly "disturbed" by that?
 
Are the contestants stepping out to rub dirt on their hands between questions? Are they faking injury or adjusting their microphones to buy more time? Will Jeopardy one day routinely run over by 10-20 minutes, forcing joined-in-progress for the syndicated show after it, just to get all three rounds in? This must be nipped in the bud! Don't let Jeopardy turn into MLB or NFL!
 
CTListener said:
Are the contestants stepping out to rub dirt on their hands between questions? Are they faking injury or adjusting their microphones to buy more time? Will Jeopardy one day routinely run over by 10-20 minutes, forcing joined-in-progress for the syndicated show after it, just to get all three rounds in? This must be nipped in the bud! Don't let Jeopardy turn into MLB or NFL!
Click to expand...

ROTFLOL!

ixnay
 
I've only watched "Jeopardy!" once, to see Alex's mustache, so I can't tell if there's a trend, but perhaps some of the material on the shows you've seen has been a little more difficult and time has run out on a clue before anyone could ring in. As a rule, Alex has always been as good as emcees come in moving the game along (almost to a fault, if you believe Merrill Heatter, for whom Alex worked on "High Rollers"); Fleming had a tendency to kid Don Pardo or the stagehands when they didn't pull the cards fast enough, and that tended to slow things down.
 
What is shut up and play, already?

There are a number of reasons. It seems like there are a lot more 'Triple Stumper' clues(per the jboard.com site, that's where none of the three gets them right, or even rings in.) When you have several clues in one or two categories of dead silence, it adds up.
Also, Alex Trebek talks a lot more between clues than he used to, often making little comments/jokes about the clue('You STILL haven't remembered my FAVORITE animal, the musk ox!'), or reminding us where that contestant stands('And with that response, Tom, you move into a tie for second place with Dick, 200 dollars ahead of Harry. Select.')
I think the main thing that takes up time, even on shows when the contestants aren't stumped too often, is the rather long-winded explanations that crop up when the judges go back and review a response('Our judges looked it up and found that there were several people named 'John Smith', and since our clue wasn't specific enough, we're going to credit you with the response, but we won't penalize her, no harm no foul, yadda, yadda...')
And while CTListener's response comparing the contestants to baseball and football players was funny, quite a few contestants are in fact more 'deliberate' in their play, some making long pauses before they choose the next category(they'd probably be a PITA to be behind at a drive-thru fast food place), and, somewhat irritatingly, a lot of them slow things down by being overly precise and verbose in selecting categories. ("I'll take 'Famous 18th Century Monarchs' for twelve hundred dollars, please, Alex.", instead of a 'let's keep it moving' pace,shortened to 'Monarchs, 12'.) This strategy seems effective when contestants get clues right, but 'pausing dramatically' between not answering anything is a time-waster.
 
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Avid Listener said:
How is that "disturbing"? Are you truly "disturbed" by that?
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I think ixnay IS disturbed......

Its called timing...how fast the players can "answer" in the allowed amount of time...a lot of the dead space is edited out of the show on the air.....

not clearing the board means some of the clues were too hard for the contestants.
 
Unless, like a football team that gets a long drive going that takes perhaps 8 to 10 minutes off the clock, those contestants who drag out their next selection do so to use up time and limit their opponents' opportunity to ring in and perhaps score.

Tom Brokaw tells a story of how that happened to him--deliberately--when he appeared on "Two For The Money" in 1957; he was governor of South Dakota Boys' State and was teamed with the real governor of South Dakota, Joe Foss. Before the show, a production assistant informed them that they were not to go much over a total of $1200 and that "state governors" might be one of their categories; he suggested some lines to eat up the clock. On the air, when that category came up, Brokaw answered in slow-ball fashion, "The honorable Joe Foss of South Dakota." As it turned out, together they won just a bit over $1200 ($1225, IIRC), so no one was unhappy. But, says Brokaw, he and Gov. Foss pulled their punches; they could have doubled the number of correct answers in that category and in another one on "Presidential Slogans"--had they not been briefed beforehand. That practice is illegal today, but it doesn't mean "Jeopardy!" contestants don't take it upon themselves to slow down the pace.
 
The contestant quality has also gone down in the past few years on Jeopardy!. There are more folks like you see on Wheel of Fortune.

A few nights ago I was watching and going into Final Jeopardy the leader only had $7,000. That's a low number for this era when you can get $2,000 for one clue.

The dress code on the show has also changed. It used to be all you saw were dresses for women, suit and tie for men. Now they're a lot more button down.
 
I would like to see the contestants clear the board. I learn a lot from these clues, and some categories are just fun and using the clues later wouldn't work as well without the category they were a part of.

Spelling is a time-consuming category but they haven't used it lately.

Maybe some of the video clues take longer than those where it's just Alex reading.
 
The 'celebrity' video clues are especially verbose, since they often contain a plug for the reader's charitable endeavors. Sandra Day O'Connor and Hilary Clinton are frequently slammed by jboard.com posters for painstakingly slow readings of very lengthy clues, which often yield simplistic responses.
 
vchimpanzee said:
I would like to see the contestants clear the board. I learn a lot from these clues, and some categories are just fun and using the clues later wouldn't work as well without the category they were a part of.

Spelling is a time-consuming category but they haven't used it lately.

Maybe some of the video clues take longer than those where it's just Alex reading.
Click to expand...

Give it a rest...there is no guarantee that the board SHOULD be cleared....and with harder question that take contestants longer to think about the answer before buzzing in, that causes the round to end earlier than before...

It's not gonna to change....
 
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