Alex Trebek Made Jeopardy! Just By Showing Up

A decade ago, Alex Trebek had been hosting Jeopardy! for 26 years, a full six longer than I’d even been alive. I had no vehicle or job, also it was summer vacation, so I started watching the show as something to do, a way to kill 30 minutes between dinner and whichever suburban sojourn I’d scuttle off to that night. However it speedily grew into a disciplined routine. I’d keep a spreadsheet tracking how several answers I got right as I watched at house, hoping to impress my family member (and myself) with my vast knowledge of global geography and classical literature; soon after several weeks, I realized I wanted to impress Trebek, also, should I ever make it onto the show as a contestant. He had become a fixture in my life, a steady presence whose warm wit made a trivia game show feel like a nightly fireside chat.


Trebek, who died at age 80 on Sunday (November 8) of pancreatic cancer, hosted Jeopardy! for 8,200 episodes across 37 seasons, setting the Guinness World Record for hosting the most episodes of an individual game show, and the program has long been synonymous with his erudite presentation fashion. He started at the podium for its 1984 revival, and by 1997, Will Ferrell was consistently portraying him on Saturday Night Live as a hapless cog attempting to rein in dimwitted celebrities like Darrell Hammond’s Sean Connery. (That the real-life Connery died a week ahead of Trebek was not lost on folks online.)


But Trebek, a good sport, was notably characterized by a demeanor of self-assuredness, adding flairs of French pronunciation to his clue readings and lending a stately geniality to a gig that occasionally required him to deadpan rap lyrics. While in my Jeopardy!-spreadsheet summer — plus several years ago, throughout contestant Ken Jennings’s legendary 74-game run — it became clear to me how important to the show’s ecosystem Trebek’s disposition was. You may have mistaken it for usual TV-host smarm. Add in the braininess of the game, so you may have pegged him as an elitist. Trebek was neither. Trebek was aspirational.


Trebek was also quite warm. The show’s production schedule meant he filmed five episodes per day and met nearly a dozen new contestants in that five-hour range. He’d be the anchor, a measured presence amid the fast-paced game play, which only got more chaotic once big-time winners like James Holzhauer strategically destabilized its normal rhythms to fantastic, record-setting success. That itinerary also required Trebek to assume a convivial, gently inquisitive tone to ask the contestants about their often quite ordinary lives. He managed to create a lot of bookish people’s mundane anecdotes — I distinctly remember one contestant talking about his trademark of flipping people’s toilet paper so that the roll hung “the right way” — feel interesting, at least for a moment.


Some days, it got deeper than that. As Trebek became a television staple, the particular reach of the show grew. Throughout an episode taped in August that aired last week, champion Burt Thakur contained back tears as he told Trebek how he learned to speak English language by watching the host on Jeopardy! with his grandfather. “I used to sit on his lap and watch you every day,” he mentioned, “so it’s a pretty special moment for me, man.” Another contestant, Dhruv Gaur, made Trebek choke up by using his Final Jeopardy! Answer as a message of hope and strength in a game taped in November 2019, shortly right after Trebek reported he’d be re-entering chemotherapy. Gaur wrote: “What is We <3 you, Alex!”


Jennings has likened Trebek to beloved, longtime CBS news anchor Walter Cronkite, tweeting that he’s a “authoritative, reassuring TV voice you hear every night, almost to the point of ritual.” Soon after I moved to New York City, I realized how inescapable Trebek’s voice really was. I’d hear it on a screen indoors a taxi promoting the show, or in a diner on a muted, corner-mounted TV as I caught the Final Jeopardy! Responses over a plate of french fries by way of the closed captioning. A 20-minute wait at a barber shop became a unplanned order competition among strangers to get more correct answers. The show was often the ideal happy-hour backdrop, with Trebek’s face more studied than the bartender’s, even at your preference local. You can routinely plan on it.


while he shared his cancer diagnosis in March 2019, as messages of support poured from across the globe, I remembered a ridiculous blog post I wrote in 2016 that rounded up all of the times I’ve ever tweeted about Jeopardy!. The majority were observations about contestants, categories, and clues, or lamentations about how I’d once again failed to be good enough to create it onto the show myself. As such, I ended the post with a self-deprecating tweet that, by spending so much time tweeting about the show, I’d “wasted my life.” Yet as I knew then, that’s not even a little true. I was just training. Trebek was making me better, every game I watched. That’s what he may do, just by showing up.