Broadcast Of Jeopardy! - Wikipedia

Original series (1964–1975)

The original Jeopardy! series, hosted by Art Fleming, premiered at 11:30 a.m. Eastern (10:30 Central) on March 30, 1964, originating from studios at the NBC headquarters in New York City's 30 Rockefeller Plaza. NBC moved the program to 12:00 noon Eastern (11:00 a.m. Central) after 18 months,[citation needed] making it accessible to businessmen coming home for their lunch break or else watching it on restaurant or bar sets, and college students departing their classes for the day watching it on student center or dormitory sets. These two constituencies, who ordinarily did not have the time or interest to view other daytime programs, made the show a runaway hit, propelling its ratings to second place among all daytime game shows by the end of the decade—second only to its immediate lead-in, The Hollywood Squares.[1] The show had practically no trouble whatsoever against soap operas such as Love of Life and Where the Heart Is on CBS and mostly sitcom reruns on ABC.

In 1973, Lin Bolen, then Vice President of Daytime Programming at NBC, began eliminating longer-running game shows from the network in an aggressive attempt to bolster ratings among women aged 18 to 34, a desirable demographic to advertisers on daytime programs of that day; Jeopardy! had not performed especially strongly among those viewers, despite its overwhelming success among men and young people. Refreshing the daytime lineup became especially imperative to Bolen when CBS launched a surprise success in the soap opera The Young and the Restless at 12:00 p.m. EST (11:00 a.m. CST) in March 1973, drawing away younger audiences in particular. Although Jeopardy! continued to produce high ratings in the 12:00 noon time slot (also against the ABC revival of Password), Bolen moved the game to 10:30 a.m. Eastern (9:30 Central) on January 7, 1974, putting it up against CBS' The $10,000 Pyramid,[1][2] to make room for Jackpot!, a stylish, youth-oriented riddle contest hosted by Geoff Edwards, in Jeopardy!'s former timeslot. Bolen and other NBC executives were surprised, though, when Jeopardy! actually beat Pyramid for several weeks in February and March, prompting CBS to cancel Pyramid for failing to draw, according to packager Bob Stewart (who also produced Jackpot!), a 30 share that CBS daytime executives required a show to have in order to stay on its daytime schedule (Pyramid returned several weeks later on ABC in an afternoon slot and went on to become one of the most popular games of the 1970s and 1980s). CBS relocated Gambit to 10:30 a.m. on April 1, which ran about even with Jeopardy! in the ratings, with Gambit having perhaps a slight lead, due to its more traditional housewife target audience.[citation needed] Remarkably, Jeopardy! stayed strong despite losing much of its core audience, who was usually either at work or in classrooms during that hour and thus could not watch the show then.

However, Bolen was not interested in seeing an aging show like Jeopardy! stand in the way of her plans for a more youthful image for NBC's daytime lineup, so she resolved to prepare it for eventual cancellation, a rare instance of a network deliberately trying to undermine one of its programs. So, on July 1 of the same year, NBC moved Jeopardy! to yet another timeslot, this time to 1:30 p.m. EST (12:30 p.m. CST) (replacing Three on a Match, yet another Bob Stewart-produced game) and placed it against ABC's Let's Make a Deal and CBS' As the World Turns, both of which had easily beaten the ratings of several programs placed in that same time slot by NBC since December 1968. At that time, Deal moved to ABC from NBC, which had carried it in that very time slot during much of the 1960s, in a dispute by packagers Stefan Hatos and Monty Hall over the latter network's refusal to make a weekly primetime version of the show permanent.

With the July move, many of the previously tenaciously devoted viewers began abandoning the program; most of the remaining ones were either middle-aged housewives or elderly retirees, two groups undesirable to advertisers due to their usually fixed retail brand preferences, rendering them unpersuadable to try new ones. As such, advertising revenues fell, a scenario not helped by the severe economic recession occurring in late 1974. Jeopardy! became the seventh show since 1968 to fall at 1:30 p.m. EST (12:30 p.m. CST), and a cancellation notice was issued by November 1974. Its replacement was the expansion of Another World to a full hour, the first daytime serial to expand to that duration; in April 1975, another serial, Days of Our Lives began occupying that time slot and eventually brought success to NBC there (Days moved exclusively to the network streaming service Peacock in September 2022, with NBC News Daily airing in its 1:30 p.m. EST (12:30 p.m. CST) timeslot.). Jeopardy! broadcast the 2,753rd and final episode of its original network run on January 3, 1975.[3] Some affiliates, including KNBC in Los Angeles, aired reruns in various other timeslots through the first quarter of that year. To compensate Griffin for canceling the program, which still had a year left on its contract, NBC purchased Wheel of Fortune, another creation of his, which premiered on January 6, 1975 (the following Monday) at 10:30 a.m. Eastern (9:30 Central).

Weekly syndicated version (1974–1975)

Griffin secured the rights from NBC to produce new episodes for first-run syndication, with Metromedia (who also syndicated Griffin's popular talk show) as their distributor. Griffin took this action mainly to keep the show in production in light of the show's deteriorating ratings on NBC daytime that eventually led to the 1975 cancellation. NBC had repeatedly refused Griffin's requests to do so in the past. These episodes began airing weekly in September 1974 and featured many contestants who were previous champions on the NBC version. Thirty-nine episodes were produced, with reruns of this version also airing in syndication through about summer 1975. Most stations aired this during the Prime Time Access slots in the early evening before network primetime programming began, usually in a "checkerboard" pattern with other weekly shows, meaning a different syndicated show aired each night, like the networks in prime time. By 1974, though, the market was flooded with evening versions of network games like the Hollywood Squares and The Price Is Right, and Jeopardy!, already on a popularity downswing for some time, did not get anywhere near nationwide clearance, thus dooming it to failure after one season.

Unique to this version was a bonus awarded at the end of the program, after Final Jeopardy! was completed. The episode's champion selected a prize hidden behind the thirty squares on the Jeopardy! board. Among the prizes was a $25,000 cash award which was hidden behind two squares. In order to win the top prize, the champion had to find both $25,000 cards in succession (winning the prize on a second pick if it was not the latter half of the grand prize). In later episodes, the bonus board was dropped and the evening's champion received a prize based upon his or her final score, with a Chevrolet Vega or Chevrolet Caprice (or even additional cash prizes of $10,000 or $25,000) as possibilities.

The All-New Jeopardy! (1978–1979)

Launching on October 2, 1978, the revived Jeopardy! took the spot of the soap opera For Richer, For Poorer on NBC's daytime schedule and initially aired weekdays at 10:30 a.m. From its debut until January 5, 1979, Jeopardy! aired against the first half-hour of the hit show The Price Is Right, which aired on CBS. As such, the show found itself unable to build an audience.

On January 8, 1979, NBC moved Jeopardy! from 10:30 a.m. to noon, the time slot the original series had occupied and done well in for many years. However, the television climate in 1979 was much different than it was in the 1960s and early 1970s. The 12:00 p.m. hour was one that network affiliates often chose to preempt in favor of showing other programming such as a midday local newscast or a syndicated offering such as another game show or a talk show. In markets that did air Jeopardy! at noon, the show found itself losing the ratings battle against The $20,000 Pyramid on ABC and The Young and the Restless on CBS, two shows that, ironically enough, had competed against the original in 1974 and 1973, respectively. NBC decided to pull the plug on the revived Jeopardy! series shortly after the move, and its 108th and final episode aired on March 2, 1979. Its place on the schedule was taken by Password Plus, which at the time had been airing at 12:30 p.m., and the cancellation allowed NBC to expand its top-rated soap opera, Another World, to ninety minutes from sixty, later in the afternoon.

Originating from the NBC Studios in Burbank, California,[4] this version featured some unique gameplay elements of its own. In the most notable of these elements, the lowest scoring contestant was eliminated from further play after the Jeopardy! round.[5] The remaining two contestants played the Double Jeopardy! round. In a second major change, no Final Jeopardy! round was played. Instead, the leader at the end of Double Jeopardy! was declared the day's champion.[5]

Most notable among the changes, Final Jeopardy! was replaced with a bonus game called Super Jeopardy!, played for a cash bonus. The round consisted of five categories (instead of six as in the main game), each with five clues numbered 1 to 5. The object of the round was to answer five questions to create a horizontal, vertical, or diagonal line on the board.[5] Contestants had to create the line before accumulating three strikes, which were given if a contestant either failed to respond (passing was not allowed without penalty) or gave an incorrect answer.[5] If the contestant struck out, $100 was awarded for each correct answer given, but if the contestant was successful, he/she won $5,000.[5] For each successive time a champion played the Super Jeopardy! round, regardless of whether or not the contestant had won the round the day before, he/she played for $2,500 more than he/she had the previous time—a second trip was played for $7,500, a third $10,000, a fourth $12,500, and a fifth and final trip $15,000. A contestant could earn $50,000 from Super Jeopardy! alone, provided that the contestant won each Super Jeopardy! round over a five-day reign as champion.[6]

Fleming later stated that he disagreed with moving the show to southern California, as he considered the contestants there to not be as appealing as those who played the game in New York were. He cited it as one of the main reasons he did not return to the series when it was revived five years later.[7]