What does it take to be a Jeopardy! contestant?
Nobody wants to be in jeopardy. But a lot of people would love to be on Jeopardy!, the 34-time, Emmy-winning American TV game show famed for making its contestants pose answers in the form of a question.
On Saturday, 21 potential Jeopardy! contestants were invited to the Sheraton Wall Centre to meet the program’s scouting staff, flex their trivia skills and demonstrate that they have what it takes to be the next Ken Jennings — or, at least, fodder for the next Ken Jennings.
One such contestant was 37-year-old Patrick Ray, a Vancouver resident who has applied annually for the last 12 years. Saturday marked just the second time he had been invited to try out in person.
“I’ve been watching the show since I was 10 years old, thinking, ‘Wow, I could do that,’ ” he said.
But if Jeopardy! looks easy, getting onto the program seems far less so.
To apply for consideration, hopeful contestants take an online test with 50 trivia questions and just 15 seconds to answer each one. Do well enough on that test and you’re placed in a pool for random selection and, ideally, invited to tryouts like Saturday’s, where you and other potential contestants sit down for another 50-question written test, this time with only eight seconds to answer.
And these aren’t easy questions. They seemed to get harder as the test wore on. For the first half, I don’t think I missed a single one. But things fell off the rails in the second half, where I was stumped on a handful of U.S. geography questions. Study your American rivers, friends.
Fortunately, Jeopardy isn’t just looking for people who can answer all the questions, which is ideal for those, like myself, who couldn’t.
“We like a well-rounded individual,” said Corina Nusu, the show’s senior contestant coordinator. “Someone who has fun playing the game. You don’t want to watch anybody boring on Jeopardy!”
Nusu admitted the way Jeopardy! selects its contestants is somewhat fluid. All tryouts are added to the contestant pool for the next 18 months, during which point the show’s producers will make their choices based on a number of different criteria, some of them ineffable.
“There’s no set formula,” Nusu said. It’s hard to define. You’ll find a contestant that comes up here and you can see them on the show immediately. They just have that sparkle.”
Jeopardy has tinkered with its audition format in recent years, shrinking the field of invites to give potential contestants more time to stand out. Ray said his first time out a decade ago, there were three times as many people in the room.
They’ve also begun filming the entire process. After Jennings became Jeopardy!’s first bona-fide celebrity (host Alex Trebek notwithstanding) by winning 74 Jeopardy! games in a row in 2004, producers realized they might want footage of a future star’s audition.
But the best opportunity to showcase one’s sparkle comes immediately after the written test, as contestants are called in groups of three to play a quick round of the quiz show and demonstrate not just their knowledge, but their likability, their stage presence and their proficiency with Jeopardy!’s famed buzzer.
Buzzer training begins immediately. At the door, all potential contestants were given pens shaped like the game show’s buzzers, complete with the bright red button on top. After using them for the written test, we were invited to practise our buzzer skills with them. A cacophony of clicking soon followed.