Jeopardy! winners won’t cross the picket line for Tournament Of Champions
At least five Jeopardy! champions are standing by the writers
Aux News Jeopardy!
This beloved American gameshow is caught in the crosshairs of the WGA strike. What is Jeopardy!?
The labor actions energizing the American workforce have found a new ally: Jeopardy champions. Over the weekend, 13-time Jeopardy!-winner and proud IATSE union member Ray Lalonde announced in the Jeopardy subreddit that he would not cross the picket line to appear on Jeopardy!’s annual Tournament Of Champions. In the post, Lalonde said that he was alerted to a “contingency plan” for the Tournament should the strike continue. The plan? Use “old and/or recycled material” written by WGA members prior to the strike. Ah, nothing but the best for America’s brightest.
“I am and will always be grateful for the experience I had on the show, and the opportunity to participate in the TOC is beyond a dream come true for me,” he wrote. “That being said, I believe that the show’s writers are a vital part of the show, and they are justified in taking their job action to secure a fair contract for themselves and their fellow WGA members.”
“As a supporter of the trade union movement, a union member’s son, and a proud union member myself, I have informed the show’s producers that if the strike remains unresolved, I will not cross a picket line to play in the Tournament Of Champions.”
He’s not the only one. Other Jeopardy! winners, including 21-time winner Cris Pannullo, eight-time winner Hannah Wilson, six-time winner Troy Meyer, and nine-time winner Ben Chan, all expressed their solidarity with Lalonde in the subreddit.
Since the strike started, Jeopardy! has been a regular source of controversy, which apparently is this show’s final form. In May, Ken Jennings caught the ire of one Mr. Wil Wheaton due to Jennings’s willingness to host the last four episodes of the Jeopardy! Masters tournament, crossing the WGA picket line to do so. “This is a VERY small town, Ken Jennings, and we will all remember this,” Wheaton wrote on Facebook. Mayim Bialick stood in solidarity with the show’s writers.
“Our words are on the screen every night,” Jeopardy writers Billy Wisse and Michelle Loud told Variety in May. “There is no Jeopardy without writers. Without us, it’s just an empty blue screen.”
[via HuffPost]
29 Comments
Without writers, we wouldn’t have had this.Starts out OK, then crashes and burns.
The first was a decent pun, the last ones sounds like they tried to have AI come up with the answers…
That one sucked, but it’s a pretty common category and it’s usually muuuuuch better.
Definitely should not be recycled.
Dude, when did you get exiled to the greys?
I somehow got logged out against my will a few weeks ago and since Twitter was my log in I couldn’t get back in because Twitter sucks so hard now. Kinja was zero help. Zer-o.I had to create a whole new account. Nice to be noticed and I’m glad to be back! Thx.
Well, that’s shithouse. I think we’re both doomed to be stuck here, because I don’t think they’re pulling people out of the greys any more.
That’s what I was afraid of. Been commenting here since before set user names were required. I wasn’t going to make a new account. Thought it’d be enough to just read but I got too much snark and smart-ass in me.
I honestly mainly come here for the comments, because it’s much better than the sea of links and hot-takes most articles are these days – the commenters are far more interesting. I may have pissed off the mouthbreathers over at kotaku, so I might even be shadowbanned – let’s see if this comment, in a chain I’ve already been blacked in, is grey. EDIT: nope, black.
same happened to me when took out zuckbook which was associated with my kinja
Oh man. I thought I saw where they were going with this, but “Hans Gruber and Scooby-Doo”? How close to the air was that was submitted and approved out of desperation?Incidentally, when I used to do bar trivia, questions like those were my favorite because there was often one team that was googling all the answers not-so-discreetly and they would always be stumped by ones you couldn’t easily type in a search engine for the answer. “Snow White and the Seven Samurai” would have been one of those answers.
Honestly, it’s cool to see these instances of solidarity.
If the staff of Jeopardy are “writers” then the 17yo who can’t get your order right at McDonalds is a “chef”Why should they get residuals? Do we pay architects and engineers residuals? The guys who built the Interstate Highways get any residuals? The roads are still in use. Designing a building is much more of a creative effort than “writing” the partial sentence Jeopardy clues. On behalf of regular middle class workers everywhere – WGA/SAG If the jester stops entertaining then Off With His Head.
Gonna take a stab here and say you work in tech, right?
Residuals are payment for material that is republished in lieu of making new stuff. The only reruns for Interstate Highways are, I suppose, maintenance instead of costly replacement. And road builders are indeed paid for maintenance.
It’s a tad different, in that the contracting company doesn’t keep getting paid for a project that’s long finished, while the workers who built it get nothing.
Okay, you do it.I’m serious.Write 73 Jeopardy clues. It’s easy, right? Crank ‘em out.
my huge bitch detector is going crazy
They literally write the clues which is half the script of the show. How is it not writing if they are literally writing? In what way is writing equivalent to being an engineer? I’m super confused by this analogy. Designing a building is a creative effort, but it’s an entirely different effort… Why did you pick engineers instead of painters or mosaicists or photographers? Even if we grant that designing a building is a more creative effort (for the sake of argument), why would the engineer get writing residuals? It’s not writing. Writing a clue is writing. I mean, it’s *literally* writing. I don’t even know what else you could possibly consider it.
He’s one of those “Only my job is important and worth remuneration” types is my guess. My professional experience has taught that anyone who says “UGH, WRITING ISN’T REAL WORK” has never actually written anything worthwhile and couldn’t actually do anything worth reading (or answering on a quiz show) even if they were being paid, and tend to equate the mechanics of holding a pencil and putting letters on a page with the effort of creativity and thought needed to make those letters mean something.
Maybe that’s why he’s still an intern:
“Why should they get residuals?”Because they contractually agree to take on some of the risk of the production by accepting lower up-front rates. “Do we pay architects and engineers residuals?”As an engineer I get RSUs, and in the past have received stock options. They are also instruments where I receive part of the future gains from my current labor.
“This is a VERY small town, Ken Jennings, and we will all remember this”
How did I end up back on the Aldean article?
“This is a VERY small town, Ken Jennings, and we will all remember this”
Seems a little over the top. Presumably the episodes were already written. And I’m sure the crew appreciated the work and getting paid as they likely won’t be starting up production of the fall season next month. And I think they were behind schedule because one of the contestants had a family emergency.
Also at the time all members of SAG were being told to show up for work so long as writers weren’t present on set. Additionally, even now, Ken’s chunk of the SAG-AFTRA union isn’t on strike. I guess he was just supposed to be in breach of his contract.
“This is a VERY small town, Ken Jennings, and we will all remember this,” Jason Aldean was Wil Wheaton all along!
I love Wil Wheaton, but I think he and others are a little off the mark when it comes to Ken Jennings: News anchors, soap actors, talk-show hosts, and game-show hosts, who are represented by SAG-AFTRA but under a different contract, are not affected by the strike, either; theirs doesn’t expire until next year.Mayim Bialik is presumably in SAG since since she’s an actress and felt different solidarity with the writers, but I imagine Ken was held to the terms of his own contract and couldn’t just walk off. I’m frankly surprised Mayim was allowed to.
I love Jeopardy. I agree with the champions; I don’t want to watch a TOC with recycled clues. I’ll wait.I also love Ken Jennings and Wil Wheaton can fuck right off.