This may be hard to believe, coming from the game show institution that went through a very long run of trial hosts only to give the job to the show’s producer (at least temporarily), but Jeopardy! seems to have gone for the least surprising and least interesting choice when deciding who should be its permanent post-Alex Trebek host. Would it be Ken Jennings? Would it be Mayim Bialik? The two of them have been trading off for nearly a year, but now Jeopardy! has decided that… they’ll both just keep trading off.
That’s according to Variety’s sources, which say that both Jennings and Bialik have “entered into long-term deals” to keep splitting the Jeopardy! host job, with Bialik also doing special primetime versions of Jeopardy! and an upcoming version of Celebrity Jeopardy! (for real, not the SNL sketch, which wouldn’t be as much fun these days for, you know, sad reasons). This comes exactly one month after the show’s producers announced that they would have an announcement about who will permanently host Jeopardy! “very, very soon,” which seems like a real stretch of what “very, very soon” means. But what would the producers of Jeopardy! know about sticking to the exact letter of the law? Surely they’re not sticklers for specificity over at Jeopardy! HQ, right?
It doesn’t sound like this has officially been confirmed or announced by the Jeopardy! producers or Sony Pictures Entertainment, but Variety seems confident that it’s just a matter of letting the ink dry. Or whatever they use on those Jeopardy! answer boards, which are probably digital pens and not actual pens. Either way, don’t be surprised if you keep seeing Ken Jennings and Mayim Bialik asking for answers in the form of a question on your TV every afternoon before or after Wheel Of Fortune.