“Jeopardy!” Champions Are Officially Staging a Boycott — Here’s Why

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A classic part of Jeopardy! is, well, in jeopardy.

The hits just keep on coming in tinseltown.

To add onto the absolute chaos of a double Hollywood strike, a group of former Jeopardy! winners have announced their intent to boycott the upcoming Tournament of Champions. The annual event is typically shot in August or September, and it features a who’s who of the best and brightest that Jeopardy! has to offer, bringing a handful of former winners together to compete. Now, though, it looks like most of those winners aren’t planning on showing up anymore — which is a major problem for the iconic show.

Because of the ongoing Writers’ Guild of America (WGA) strike, Jeopardy! was already going to be handicapped in the upcoming season. The producers were reportedly planning to recycle old questions for the tournament, since the writers for the show weren’t available to create new ones. Then Ray Lalonde, a former champion, spoke out.

Lalonde won $386,400 over 13 games last season, and he was scheduled to attend the Tournament of Champions taping. But in a statement recently shared to Reddit and Facebook, Lalonde explained publicly why he was no longer planning to participate. Shortly thereafter, other previous champions joined him and announced their decision to boycott the show, too.

Jeopardy! winners speak out in support of the WGA strike

In his official statement, Lalonde immediately called out the producers of Jeopardy! for their alleged efforts to replace the work of the writers currently on strike. “There are now credible reports that the producers are making contingency plans to start filming the next season of the show with old and/or recycled material if the WGA strike remains unresolved” he wrote. “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.”

Lalonde also relayed a certain level of optimism that his announcement might sway the outcome of the upcoming season.

“My hope in saying this publicly now is to perhaps influence some future decision to proceed without the writers and to encourage any others in the community who feel the same way to speak out as well,” he explained. “A few small voices may not change any minds but we can try.”

Following Lalonde’s message, several other Jeopardy! champions quickly followed suit in publicly boycotting the show, including Chris Pannullo, Ben Chan, Troy Meyer, Ben Goldstein, Luigi de Guzman, Suresh Krishnan, and Hannah Wilson.

Wilson told the Washington Post that her decision to bow out of the tournament was a “no-brainer.” Wilson won $229,801 over the course of an eight-week streak earlier this year. “I don’t want to be in a scab tournament,” she said.

Is the writers’ strike going to end anytime soon?

It seems like every day, a new side effect of the strikes in Hollywood reveals itself. From canceled red carpet events to delayed television and movie production timelines to the chaotic situation unfolding on Jeopardy! in real time, you might assume that studio executives are desperately trying to reach a compromise with the WGA in order to end the madness. It’s already been almost three months since the strike began, after all.

Unfortunately, that is far from the reality taking place in Los Angeles right now. According to a recent Deadline exclusive, television and film executives have every intention of letting the writers’ strike play out for as long as possible. In literal terms, that means the strike could go on through the fall and into the winter season — or, as one executive put it anonymously to Deadline, “the endgame is to allow things to drag on until union members start losing their apartments and losing their houses.”

Given the icy temperature between Hollywood executives and the WGA at the moment, it seems all but guaranteed that we have many months to go before we start to see one side (or both) start to budge towards negotiations. With that said, events like the Jeopardy! champions’ strike could very well cause those negotiations to take place earlier than they would have otherwise. At least, that’s what Lalonde posited in a recent phone conversation with USA Today.

“[WGA] is trying to bargain in good faith, and it seems like the [studios] are more or less trying to break them instead of continuing negotiations. They’re just saying no,” Lalonde said. “I’ve been on both sides of that, being in a union myself. I’ve seen negotiations go well and negotiations go poorly. If I can put a little pressure on my little corner of the world, that’ll be good.”