James Holzhauer has returned to Las Vegas, his run as Jeopardy! champion concluding after 32 wins and north of $2.4 million earned.
The pro sports gambler will likely not completely exit the spotlight, whether through taking a job with a pro sports team or simply by returning to the show for their All-Star tournaments. Holzhauer’s run lasted two months, thanks to the Teacher’s Tournament break in the middle, and people couldn’t get enough of the machine-like precision with which he picked apart the Jeopardy! board and dominated his opponents.
Some hated him, others loved him, but like a dominant sports team, it was hard not to want to watch. For Ken Jennings, the most famous Jeopardy! champion of all-time, that was the best part of it all. Jennings regularly praised Holzhauer for his aggressive style and while some felt he was ruining the show, Jennings thought it made it better — and the TV ratings didn’t disagree.
With Holzhauer’s run ending on Monday, on the show most expected him to break Jennings’ cash winnings record, Jennings penned a column for The Atlantic on what Holzhauer’s run meant, and why it made him nostalgic for a somewhat simpler time.
But there was something beautiful, I think, in the James Holzhauer news cycle. For two months, one of the most irresistible news stories in America was about Jeopardy, a 55-year-old media property. It seemed so wholesome and old-timey, a story that Snapchatting teens and their grandparents were all following at once. It brought back good memories of 2004 for me, but it also reminded me of a time before the cultural landscape balkanized into a thousand niches, before middlebrow America went away, before politics and everything else dumbed down.
For a little while, we just wanted to watch someone blow our minds by knowing stuff.
In the piece, Jennings commented on the viral nature of Jeopardy! winners in the social media age and how they become celebrities, both for good and bad. It was an interesting perspective and he’s not totally wrong in highlighting how it was somewhat amazing to see seemingly everyone tuning in for Jeopardy! episodes on their network affiliate each night to see what Holzhauer would do and whether he’d keep his streak alive or finally lose.
That said, there is so often this need for people to point out how we don’t have these shared cultural experiences anymore because things have become so niche, which almost always come out whenever one of those giant pop culture things comes to an end. It happened after Breaking Bad, and again after Game of Thrones — ironically in the midst of Avengers: Endgame being watched by hundreds of millions of people.
The idea that we don’t have shared viewing experiences anymore isn’t true, it’s just that there are more options for people with varying interests. There are opportunities for those who have long lived on the margins to enjoy things with others that do too, which is part of the positive of the social media age. No longer is a kid in middle America who likes anime feeling isolated, because there’s a massive online community he can find comfort in.
So, yes, there was something nice about seeing the overlap of people from all over interested in Holzhauer’s Jeopardy! run. It’s fine to enjoy that moment, but also to remember that the overwhelming amount of entertainment available doesn’t just serve to divide interests, instead offering a little something for everyone.
