The Awesome Column

Is this the wheel from Wheel of Fortune I found backstage at CBS? Maybe. Maybe it’s The Price Is Right. I’m too much of an elite to know the difference.

Key indicators that a nation is coming apart include the emergence of paramilitary organizations, a refusal to recognize the legitimacy of leadership, and watching separate game shows.

Wheel of Fortune and Jeopardy! have run back-to-back in most broadcast television markets for decades, meaning that programmers know the audience of one stays to watch the other. They are The Cosby Show and Family Ties of games shows. Or, for those too young for that reference, the random TikTok video and random TikTok video of game shows.

Both shows were both created by Merv Griffin and are still owned by the same company. The crew that makes Jeopardy!at the beginning of the week switches to making Wheel at the end of the week. Because the Jeopardy! green room is so small, during Covid the contestants sit in the audience area of the Wheel stage next to a sign reading, “Do Not Uncover or Touch the Wheel Under Any Circumstances” and I have been told that they can’t help themselves from doing exactly that.

For generations, Americans were able to watch both a speed test of knowledge and hangman with mall shopping. “Everyone loved Jeopardy!, including my mother, who had a ninth grade education,” says Tom Nichols, an undefeated five-time Jeopardy! champion, former professor, and Atlantic contributor. “Weird Al did not make a beloved MTV parody of Jeopardy! because it was only for grad school wonks. Groundhog Day didn’t have a great Jeopardy! scene in it because it’s some Ivy League thing.”

Nichols, the author of The Death of Expertise, remembers an era of mutual respect. “When I tried out for Jeopardy! in 1993, Alex Trebek came to the tryout in Burlington, Vermont. Someone among the aspiring contestants made a crack about Wheel, and he was quick to point out that Wheel was harder than it looks and that the people who play it aren’t dumb.”

That time is gone. In the last year, Jeopardy! has become the game show for the liberal elite, while Wheel is now for populist conservatives. We are months from hearing a Wheel contestant say, “I’d like to buy a gun, Pat.”

In March, the Twitter elite mocked three Wheel contestants for failing, over and over, to solve “another feather in your cap” with only three letters left. And then again a few weeks later when contestants took five tries to get “renting a pedal boat” when the puzzle was only missing the “l”. To liberals, it was like watching three Proud Boys struggle to spell MAGA.

Last month, the New York Post continued its assault on Jeopardy! with an article that started, “The most pretentious game show on television has slipped up again.” Jeopardy! has fueled conservative columnists upset about new liberal host Mayim Bialik, transgender winner Amy Schneider, and the firing of post-Trebek host Mike Richards for an old podcast in which he referred to models at the Computer Electronics Show in Las Vegas as “boothstitutes.”

I know four people who were on Jeopardy!, but no one who has even tried out for Wheel. The biggest all-time Jeopardy!winner is Ken Jennings, who wrote a cultural history of comedy that got a starred review from Publishers Weekly. The biggest Wheel winner is Autumn Erhard, who is an animal pharmaceutical sales representative, which is a job I have no doubt Mike Richards has a clever name for.

Andy Wood, a four-time Jeopardy! champion, 2021 Tournament of Champions quarterfinalist, former engineer, and founder of Portland’s huge Bridgetown Comedy Festival, is anti-game-show-partisanship. Yet, when pressed, Wood’s elitism seeps out.

“I would pretty much only watch Wheel when I accidentally tuned in to Jeopardy! too early. But I don’t look down on it. It just isn’t as interesting of a game for me to watch. And that’s not because it’s intellectually beneath me. I loved Deal or No Deal, which is objectively pretty stupid, but I thought it was interesting to see the contestants’ different levels of risk-aversion and irrationality play out.” Only a Jeopardy! champion could cleverly destroy something by comparing it toDeal or No Deal, a show mainly known for its boothstitutes. (No offense to former briefcase models Meghan Markle or Chrissy Teigen, but it was a creepy job.)

Two-time Jeopardy! champion, Michael Colton (Harvard graduate, co-creator of the ABC sitcom Home Economics, and fellow I Love the ’80s heartthrob) not only acknowledges the game show divide, but luxuriates in faux self-deprecation about it.

“Jeopardy! players are nerds who know tons of esoteric trivia and annoy other people with it. (This morning in the writers room I was razzed for referencing Thomas Pynchon.),” Colton told me in an email. “Wheel of Fortune players are more normal people whose only requirement for the game is a familiarity with words and idioms. I don’t imagine that Wheelplayers are teased by their co-workers for knowing phrases like ‘a chip off the old block.’” I bet, though, that after hearing that Pynchon humblebrag that they would solve “a -ick off the old block” by guessing a “d.”

As people use their politics to decide which car to buy, which theme park to go to, which razors to shave with and which coffee to drink, we are cleaving into two societies with different values, different goals, and different games to play. Things that were once trivial become tribal markers. Which confuses Alex Schmidt, four-time Jeopardy! champion, New Yorker contributor, and host of the podcast Secretly Incredibly Fascinating.

He argues that Jeopardy! and Wheel are merely two different sports. “So if you’re a huge fan of one, that might not carry over. But you would think it would carry over more, sort of like how U.S. sports fans can get way into the football, baseball, basketball, and hockey in their big city, all at once,” he argues.

Except we haven’t had that for a while. Fans of basketball, soccer, tennis skew democrat, while Republicans are more likely to watch golf, car racing and college football.

Unless we bring this county together soon, I fear for the worst. Sometime in the future, there might be restaurants I can’t go to. Luckily, I already prefer fish to steak.

Joel Stein is the senior distinguished visiting fellow at the Joel Stein Institute. A former columnist for Time, the L.A. Times, and Entertainment Weekly, he is, amazingly, also the author of In Defense of Elitism: Why I’m Better Than You and You’re Better Than Someone Who Didn’t Buy This Book and Man Made: A Stupid Quest for Masculinity. Follow him on Twitter,Facebook, Instagram, Friendster, or Google+.