The show has experienced a long life in several incarnations over the course of nearly a half-century, spending more than 12 years as a daytime network program and having currently run in syndication for 39 seasons.
series, hosted by Art Fleming, premiered at 11:30 a.m. Eastern (10:30 Central) on March 30, 1964, originating from studios at the NBC headquarters in New York City's 30 Rockefeller Plaza.
NBC moved the program to 12:00 noon Eastern (11:00 a.m. Central) after 18 months,[citation needed] making it accessible to businessmen coming home for their lunch break or else watching it on restaurant or bar sets, and college students departing their classes for the day watching it on student center or dormitory sets.
[1] The show had practically no trouble whatsoever against soap operas such as Love of Life and Where the Heart Is on CBS and mostly sitcom reruns on ABC.
Refreshing the daytime lineup became especially imperative to Bolen when CBS launched a surprise success in the soap opera The Young and the Restless at 12:00 p.m. EST (11:00 a.m. CST) in March 1973, drawing away younger audiences in particular.
continued to produce high ratings in the 12:00 noon time slot (also against the ABC revival of Password), Bolen moved the game to 10:30 a.m. Eastern (9:30 Central) on January 7, 1974, putting it up against CBS' The $10,000 Pyramid,[1][2] to make room for Jackpot!, a stylish, youth-oriented riddle contest hosted by Geoff Edwards, in Jeopardy!
stand in the way of her plans for a more youthful image for NBC's daytime lineup, so she resolved to prepare it for eventual cancellation, a rare instance of a network deliberately trying to undermine one of its programs.
With the July move, many of the previously tenaciously devoted viewers began abandoning the program; most of the remaining ones were either middle-aged housewives or elderly retirees, two groups undesirable to advertisers due to their usually fixed retail brand preferences, rendering them unpersuadable to try new ones.
Its replacement was the expansion of Another World to a full hour, the first daytime serial to expand to that duration; in April 1975, another serial, Days of Our Lives began occupying that time slot and eventually brought success to NBC there (Days moved exclusively to the network streaming service Peacock in September 2022, with NBC News Daily airing in its 1:30 p.m. EST (12:30 p.m. CST) timeslot.).
To compensate Griffin for canceling the program, which still had a year left on its contract, NBC purchased Wheel of Fortune, another creation of his, which premiered on January 6, 1975 (the following Monday) at 10:30 a.m. Eastern (9:30 Central).
By 1974, though, the market was flooded with evening versions of network games like the Hollywood Squares and The Price Is Right, and Jeopardy!, already on a popularity downswing for some time, did not get anywhere near nationwide clearance, thus dooming it to failure after one season.
took the spot of the soap opera For Richer, For Poorer on NBC's daytime schedule and initially aired weekdays at 10:30 a.m. From its debut until January 5, 1979, Jeopardy!
Its place on the schedule was taken by Password Plus, which at the time had been airing at 12:30 p.m., and the cancellation allowed NBC to expand its top-rated soap opera, Another World, to ninety minutes from sixty, later in the afternoon.
[6] Fleming later stated that he disagreed with moving the show to southern California, as he considered the contestants there to not be as appealing as those who played the game in New York were.
One significant difference from the 1964 to 1975 versions was that only the winning contestant kept his or her earnings, while the runners-up were awarded higher-end consolation prizes instead (changed in later years to $3,000 for second place and $2,000 for third).
After Fleming declined to return to the show because of his dissatisfaction with the changes, Griffin took the advice of Lucille Ball, who recommended Alex Trebek for the position.
[9] Trebek, in turn, recommended Johnny Gilbert, whom he had met at a dinner party a few years prior, for the announcer position.
However, the new version built upon early ratings successes in Cleveland and Detroit, where it was slotted in the same 7:00–8:00 p.m. block (the Prime Time access hour) in which Wheel also appeared.
WNBC's more favorable fringe time and daytime slots were all filled with other programming, a situation that was also true at all of the other major stations in the city; WABC and WCBS also cleared their networks' schedules completely and had other programming, including other long-running syndicated game shows and reruns, filing the holes in their schedules, as did independents WNEW-TV, WOR-TV and WPIX, which also carried cartoons in addition to reruns.
Like previous shows that aired in the 4:30 p.m. slot following Jeopardy!, Card Sharks proved unable to retain a good percentage of its lead-in's audience, and WABC moved it to 12:05 a.m. following Nightline.
The 7:30 p.m. slot was filled by a syndicated revival of Hollywood Squares, hosted by John Davidson which debuted in the fall of 1986, and was performing well for WABC against the immensely popular Wheel of Fortune on WCBS.
ABC did not require its stations to air World News Tonight at a specific time, giving WABC the freedom to make the move if it wanted.
[26] After moving the CBS Evening News to 6:30 p.m. in the fall of 1988, WCBS picked up a syndicated edition of the NBC game show Win, Lose or Draw to air at 7:00 p.m. as a lead-in for Wheel, while WNBC, (which eventually moved NBC Nightly News to 6:30 in 1991), eventually began airing newsmagazines (such as Inside Edition) and a new syndicated version of Family Feud, hosted by Ray Combs, (who also hosted the show's daytime revival on CBS) in the half-hour prior to prime time.
The only exception has long been KTRK in Houston, which had never carried both game shows in part due to an hour-long newscast in the Prime Time Access hour where Wheel is normally seen (and whose hour-long newscast predated parent company Capital Cities' acquisition of ABC in 1986); both game shows have aired on different Houston stations: first on NBC affiliate KPRC from their respective start dates until 1986, and then to CBS affiliate KHOU which also carried The Oprah Winfrey Show over its entire run (making KTRK the only ABC owned-and-operated station that never carried Oprah over its 25-year run).
King World and production company Sony Pictures Television indicated that as of August 10, 2006, some 49 of the 210 stations that carried the show at that time were prepared for the transition.
had been available intermittently on Netflix until August 2021; the agreement with Pluto allows Sony to continue selling episodes of the series to subscription video-on-demand (SVOD) providers.
[44] In 2024, host Ken Jennings indicated that Sony was in negotiations with Hulu (which, like ABC, is owned by The Walt Disney Company) and Amazon Prime Video (the home of an upcoming spinoff Pop Culture Jeopardy!)
to bring next-day streaming to an SVOD platform by September 2025; executive producer Michael Davies also noted that the show had no plans of ever leaving broadcast television.
Hosted by Survivor star Jeff Probst, this version highlighted post-1950s popular music trivia rather than focusing on general knowledge.
The fewer clues allows Patrick and the contestants more time to interact during the interview portion of the show and during a "postgame" segment during and after the closing credits.