As WGA strike continues, 'Jeopardy!' tweaks plans heading into season 40

“Jeopardy!” executive producer Michael Davies has tweaked plans for the game show’s upcoming 40th season, in light of the ongoing TV and film writers strike. He confirmed “Jeopardy!” will reuse some past-season questions, although in selected tournament play only and not regular-season games.

“We were going to kick off the entire season with [season 39] postseason episodes,” Davies, 57, said Monday   on the show’s official podcast, “Inside ‘Jeopardy!,’ ” which he co-hosts. Planned were “about 10½ weeks” of “a second-chance [tournament]” for select season 39 contestants, followed by a new champions wild card tournament and then the traditional Tournament of Champions.

Regular season 40 games then would have followed, he said, with the exceptions of a new invitational tournament announced in January and, later, “high school or college ‘Jeopardy!’ ”

But with the industrywide Writers Guild of America (WGA) strike that began in May, “I realized that ‘Jeopardy!’ was going to have to go into some sort of holding pattern,” Davies said, adding, “I knew immediately that we would have to postpone our [season 39] postseason, because the postseason, the way it feeds into everything else … is so important to me” that it needed to be delayed “to a point when our writers will have returned and be able to write the original material that that tournament deserves.”

However, he amended, “We’re going to open the season with a second-chance tournament for players from season 37 who lost their initial game, and winners from that will advance to a season 37 and season 38 champions wild card,” and these games would use “a combination of material that our WGA writers wrote before the strike, which is still in the database, and material that is being redeployed from multiple, multiple seasons of the show.”

Regular season 40 episodes would not reuse questions, he confirmed. “It would not be fair to have new contestants making their first appearance on the Alex Trebek Stage” — Sony Pictures Studios’ former Stage 10, renamed in honor of the late host in 2021 — “doing it with non-original material or … a combination of original material and material that was written pre-strike,” Davies said.

He noted that ABC’s upcoming prime-time “Celebrity ‘Jeopardy!’ ” season 2 “was entirely written under the WGA contract before the strike was called. So that material has been organized by our research teams and applied to the show and that is all original, fresh material.”

Davies also said second- and third-place prizes were each increasing $1,000, to $3,000 and $2,000, respectively.

Trade reports said that season 40 will start on Sept. 11.