I don’t watch Jeopardy anymore; I got tired of it a year or two ago. This was partly because after Ken left, the excitement was gone, sort of like playing a game where you spend a lot of time building up, then lose and have to start all over again; it’s just not fun anymore.
The main reason however is that I noticed something about the questions. A lot of them are too easy, and the “hard” ones are actually just obscure. Most of the questions that I don’t get aren’t important questions that I should know but don’t, but rather questions that are irrelevant and only a few people in the world would know anyway. For example here’s an admittedly exaggerated, but similar example of such a question:
This woman was my sixth grade teacher.
Who the Hell would know that? I do, my teacher might remember me, and perhaps a classmate or two. Or a closer one:
This was the only animal that Elvis visited the first time he went to the zoo.
Unless that was somehow a noteworthy event like being the trigger for his musical career (I don’t believe it was) or had some other significance that would justify public knowledge, only a few people would know that—assuming they can remember it.
Why on Earth would questions like this be on Jeopardy? Sure they’re “hard” and the contestants will probably not get them, but there’s no purpose to having them. They aren’t knowledge, they are trivia. Trivia isn’t usually appropriate for a show like Jeopardy, it’s more suited to quotes-of-the-day.