Since Jeopardy! will start its 2022-2023 season with Ken Jennings and Mayim Bialik as hosts, producers can organize their schedules further in advance than they could before. Executive producer Mike Davies said the plan for the new season will be to keep their tenures on the show longer than this past season to bring some added consistency to the show. Bialik’s schedule also has to be built around her commitments to the Fox sitcom Call Me Kat.
Jennings will start the season off in September as host of the first-ever Second Chance competition, which includes previous contestants vying for another shot at winning a Jeopardy! game. He will also host one of the most-anticipated Tournaments of Champions in years, with Amy Schneider, Matt Amodio, Mattea Roach, Ryan Long, and other stars returning. Jennings’ first hosting run will end in December.
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Bialik will host ABC’s Celebrity Jeopardy! this fall. She will begin hosting the standard Jeopardy! in January, with “a couple of new tournaments” during her tenure. The former Big Bang Theory star will also host the Jeopardy! National College Championship. Bialik will host “as many weeks as she can manage” with her Call Me Kat commitments.
“We know you value consistency, so we will not flip flop the hosts constantly and will keep you informed about the hosting schedule,” Davies wrote Wednesday. This was possibly a reference to the inconsistency of this past season, where Bialik and Jennings have switched weeks with little advanced notice for fans.
Jeopardy! producers came up with the two-host plan in September following the debacle with Mike Richards. Richards was the executive producer who oversaw the celebrity host carousel during the 2020-2021 season, which ended with Richards naming himself the permanent host. He resigned after filming one week’s worth of episodes because his offensive comments from a podcast resurfaced. At first, he planned to remain an executive producer, but Sony Pictures Television fired him. Davies came in as interim EP, and Sony hired him full-time in April.
“Mayim and Ken are both extraordinarily talented and simply lovely humans,” Davies wrote. “They support the staff and each other. They love and respect this institution of a television program. In return, the staff and I are honored to work alongside them.”
After Sony shared the news, Jennings celebrated returning to the show. “I’m not a professional broadcaster, obviously. I still get nerves out there every single show,” Jennings tweeted. “But I was lucky enough to watch Alex host Jeopardy! for decades – about, as well as the job, could possibly be done. I hope a drop of that Trebekian perfection slips through sometimes.”
