From the beginning of Jeopardy!, there was a rule that after a contestant won five games in a row, they retired as an “undefeated champion.” This was in part a response to the quiz show scandals of the 1950s. Jeopardy! didn’t want it to seem as if any one player had a suspicious advantage or that the producers had a vested interest in a particular contestant continuing to win. Of course, as I mentioned earlier, the show itself came about in response to those scandals, with Julann Griffin’s suggestion that one way to win back the public’s trust in quiz shows was to provide contestants with the answers and ask them to provide the questions. Thus Jeopardy! was born.
The drawback of the five-game rule was that it didn’t always allow the audience to emotionally invest in the contestants. Just as you got to know a contestant and really started rooting for them, they were forced to stop playing. For instance, Frank Spangenberg was a New York City police officer who attracted a lot of attention in 1990. He was from Flushing, Queens, and had this great handlebar mustache. He set a one-game record of $30,600 and a five-game record of $102,597. But then he was done.
Granted, even after just those five shows Frank became somewhat of a celebrity. When he returned to the show some years later for a champions tournament, he told the story of taking a trip to the Grand Canyon. He was standing by himself on the south rim admiring the view. A woman came out of the woods behind him.
“Oh my God,” she said.
“Yeah,” Frank said, assuming she was referring to the view. “I feel the same way.”
“Oh my God, you’re Frank Spangenberg,” she said. “I know you from Jeopardy!”
Frank joked that his notoriety made doing undercover police work impossible.
In 2003, as we readied to begin taping our twentieth season, our executive producer, Harry Friedman, suggested doing away with the five-game rule. Our two supervising producers, Rocky Schmidt and Lisa Broffman, were initially concerned. What if you got a contestant on a hot streak who was unlikable, who the audience couldn’t stand to watch? But we decided to take a chance, and it was probably the best thing that happened to the show.