Jeopardy host Ken Jennings has thoughts about the poster for Season 43.
Only half of Jennings’ face appears in one image promoting the season, which he posted as a snap on Instagram. With Jennings’ closed-lipped smile against the dark background, the host said the poster brought something very specific to mind. “Jeopardy! but it’s one of those sex thrillers from the ‘90s starring, like, Stephen Baldwin,” he wrote in his post’s caption.
Baldwin played a string of gritty roles during the decade, including in 1995’s The Usual Suspects and 1998’s One Tough Cop.
The new poster comes just after Jeopardy producers teased “big changes” for the new season, which premiered on September 14.
Executive producers Michael Davies and Sarah Whitcomb-Foss talked about what fans should expect on the Inside Jeopardy podcast earlier this month. “I don’t know if everyone has noticed at home, but we’ve had a few upgrades,” Whitcomb-Foss said on the show. “Our lighting team has been hard at work. New columns. New lighting colors. It’s like a glow-up.”
The changes aren’t only cosmetic. The show advertised a job posting for a clue writer for the first time in 42 years, following the retirement of writer Jim Rhine in July. The producers also revealed potential plans for a live episode and that the season’s theme would be “Knowledge Wins.” Jennings told W. Kamau Bell that the motto is particularly important in the age of MAGA.
“On Jeopardy, you can’t say, ‘What is, the moon landing never happened, Ken.’ You know we’re not going to go to the tape for that one. No alternative facts on Jeopardy,” he said on the podcast Bell’s Who’s With Me? podcast. “On Jeopardy, questions have answers, or, I guess, answers have questions. And I think that’s kind of refreshing.”
