New to the Party

Amy Ozols, a rookie Jeopardy! writer, is good to go. Sort of.

Imagine you’ve been invited to a dinner party. It’s at a lovely townhouse, one you’ve walked past every single day since you were a child, admiring the façade on literally thousands of occasions, but you’ve never been inside. You’re not really sure why you’ve been invited there now—perhaps there’s been some sort of clerical error—but it seems weird to ask, so off you go.

It is a unique party indeed. On the menu is a gourmet meal of infinite courses, appearing one after another, ceaselessly, in regular intervals. You’re the last to arrive, and the meal is already underway, so you try not to overthink things and you just…start eating. The food is exceptional. “This is great,” you think to yourself. “I love going to parties.” Except you’re getting full, and the plates keep arriving. Everyone else keeps eating, taking dainty bites, using the correct utensils, making pleasant conversation, yet somehow clearing their plates easily before the next course arrives. They’re not gaining weight. Their party attire is unsullied. Whereas you look and feel like you’re at a pie-eating contest. You’re surrounded by stacks of dishes, half-eaten food, an untouched leg of mutton. There are flies. It’s very embarrassing. A fellow guest takes pity on you and whispers that you’ll get better at keeping up, that you’ll be able to enjoy the party more the longer you stay, and you feel relieved. Then you ask him how long he’s been at the party, and he takes a patient sip of claret before answering, “Twenty-five years.”

I’m going to put this dinner party metaphor out of its misery, but you get the idea. It’s daunting to start working at a place where almost everyone you meet has been working for decades. And where they’ve all known each other for decades. And where they’re all very, very good at a job that’s very, very difficult, and where they’re all very, very smart. (Like, scary smart. Benevolent-cyborg smart.)

My first category to air. April 10, 2025.

That’s the situation I’m in. I started working at Jeopardy! earlier this year. And I feel grateful on a daily basis for my inexplicable good fortune. But also I feel…daunted. Not by any fault of the show’s wonderful people, who have been welcoming and kind to me without exception. Being daunted is partly just how I’m wired, and partly it’s a function of the respect I have for the show. The scope of its legacy looms very large, and it makes me want to do a good job. But also the machine itself is just plain daunting: the number of shows, the volume of material, the experience of the staff, the meticulousness of the research process, the relentlessness of the schedule. For one such as myself who tends toward apprehension, there is much to be daunted by.

A category I wrote to honor my mother.

There are many examples, so I’ll just pick one: the database. That’s where you search before writing a clue, to make sure you’re not stepping on something that’s already been written. Usually the goal is to write about something that hasn’t been covered in the last season or two, so the material doesn’t feel repetitious. This gets more and more difficult as the season progresses, because more material gets used; it’s a built-in challenge of writing for almost any game show. But at Jeopardy!... yikes. With the number of clues used per game, and the number of games played per season, and the number of seasons the show has been on the air, the difficulty of exploring new material in new ways seems at times (to me, anyway) almost comically high. The show’s other writers seem wholly unfazed by this, yet the first time I logged into the database, I almost had a panic attack. Everything has already been asked, I thought. There is nothing left. I tried to write a clue about the Mausoleum at Halicarnassus, one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. I searched for “Maus” and “Halicarn” in the database, assuming the search would return zero results, meaning I was free to write a clue on this highly specific, somewhat arcane, surely yet-to-be-written-about topic. (I would never assume this now. It was a simpler time.) Over a dozen clues about the Mausoleum at Halicarnassus had been written in the last two seasons alone. Over a dozen clues already written. About the Mausoleum at Halicarnassus. That was the first of roughly one trillion times I thought to myself, This is not an ordinary place.

Every time I have a thought like that, I wish I could share it with my mother. Like a lot of people, I grew up in a house where Jeopardy! was a big deal, and my mother’s devotion was especially zealous. The 7:30 pm time slot was observed with discipline and precision. During the show, when my mother gave a correct response, she’d get excited and unwillingly smack the person sitting next to her. This happened dozens of times per episode, meaning the spot next to her on the couch was the seat to avoid at all costs. Winners of multiple games became celebrities in our home. Frank Spangenberg in particular stands out in my memory, tall and mustachioed; we talked about him like we knew him. Ken joined the pantheon of household names during his winning streak and has remained there ever since. And Alex—well, there are no words. In our house, he was a hero.

My mother died of Alzheimer’s last year. It stunk. The hardest part was how the things she enjoyed just fell away, one after the other, as she declined and couldn’t enjoy them anymore. No more crossword puzzles. No more sitcoms, because she couldn’t follow along with the plots. And of course, no more Jeopardy! That was really hard. But I appreciate that the show was such a big part of who my mother was, to the point where no longer enjoying it meant she was literally no longer herself. It’s like Jeopardy! has been this thread running through different parts of my life, this reliable presence while good things and bad things have happened through the years and even decades. I know a lot of people feel this way—that the show is a character in their lives, a constant, which is part of what makes it so special. So for me now, to be connected with the show in this new way, to get to take part in the whole thing, has just been very meaningful.

My mom would absolutely lose her mind if she knew I was working at Jeopardy! She’d get such a kick out of it. So I try to sneak in little things for her where I can. I wrote a category called “You Go, Sister!” about nuns, because she worked with nuns for most of her nursing career, and she loved them. She used to say “G to G” all the time, short for “good to go,” which my sisters and I found quite mortifying. So I used that as a category title, which I think she would have liked. But mostly I’m still trying to keep up with everybody else at the show, this incredible staff of people who makes everything look very easy even though it’s not. Someday I hope to feel less daunted by it all. But in the meantime, I’m OK with daunted. It’s the oddest dinner party I’ve ever attended, and I’m just honored to have been invited.