Jeopardy! around the world

Jeopardy! is an American television quiz show created by Merv Griffin, in which contestants are presented with trivia clues in the form of answers and must phrase their responses in the form of a question. The show has experienced a long life in several incarnations over the course of nearly a half-century, spending more than 11 years as a daytime network program and having currently run in syndication for 30 seasons. It has also gained a worldwide following with a multitude of international adaptations.

The original Jeopardy! series, hosted by Art Fleming, premiered at 11:30 a.m. Eastern (10:30 Central) on March 30, 1964, originating from the NBC headquarters in New York City's Rockefeller Center. NBC moved the program to 12:00 noon Eastern (11:00 a.m. Central) after 18 months, making it accessible to businessmen coming home for their lunch break or else watching it on restaurant or bar sets, and college students departing their classes for the day. These two constituencies, who ordinarily did not have the time or interest to view other daytime programs, made the show a runaway hit, propelling its ratings to second place among all daytime game shows by the end of the decade—second only to its immediate lead-in, The Hollywood Squares. The show had practically no trouble whatsoever against soap operas such as Love of Life on CBS and mostly sitcom reruns on ABC.

In 1973, Lin Bolen, then Vice President of Daytime Programming at NBC, began eliminating longer-running game shows from the network in an aggressive attempt to bolster ratings among women aged 18–34. Refreshing the daytime lineup became especially imperative to Bolen when CBS launched a surprise success in the soap opera The Young and the Restless at 12:00 p.m. EST (11:00 a.m. CST), drawing away younger audiences in particular. Although Jeopardy! continued to produce high ratings in the 12:00 noon time slot (also against the ABC revival of Password), Bolen moved the game to 10:30 a.m. Eastern (9:30 Central) on January 7, 1974, putting it up against CBS' The $10,000 Pyramid, and placed Jackpot!, a stylish, youth-oriented riddle contest hosted by Geoff Edwards, in Jeopardy!'s former time slot. Bolen and other NBC executives were surprised, though, when Jeopardy actually beat Pyramid for several weeks in February and March, prompting CBS to cancel Pyramid for failing to draw, according to producer Bob Stewart (who also produced Jackpot!), a 30 share that CBS daytime executives required a show to have in order to stay on its daytime schedule (Pyramid returned several weeks later on ABC in an afternoon slot and went on to become one of the most popular games of the 1970s and 1980s.) CBS relocated Gambit to 10:30 a.m. on April 1, which ran about even with Jeopardy! in the ratings, with Gambit having perhaps a slight lead, due to its more traditional housewife target audience.

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