The unanswered Jeopardy! question: Who will be the new host?

Jeopardy! needed a host, and Lucille Ball had an enthusiastic suggestion for creator Merv Griffin: The smooth-voiced, debonair emcee of the High Rollers game show. That was 1984. Decades later, filling the void left by the late Alex Trebek involves sophisticated research and a parade of guest hosts doing their best to impress viewers and the studio that’s expected to make the call before the new season begins taping later this summer.

Think of Sony Pictures Television as clutching the rose, and Mayim Bialik, Anderson Cooper, Katie Couric and Jeopardy! champs Ken Jennings and Buzzy Cohen among the suitors so far, with more to come including Robin Roberts, Dr. Sanjay Gupta and LeVar Burton.

Sony has “the most robust team of people I have ever seen looking at this and analyzing it in a very cerebral way,” said executive producer Mike Richards. “It’s a real change from the way casting has traditionally been done on television.”

Trebek helped build the show’s “display of excellence with his own excellence. And it’s tremendously difficult to find somebody to replace him, not only because of the status that he had in the American imagination,” said Deepak Sarma, a Case Western Reserve University professor and Netflix cultural consultant. “Anyone who is going to take his position will be judged in the end against this model of perfection.”

Among the Jeopardy! subs are men and women of colour and prospects from a variety of fields, including NFL quarterback Aaron Rodgers.

The approach makes sense to Louis Virtel, a long-time fan whose vantage point is informed by writing for a game show ( Match Game) and competing on Jeopardy! in 2015.

“It’s great to see all these different fill-ins. I’m open to suggestions, and I think most people are,” said Virtel.

What makes for a good Jeopardy! host?

“I think establishing a sense of comfort (so) the audience just eases into the game,” Virtel said. “Also a sense of stakes, that a real tough game is being played. It’s called Jeopardy! for a reason. The host is there to make sure we’re all on our toes.”

The tryouts are an unusually public form of auditioning, one that could cause flop sweat even for veteran emcees. For actor Bialik of Blossom, The Big Bang Theory and Call Me Kat, any nerves were crowded out by the demands of the job – and she’s a neuroscientist.

“There is very little room for not being 100 per cent dialled in to the job of hosting when you are on that stage,” Bialik said in an email. It proved the most “joyful, challenging, transcendent act I have undertaken – second only to giving birth to my second son on the floor of my living room.”

Series producer Richards, the second temporary host after Trebek’s pancreatic cancer death in November, 2020, at age 80, holds an optimistic view despite the prospect of online trolls and whatever their gripes about the newbie may be. “Ultimately, we are trying to put outt he best product for our fans. That tends to narrow your focus to a pretty nice North Star, as opposed to, ‘What’s the internet going to say?’ ”