Jeopardy! Ratings Rise Following Alex Trebek’s Passing

The entertainment world has been reeling from the death of Jeopardy! host Alex Trebek, who passed away at the age of 80 earlier this month. Tributes have continued to pour in for the legendary game show host — and it looks like the series’ ratings are matching that reverence. According to a new report (courtesy of The Hollywood Reporter), Jeopardy! earned its best ratings in seven months in the week of November 9th, in the days immediately following Trebek’s death on November 8th. The series averaged 10.05 million daily viewers per episode that week, a 24% jump over the show’s season average of 8.1 million. The series has not had over 10 million viewers since April of this year.

While it has been a few weeks since Trebek’s passing, the show’s advanced filming schedule has left several weeks of new episodes, culminating in his final taped episode that is set to debut on Christmas Day.

Trebek hosted Jeopardy! for over three decades, continuing to do so even after publicly announcing his cancer diagnosis in March of 2019. In the year and a half that followed, Trebek continued to update fans on his condition — as well as the emotional struggles he felt while undergoing that journey.

“Now I’d be lying if I said the journey had been an easy one,” Trebek previously shared in a video update. “There were some good days but a lot of not-so-good days. I joked with friends that the cancer won’t kill me, the chemo treatments will. There were moments of great pain, days when certain bodily functions no longer functioned and sudden, massive attacks of great depression that made me wonder if it really was worth fighting on. But I brushed that aside quickly because that would have been a massive betrayal – a betrayal of my wife and soulmate, Jean, who has given her all to help me survive. It would have been a betrayal of other cancer patients who have looked to me as an inspiration and a cheerleader of sorts, of the value of living and hope, of my faith in God and the millions of prayers that have been said on my behalf.”

While the series has yet to name a full-time replacement host for Trebek, it did announce earlier this week that Jeopardy! champion Ken Jennings would be the first in a string of interim hosts.