'Jeopardy!' Fans Slam Contestants for Missing 'Basic' Questions

Jeopardy! fans are expressing their frustration after a run of episodes when contestants seemed to keep "fluffing some pretty easy questions."

Over a week in mid-July, a flurry of Twitter posts from viewers bemoaned the missed opportunities.

One fan even tweeted to suggest that host "Ken Jennings [was] looking annoyed at the contestants fluffing some pretty easy questions."

Another fan wrote: "Whoa! What was up with the folks on #Jeopardy tonight? For people of that caliber, those were some pretty basic questions that no one was getting..."

A third posted: "Holy s****! I keep saying the Final #Jeopardy clues keep getting easier, but today's takes the cake. So easy. However, two of the three contestants either misread or misunderstood the clue and didn't get the answer right. Everyone involved at @Jeopardy should be ashamed."

However, it is not uncommon for contestants to get multiple questions wrong. Even Jennings, who has the longest winning streak in the history of the show, got 264 questions wrong during his 75-night run, according to The Jeopardy! Fan website. This is an average of 3.52 incorrect answers in each episode.

Fans' reaction on Twitter seems to chime with recent polling about Jeopardy! clues,conducted on behalf of Newsweek.

In the survey conducted on July 6 by Redfield & Wilton Strategies, just over half of the respondents—51 percent of 1,500 people—"believe the questions on Jeopardy! are the same in difficulty/easiness as they used to be a few years ago."

On July 10, fans of ABC's syndicated show had complained about a "poorly worded clue."

The Final Jeopardy! clue read: "At the 1865 Paris art salon, the elder of these two men said 'If the younger were successful, it would be because his name sounds like mine.'"

Only one player correctly guessed, "Who are Édouard Manet and Claude Monet?" while the other two players only wrote one name.

"Exceptionally poorly worded final question on #Jeopardy tonight—looks like many were confused about whether it was asking for one name or two," wrote one person on Twitter.

The clue came from an interview Monet gave art critic Marc Elder at his famous Giverny property in 1924.

He told Elder about the moment Manet had made the "his name sounds like mine" comment—not realizing the younger artist could hear him. According to Monet, Manet became very distressed when he realized.

"He was upset. I was no less," Monet said in the interview, which was republished in the newspaper Le Parisien in 2015.

Update 07/14/23, 10:16 a.m. ET: This story was updated to include a Newsweek poll.

Correction 08/03/23, 12:30 p.m. ET: This article has been updated to reflect that the tweets were referring to several episodes of the quiz show that aired in the same week, not to a single episode. It was also updated with statistics about Jennings' incorrect responses during his run on the show.