The Jeopar-verse in 2026

We’re nearly two weeks into the new year; I hope 2026 has gotten off to an auspicious start for all of you. Today, a few questions about Jeopardy! that have been rattling around in my head — things that I’ll be looking to see how they play out as the year unfolds.

What we know: Season 2 moves to Netflix from Amazon Prime. Colin Jost returns as host. Taping of the season started on January 7 and ran through Sunday.

What we don’t: When it’ll be streaming. How many teams there’ll be, and what format the season will take. Also, will the show still feature teams of three players? In early December, BuzzerBlog reported hearing that a last-minute change to duos was made. If true, that’s a bush league move. Wherever the impetus for it came from (that is, whether Netflix or Sony), that should have accompanied the announcement of the renewal and been incorporated into the audition process from the beginning.

What we know: It’ll air Friday nights starting February 27; its time returns to 8:00 Eastern/7:00 Central, reversing the shift an hour later that we saw for both Celebrity and Masters last year. We also know this will be an “all-stars” edition with players from the previous three seasons returning. The entire season is in the can already, having been taped in the fall.

What we don’t: Whether this will be a 27-player field. I’ve seen remarks from people that indicate it won’t be. They’re to the general effect that previous Celebrity champions Ike Barinholtz, Lisa Ann Walter, and W. Kamau Bell will get byes into the semifinals, meaning it’ll be something akin to a Tournament of Champions but with a single-game final — 21 players, 10 hour-long episodes. (The now standard Celebrity format, including Triple Jeopardy, is presumed to be unchanged.) It’s not clear how Tournament of Champions qualification would be handled with the returning Celebrity winners; this raises the possibility that if one of the previous champions wins, that player could appear in two different editions of the ToC, which would be unprecedented in the show’s history.

Hopefully the producers shed some light on all of these matters on this month’s edition of Inside Jeopardy!.

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Two years ago, the second season of Masters wasn’t officially announced until mid-February 2024, so no word yet on it coming back in 2026 isn’t necessarily proof of a shift in the show’s timing. That said, Michael Davies did mention over the summer that as the one paying the piper, ABC calls the tune on the matter, so a move wouldn’t be out of the question. The possibility of that happening can be informed by trying to read the tea leaves on…

It has been believed for months that contrary to Seasons 40 and 41, a Jeopardy! Invitational Tournament will not immediately follow the 2026 Tournament of Champions. This is due to the one major preempting event that I neglected to mention just before the season started: the XXV Winter Olympic Games. Here are the key points regarding Milano Cortina 2026:

• The Opening Ceremony is on Friday, February 6, and the Games run through to Sunday, February 22

• The time difference is equivalent to Paris 2024; Central European Time is six hours ahead of Eastern Standard Time

• In Paris, NBC presented the Opening Ceremony twice — live in the afternoon, with an edited-down repeat in prime time

• NBC has stated that it’ll show three hours of tape-delayed coverage in prime time each weeknight, and at least five hours of live coverage daily — “on weekend mornings and every afternoon.”

More about the Opening Ceremony below. But if that weekday afternoon coverage is run from 1:00 to 6:00 PM Eastern, twenty-six media markets will not see Jeopardy! in its usual position for all of Weeks 23 and 24 of the season (the weeks of February 9 and 16). Among them are the Twin Cities, St. Paul, Austin, and Oklahoma City.1 That’s certainly sufficient to preclude running a tournament that qualifies one or more players into the next Masters in that time frame.

While Pop Culture Jeopardy! just wrapped up2, tapings of the main program will resume in the last week of January. There are presently ten tape dates on the schedule — January 26, 27; February 2, 3, 10, 11, 12, 24, 25, 26. All except January 27 show the customary 10:00 AM and 2:00 PM sessions, indicating that they should be five-game tape days. (January 27 only shows one session; tapings previously scheduled for January 28 have been canceled.) If all of that’s regular play, it takes us out to mid-April. A JIT in the same format as the last two takes fourteen to sixteen games; were it to follow the current tapings, it would extend at least into the first week of May. In other words, IF everything being taped through the end of February is regular play, it seems there wouldn’t be enough time to air a JIT before the space in the calendar where ABC has aired Masters the last three years. It’s possible that one of those two weeks in February with three tape days could itself be a JIT. At this point, I won’t be surprised either way.

Could something else be slotted into the syndicated program in May if ABC doesn’t run Season 4 of Masters in that month? Well, one option could be to just have the JIT there, for a Masters to be played in the autumn of 2026. Additionally, Michael Davies has floated the possibility of a high school or college event under those circumstances. The thing is: traditionally, those tournaments being of lower difficulty than regular play, separate testing and audition processes have been held. There hasn’t been a peep from Jeopardy! on that front about any such tests. I feel as though if the show were planning to head in that direction, we’d have heard something about it by now, even if through the grapevine as opposed to official channels.

I think the deciding game will not air on Friday, February 6, the day of the Opening Ceremony of the Winter Olympics.

But doesn’t the ToC final end when it ends, after a player has won three games? How can the show keep it from finishing on the 6th?

With the exhibition match, that’s how. The top three seeds play a no-stakes game so they have equal practice on the buzzer as the other eighteen ToC players who competed in a quarterfinal. In 2022, this aired on Election Day; last year, it was after the ToC final, allowing the JIT to begin on a Monday. Thus, the airing date of the ToC final can be pushed out one day if needed. And moving the last game of the final off of a day when nearly every NBC station airing Jeopardy! will preempt the show more than satisfies my definition of “need.”

What does this look like in practice? If the exhibition does air before the final (either after the quarterfinals or the semifinals), that would indicate to me that the final’s length will not be exactly six games, because the exhibition would push the end of the final to February 9 in that case. Conversely, if the exhibition isn’t aired before the final, the show wouldn’t want to bump the last game onto the 6th — so in that case, it won’t be exactly five games long.

EDIT, January 22: I’ve now seen the actual schedule for coverage of the Opening Ceremony. 2:00 – 5:00 PM EST live, encore in the three-hour network prime time block, not spilling over into the “access hour.” This means that the total number of preempted markets is… nine, covering 3.4% of the country. That isn’t significant enough to factor into the show’s decision calculus — even leaving aside what the producers actually said this past Monday.

With 2026 upon us, the Minimum Basic Agreement between the Writers Guild of America and the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers is less than four months away from expiration. I haven’t seen much in the news about negotiations over a new deal, other than the WGA naming its negotiating team back in November.

Last time around, the show got all the writing for Season 39 done before the WGA went to the picket line, even though taping of it and Season 1 of Masters extended into May. But that didn’t allow any leeway to get syndicated shows for the start of 2023-24 taped ahead of time — which might have proved logistically challenging in any event, as the original plan was to start Season 40 with a postseason. By contrast, the first five weeks of Season 41 were taped in late May and early June 2024, guarding against the possibility that IATSE (who represents most of the crew) might walk off the job.

Further, a precedent was established three years ago that under the show’s current leadership, Jeopardy! will not play regular games with first-time contestants on reused/recycled clues. This was why we got fifteen additional weeks of Second Chance and Champions Wildcard to start 2023-24. If we get to that point, and the show elected to go that route again, there’s a pool of players available for Second Chance and Champions Wildcard. For the latter event, it would be the 71 one- and two-day champions who weren’t brought back over the qualification cycles for the 2025 and 2026 ToCs. And that’s at minimum; the show could go back even further into past champions.

Of course, we’re all hoping the Jeopardy! writers remain on the job —and because a fair deal is struck between the WGA and the AMPTP, as opposed to fear of taking another severe hit to their pocketbooks so soon after the last one. This is something that every Jeopardy! fan should keep an eye on over the first four months of 2026.

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