“The show has definitely changed,” said Friedman. “But it’s very much changed along with the times.” In other words, that movement seen above from “World Travel” to “My Son, The Doctor” is not willed into existence. Rather, it’s a growing with culture. Jeopardy! changed, and changed productively (compare its success to other long-running and flailing stalwarts like the nightly news and soap operas), because TV changed. HBO, DVDs, and the web happened, and in the process, we’ve moved from a norm, sometimes called Least Objectionable Programming, to one in which viewers are trusted with the possibilities of the medium as showrunners explore complexity and nuance.

The continuing evolution of Jeopardy! lets us see this shift happening in real time, providing a constant basis of comparison that isn’t there if we just look at, say, Full House beside The Sopranos. From a straightforward trivia contest predicated on a set of largely academic knowledge, the show has become a repository for jokes, references (both to pop culture and to itself), and language games. The questions have become dense tangles of allusions that rely on contestants’ ability to make connections and inventively parse language. Over the years, the show has been able to take advantage of the new complexity audiences were willing to accept, and the writers have seized the opportunity to turn this trivia show into something that intuitively probes the ways in which we understand the world.

– Mike Barthel, GQ.

This is an awesome article about Jeopardy!, focusing on the show’s oft-overlooked but excellent writers.