Jeopardy! Masters first hit airwaves in May 2023, but the show’s players are no strangers to the Jeopardy! universe. The spin-off follows six of Jeopardy!’s highest-ranked champions as they compete for the title of Jeopardy! Masters Champion, the highly coveted Trebeck Trophy, and a whopping $500,000. The elite tournament consists of 20 games and is currently in its second season. However, some fans say Masters shouldn’t be renewed for a third.
RELATED: Ken Jennings Slammed for "Disrespectful" Comment About "Jeopardy!" Champ.
Reigning Masters champion James Holzhauer is back to defend his title in Season 2. Meanwhile, Season 1 Masters finalists Matt Amodio and Mattea Roach are looking to rewrite history and see their names on the leaderboard this season. Tournament of Champions (ToC) winner Yogesh Raut and Jeopardy! Invitational Tournament (JIT) champ Victoria Groce are also in the mix, as is 2022 ToC winner Amy Schneider.
Between regular Jeopardy! episodes and other spin-off tournaments, viewers are already well acquainted with the Masters players and their gameplay. Sometimes, this sense of familiarity can help spruce up the competition. But according to fans on social media, it can also feel a bit redundant—and the truth is in the ratings.
Despite having a wildly successful first season, Jeopardy! Masters viewership is at an all-time low. Masters Season 2 is experiencing a 20 percent drop in ratings, and those numbers are steadily on the decline, as evident in a recent Reddit thread in which a user revealed that episode one only brought in 4.2 million eyeballs compared to the 5.78 viewers who tuned in the year prior.
For a brief moment, Season 2 viewership did get slightly better. Episode two pulled in more viewers than episode one, coming in with 4.32 million. However, those numbers dropped off by episode three, which only had 4.1 million viewers. Masters 2024 is down over 20 percent from Masters 2023, where episodes two and three had 5.49 million and 5.45 million viewers, respectively.
The downfall of Jeopardy! Masters isn’t all too surprising to some fans, who have admitted to tuning out of the series due to “heavy tournament fatigue.”
RELATED: "Jeopardy!" Producer Defends "Brutal" Category After Viewer Complaints.
“It’s clear there’s heavy tournament fatigue based on the near daily posts on social media and Reddit. I’d bet that’s the culprit,” theorized one person in the Reddit thread. Someone else added: “Tournament fatigue as well as fatigue of seeing the same contestants over and over.”
One fan explained they tuned into Season 1 because it was Holzhauer's first time on the Alex Trebek Stage in four years, but now the novelty has worn off.
“A year ago it was must see. Now…not so much. It’s no longer special. How can we miss them if they never go away?” said another.
“Last year was different as there were 3 big champions that season, then add James, Sam, and Andrew. This year Masters is after a season full of tournaments so people are tired of it a bit. Not counting that 4 of the 6 were in last years Masters,” explained one user.
“Don’t get me wrong, we like the Masters. But if the timing was different I think the viewership would be different,” they clarified.
“Tournament fatigue, it's not new and novel like it was last year, and also, to be honest, I'm finding it less interesting to watch people who have (mostly) become pro or semi-pro trivia competitors be really good at trivia,” shared another fan. “They all seem like lovely people but it's not really shocking or interesting to me to see people like Victoria and James, who have a gig doing trivia on TV, be good at that.”
Jeopardy! Masters hasn’t been renewed for a third season yet, but the show’s producers did announce that the franchise will be scaling back on special tournaments—including Masters and ToC—for the remainder of 2024.
