We knew how much we would miss Alex Trebek.
When, in March 2019, the longtime host of the game show Jeopardy! revealed that he had received a diagnosis of stage IV pancreatic cancer, we began to reckon with what would become a grim new normal. The odds were that sometime soon, the man whose famously calm disposition and ease with all manner of facts, figures, and tidbits had serenaded countless dinner hours would no longer be among us. That came to pass on Nov. 8, when Trebek died at age 80.
It must be a special kind of burden to be a public figure while contending with a terminal illness. A grim diagnosis has a way of focusing the patient’s attention inward, on his own mortality, but a celebrity in the same position must also contend with avaricious but well-meaning fans and a routine of rigorous public engagement. The constant calls for health updates are surely emotionally draining.
Trebek handled the predicament gracefully: Aware that his plight roused genuine sympathy among a loyal fan base built over three decades as host, Trebek checked in with bracingly honest cancer status reports. He also returned the love that was sent his way. Speaking in a video recorded on the anniversary of his diagnosis, Trebek candidly recalled moments in which he wondered about the wisdom of proceeding with chemotherapy treatments that resulted in awful physical side effects and bouts of agonizing depression. To concede to such thoughts, though, went against his grain. “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,” Trebek said. “And it would certainly have been a betrayal of my faith in God and the millions of prayers that have been said on my behalf.”
In fact, Trebek’s affinity with the public, and with our stand-ins, the contestants who filed on and off the set of Jeopardy! through the years, was among his most notable qualities. When a player confidently buzzed in with the wrong answer in the form of a question, Trebek could be quick or cutting, but he was never mean-spirited; he corrected you as a teacher might and relished when you made up for your mistake. And during “Final Jeopardy!” when a player was revealed to have made a wild, uneducated guess or to have placed a reckless wager, Trebek more often than not seemed gently disappointed. In affecting the manner of a mellow life coach, Trebek injected just enough spontaneity into a role that was highly choreographed, consisting of the reading of clues, the calling on contestants, and the management of the game itself.
Born in Ontario in 1940, Trebek kicked off his career at the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. Upon arriving in the United States, he cycled through a largely inauspicious series of 1970s-era game shows, from The Wizard of Odds to High Rollers, before being tapped to oversee that great blue board in the third incarnation of Jeopardy! starting in 1984 and continuing even after his illness was announced.
To be a game show host during Trebek’s early years was to court genuine celebrity, but this host had an altogether different, more lasting quality than Bob Barker’s auctioneerlike showmanship on The Price Is Right or Chuck Woolery’s I’m OK — You’re OK-style friendliness on Love Connection. He also benefited from a game that demanded real knowledge, unlike the Scrabblelike guessing prompted by a steady diet of Wheel of Fortune. Canadian-accented and, for much of his career, amusingly mustachioed, Trebek was happy to put himself at the service of his show’s endless barrage of factoids and trivia, none of which he condescended to. “We are a show that comes into your home every day that doesn’t disturb you,” Trebek said in an interview with the Archive of American Television. “Everyone can play. You can spend a half-hour together without feeling you have to flee the room to go watch your own show.”
Trebek did not overstate his importance — he even appeared in a cameo in Robert Altman’s Short Cuts, embodying the sort of low-wattage star that average folks would be impressed by — but Saturday Night Live star Will Ferrell’s famous Trebek impression, first trotted out in the 1990s, was funny without being quite right: The real Trebek had nothing of the priggish scold in him.
In his labors, Trebek emerged as not only the world’s greatest game show host but also as the most plausible heir to those stone-faced television newsmen of yesteryear who at least affected objectivity and dispassion. Like Walter Cronkite or John Chancellor before him, Trebek appeared to have the world at his fingertips, and now, in death, he has the world at his feet.
Peter Tonguette writes for many publications, including the Wall Street Journal, National Review, and Humanities.
