'Jeopardy!' Question Writing Is No Easy Task — Meet the Writers Behind the Show

America's favorite game show, Jeopardy!, has captivated audiences for decades. The quiz show challenges master trivia stars to really flex their knowledge in a unique format, flipping the concept of questions and answers. Between 1964, when the show started, and now, there have been over 700,000 prompts.

During the show, the questions are asked and directed by host Ken Jennings, who replaced the late Alex Trebek. While Ken is an expert quizzer himself, he's not just making up the questions. In fact, there is a strong team of producers and writers who ensure that the show runs as smoothly as possible.

There is a team of writers behind the scenes for the show. According to the Jeopardy! website, the current team includes John Durate, Mark Gaberman, Debbie Griffin, Michelle Loud, Robert McClenaghan, Jim Rhine, and Billy Wisse. Michelle and Billy also act as producers for the show.

The team is a part of the Writers' Guild of America which created an issue for the show when the union went on strike. While most people thought about the strike from the perspective of fictional stories and movies that operate off of a script, other aspects of the industry were affected, too, like game shows and talk shows. Some of these programs, like Jeopardy! looked for a way to still proceed with their productions without overstepping the line by bringing on new writers who would be violating the strike.

Thanks to its long history and large pool of questions, the trivia show was able to continue by just recycling old prompts from over the years, making the game both new and old at the same time. During that brief time, the show didn't technically have active writers. After the writers struck a deal with the networks and came back to work, they were able to start researching and churning out new trivia questions — or, well, technically answers — for future shows.

It might seem like a simple Google search to find fun trivia questions, but there is far more going on behind the scenes, according to the Jeopardy! Writers' Room. The process needs to start somewhere, and Billy said that they either come up with a punny category title and fit trivia in from there or just start with a general subject and come up with an angle afterward.

While that's the blueprint, Michelle admitted that it isn't always so black-and-white. In fact, she confessed to coming up with trivia questions at random. “Apollo 13 was coming out, and there was a Whitney Houston song playing on the radio when I saw the poster,” she said. “I said to myself in my car, ‘Whitney Houston, we have a problem.’ And I wrote it into a BEFORE & AFTER [category] the next day.”

Regardless of how they come up with the questions, the next step is to really take the time to research to ensure that they aren't getting anything wrong. A misstep in their research process could cost a contestant thousands of dollars and alter the course of the competition.