Though you may not have thought about Jeopardy! in the last 10 years — except perhaps to think, “I can’t believe I’m thinking about Jeopardy!” and “I really wish I thought about Jeopardy!” and perhaps most commonly “Jeopardy! is still on? That’s great!” — today’s guest on the classic game show indicates that perhaps the show is still pretty “with it.”
For last night’s episode, they enlisted the paragon of cultural with-it-ness, Hamilton writer/composer/star Lin-Manuel Miranda, to deliver Jeopardy! clues in a category about Alexander Hamilton. His widely acclaimed musical happens to be chock-full of such historical clues (it’s based on the biography Alexander Hamilton by Ron Chernow), so instead of attempting to beat Alex Trebek at his own game, he sang rather than spoke the clues — which were pulled directly from numbers in his musical.
As the Jeopardy! website (which exists!) explains, he delivered his performance from the Richard Rodgers Theater. The team on the game show first became interested in Miranda and Hamilton when the play was in early performances at the Public Theatre (it since moved to Broadway) — and noted what they describe as “the parallels to how Jeopardy! tries to present information in an entertaining way.” Sure.
They thereafter asked members of the production team to compile excerpts from numbers that could become clues. And so the clip below came to be: