Jeopardy!’s Ken Jennings Nominated for Emmy Award
25 Jul 2023
Ken Jennings, Jeopardy! co-host, greatest Jeopardy! player of all time and APB speaker, has been nominated for an Emmy Award for Outstanding Game Show Host. Also nominated is fellow co-host Mayim Bialik. The Television Academy announced the nominees on July 12.
This is the first nomination for Jennings, who has been co-hosting since July 2022 after the death of longtime host Alex Trebek.
The former Utah software engineer rose to fame in 2004 when he spent six months as a contestant on Jeopardy! His 75-game streak and $2.52 million in winnings are still Jeopardy! records today. In 2020, he was named the show's "Greatest of All Time" after winning a prime-time tournament against legendary champs James Holzhauer and Brad Rutter and earned an additional $1 million.
A native of Seattle, he spent 15 years in South Korea and Singapore. His father worked as an attorney there. The only lifeline to American pop culture at the time was the Armed Forces Network, where he watched Jeopardy! after school every afternoon. He dreamed of being on the show. But as life got busy, the fantasy faded away.
Jennings returned to the U.S. and while at Brigham Young University, he captained the university’s successful quiz bowl team and began writing and editing questions for National Academic Quiz Tournaments. He noticed a lot of his friends and acquaintances from the world of quiz bowl appearing on game shows—allowing them to pay off student loans or buy cars with their winnings. His long-ago dream of competing on Jeopardy! was revived. And in 2004 that fantasy became a reality.
Jennings is the author of 13 books, including New York Times bestsellers like Maphead, about geography obsessives, and Because I Said So, debunking parenting myths, and his most recent, 100 Places to See After You Die: A Travel Guide to the Afterlife. He stars on ABC's hit game show The Chase, as well as Master Minds on GSN, and co-hosts the twice-weekly podcast Omnibus.