Holy Smokes It’s So Nice To Stream Yesterday’s Wheel of Fortune
I'm not sure what this says about the syndication model, but it's a pleasant experience anyway.
As part of a new streaming agreement, Wheel of Fortune and Jeopardy! are now available to stream next-day on Hulu and Peacock TV. The five most recent episodes of each show are available, meaning you can catch up on up to a week of episodes you may have missed. As a recent cord-cutter, one of the things that’s really been bothersome was either “stopping watching Dropout episodes for the 100th time to actually tune into Jeopardy!” or “finding the least-shitty YouTube rip because I don’t have a DVR”. But this quality of life improvement, even just on its first day, has been delightful.
I have Xfinityh internet, and one of their perks is giving me access to Peacock’s premium tier, so there are limited, if any, advertisements while I’m watching Jeopardy! and then Wheel (as God intended), which keeps these games moving fast. Wheel of Fortune, in particular, felt like less of a slog than it does when watching it live. Jeopardy! felt extra fast paced without any real stoppage for ad breaks, which with my ADHD, is exactly what I needed to get locked in and actually enjoy watching Jeopardy!. Everything streams in pretty nice quality too, showcasing how ugly the new Wheel of Fortune puzzleboard still is. (Gang, please, swap them panels out for OLEDs, it’s getting washed out from the stage lights).
Also a nice bonus: archive episodes—not the entire run of the show, as fans (foolishly? sillily? naively?) thought might happen, but collections of various episodes, some shared between Peacock and Hulu and others unique to their platforms. I’ll leave it to the nerds on the subreddit to figure out the differences between the two, but suffice it to say: Wheel of Fortune on Peacock AND Hulu have rudely skipped over the season I was on, and Jeopardy! seems to have done the same. Does Sony have a vendetta against specifically me? A person who has been on 40 minutes of the thousands of hours of television they’ve produced?
Signs point to yes.
Anyway, it’s really great that Wheel of Fortune and Jeopardy! are now streaming. I would be very surprised if this doesn’t grow the shows’ audiences—especially Jeopardy!, which has a fervent fan base of under-100-year-olds who otherwise really only watch the show through more nefarious means. Could this also mean an economic reality that the audiences for those who would watch Peacock and those who watch OTA television are so vastly disparate that both syndicators and production companies seem to agree that there is no cannibalization between the two? I don’t know. But if the two biggest television shows in syndication are putting their eggs in this kind of basket, the syndication landscape might be changing more drastically than anyone expected.
