Q&A: Talking ‘Pop Culture Jeopardy’ with Lafayette contestant Nick Rogers
Episode debuts Wednesday on Netflix. Plus, details about Mitch Daniels’ compensation as incoming interim president at Purdue.
Thanks for ongoing support from Based in Lafayette sponsor Long Center for the Performing Arts in downtown Lafayette. For tickets and details on all the shows and events, go to longpac.org.
Q&A: TALKING ‘POP CULTURE JEOPARDY’ WITH LAFAYETTE CONTESTANT NICK ROGERS
Nick Rogers says he wasn’t sure it was ever going to happen, this notion of landing on a TV game show.
Wednesday, two weeks into the second season of “Pop Culture Jeopardy” – a team-based variation of the original “Jeopardy” game show with a heavier twist on movies, Vine videos, Real Housewives, 6-7, music and the like – the Lafayette resident gets his shot.
Taped four months ago, and rolling out a few episodes at a time in the coming weeks on Netflix, an episode featuring Rogers goes live at 3 a.m. (EDT) Wednesday.
How he did, he can’t say – a standard clause in any iteration of the “Jeopardy” franchise.
But this week, Rogers talked about the experience on the show hosted by Colin Jost of “Saturday Night Live,” how he prepped for the show’s pop culture format and what’s behind the cardigans he and teammate Shane Whitlock were spotting wearing in the show’s trailer.
Here are excerpts from the conversation.
Question: Let’s start with this: Introduce yourself. You have to do that on “Jeopardy” anyway.
Nick Rogers: My name is Nick Rogers, and I have lived in Lafayette now for 18 years, and I do communications with Tipmont and Wintek, which is the electric utility and fiber internet utility provider. I’ve been there for about five years. I worked at Purdue and various places before that, and doing some marketing in town before that. And probably most germane to this outing in my life, I was an arts and entertainment journalist for six years when I started out. I still dabble in that. I still do movie reviews, I still listen to an insane amount of new music each year, watch an insane amount of TV shows, and am probably online entirely too much. But when “Pop Culture Jeopardy” comes calling, these are the things that help you out.
Question: Does that count as studying, or is that just an interest?
Nick Rogers: It is definitely an interest. TV, movies, music – movies, especially – is just an everyday interest for me. I don’t really look at it as studying. I have pretty broad tastes, so I watch and listen to a lot of different stuff, but I don’t ever feel like, well, I have to listen to this, or when we were getting ready for the show, feeling like, well, I should listen to that now. Did I study some things? Yes. But pop culture is a broad brush, and you don’t know what kind of categories will come your way.
Question: I watched the first episode last week. Having gone through a few trivia nights here in town, I don’t know what I would have studied or whether it would have done any good.
Nick Rogers: That’s the thing. There is no one surefire way to prepare for any game show, let alone “Jeopardy,” where the very nature of it is that it could be anything and everything. But I think that if you have an innate interest and innate curiosity, this is an instance where my own personal interest proved pretty useful in that I didn’t feel like there was a lot that I had to memorize, like from a list or things like that. It also helps that your weak spots – in my case being math and geography – probably aren’t going to come up too terribly often in “Pop Culture Jeopardy.” Or if they do, they’ll be clued within something that I do know quite well.
Question: And everyone has a partner in this version of “Jeopardy,” right?
Nick Rogers: The thing that’s a little bit different about “Pop Culture Jeopardy,” as opposed to everyday “Jeopardy,” is that you do get to have a partner. In the first season they did teams of three. This season they pared that down to teams of two. My teammate’s name is Shane Whitlock. He is a radiologist by trade, but he and I met each other well more than 10 years ago when, on a whim, I accepted an invitation from a mutual friend to go to a nationwide trivia competition in Austin, Texas. The only person that I knew on the team was this mutual friend. I had never met anyone else, and, as fate would have it, that mutual friend ended up not being able to go. I debated whether to go. I would literally be going there to do trivia with a bunch of strangers who don’t know me, I don’t know them. I don’t want to derail their shot if they’ve got a pretty good shot, because it was a pretty good pedigree of players. In talking about it with my wife, she said, just go, what’s the worst that could happen? I went, and we placed in the Top 10, I believe, for that tournament. Shane and I and some of the other friends from that team have competed in different trivia tournaments over the ensuing years, and we’ve just become really great friends. Shane lives in Vancouver now with his family, and we’ve gone there to visit them a couple of times, and they’ve come here to visit us. When the call was open for teams to audition for the second season of “Pop Culture Jeopardy,” he reached out to me and said, Let’s give this a shot. I said, Sure, let’s do it.
Question: What’s his specialty? Please, don’t say math and geography.
Nick Rogers: He’s very good at TV deep cuts, and I would say not just scripted, but reality. Reality TV is a bit of a deficit for me. I know some things, but not some of the most specific things. He also is, unexpectedly to people who would maybe size him up in the pop culture arena, very good with K-Pop, country and parts of the music spectrum that I know some about, but not the deep cuts that he does. He also has two children of different ages, so they’re into different things. I think that he picks up on some of that through his kids. That makes him a terrific partner, because we really fill in each other’s gaps of knowledge really well, when you’ve got a buddy to count on out there.
Question: What’s the name of your team?
Nick Rogers: The name of our team was Only Howards in the Building.
Question: Is that a Three Stooges thing?
Nick Rogers: It is an “Only Murders in the Building” thing. “Only Murders in the Building” is a streaming show with Steve Martin, Martin Short and Selena Gomez. There’s a character on the show named Howard, who is a supporting character, but he’s been on all of the seasons of the show. A lot of people have told Shane that he resembles the actor who plays Howard, whose name is Michael Cyril Creighton. Shane’s idea for our gimmick or schtick or whatever you want to call it, was that I look enough like Shane, and if Shane looks like Howard, we could dress as Howard, who wears very loud cardigans at all times, has a beard, like we have a beard, same kind of build, same kind of haircut. That was how we showed up in the Zoom audition room when we got our call. We were wearing matching, loud cardigans at the time. We didn’t end up wearing matching cardigans on the show, but that was our approach.
Question: Is this going to get you a call from Martin Short?
Nick Rogers: Not from Martin Short, but we have heard from Michael Cyril Creighton already. The day that the trailer for the season dropped, he posted on Instagram a screen capture of Shane and I, and he said, I guess I know who I’m rooting for this season on “Pop Culture Jeopardy” – which was, incredible in its own right. But then later that night I got a ping on Instagram. Very late, we’re kind of getting ready for bed, and when I looked at it, I said, “Oh my God.” Michael Cyril Creighton had found us, Shane and I, on Instagram and had direct messaged us to tell us how flattered he was and how excited he was to see this and how much it made his day. He also said that the Howard Whisperer, as he calls the person who gets sweaters for the show, said that we nailed the cardigans. Which was good to know that we lived up to promise of the character.
Question: That’s excellent.
Nick Rogers: It was. Here’s a guy who had earlier that evening done a play reading in New York with Ben Stiller and Billy Eichner and other Tony nominees, and then he came home and messaged us.
Question: Now, I guess you wait and see at the end whether he messages again and applauds how you do.
Nick Rogers: He did say he hopes we win $5 million, which is very nice of him, but also logistically impossible, unless we go on another game show. Because the maximum prize here is $300,000.
Question: Then win it all, right?
Nick Rogers: Right. The format of this is like regular “Jeopardy,” where there is a returning champion, up to five games. If you win, you get to keep playing until you win a maximum of five games. Then they take the top nine teams, and those are the teams in the semi-finals. They’ll play three semi-final games. Then it’s a two-game final, where it’s a cumulative score over the two games to determine the champion.
Question: How many episodes are we talking here?
Nick Rogers: This is 20 total episodes. And they taped the whole thing over several days in January.
Question: How was that experience?
Nick Rogers: It was such a great time really, just for so many reasons. The experience of taping the episode was a blast and a blur all at once. But it was great to meet so many different people. Actually, really great Midwest representation from the contestants this season, so it was great to meet so many people from the Midwest. It was great to just get to know them, what their background is, how they became fascinated with pop culture, because you’re basically sitting with them all day until your number comes up to go and get ready to do your episode. Of course, you get to watch the games that you’re not playing that are taping that day, so you can kind of compete against each other in a friendly way backstage. We still keep in touch through an Instagram group chat that some of us have. You know, if Colin Jost’s spouse (Scarlett Johansson) had the Avengers group chat for all those years, we can have our own.
Question: What’s your plan to watch it?
Nick Rogers: We’ll have our watch party at 6th Street Dive on Wednesday, May 27, which is when our episode airs. Some friends in town, some friends from out of town are coming.
Question: Did you have a history with “Jeopardy” in any way before this?
Nick Rogers: I have tried out before and done an audition before. Have not gotten the call to be on the show. I’ve tried out for a couple of other game shows in the past. Didn’t make the cut there. So, this is the first time that I’ve ever had the TV game show experience.
Question: What was it in your dreams, and what was it like in reality?
Nick Rogers: In my dreams, I probably thought it would feel a lot more biologically terrifying than it was. You know, am I going to have a pool of sweat at my feet like Henry Rollins under a stage light or something.
Question: Especially with a cardigan on.
Nick Rogers: Right. Well, the studio is cold. That helped. But everyone involved – the hair and makeup folks, the producers, all the backstage folks, the stage directors – everybody does such a great job of reminding you of what I think is key to remember for anybody that that is interested in this or wants to take a shot at this. They said, You’re here because of who you are. Just remember to go out there and be who you are – a competitive person, but also a likable and charismatic person. Because they’re ultimately casting for a TV show, so they want people that are loose and funny and can be kind of quick in the moment. They do a great job of making you feel relaxed and conversational. It is competitive, but it didn’t feel nerve-wracking in the way that I had maybe presumed. …
Colin Jost is a terrific host. You can tell that he really enjoys being there, talking with people, the pace of the show. He’s very quick-witted, obviously, because that’s his job, week in and week out on “SNL.” It was a delight. The whole experience, just to talk with him, to play the game, to get the shot at it was a blast.
Question: Are you nervous to watch?
Nick Rogers: Yes and no. It’s one of those things where it was so long ago now that there are certain parts of the game that I’ve surely forgotten. So, there’ll be that sort of, oh yeah, that happened, that kind of moment. But at the same time, I’m eager for people to to finally see it, because now they’ll know I wasn’t just blowing smoke about, Oh yeah, I’m going to be on a game show.
Question: Just like your guy from “Only Murders in the Building” said: I hope you win $5 million.
Nick Rogers: Well, thank you. As I told you, that would require at least one more game show for us. We’ll do what we can.
THIS AND THAT …
DETAILS REVEALED ON MITCH DANIELS’ COMPENSATION AS PURDUE’S INTERIM PRESIDENT
Mitch Daniels will make $25,000 a month, plus housing, as interim president at Purdue, according to an offer letter outlining the terms of an assignment expected to last until university trustees name and install Purdue’s 14th president to replace Mung Chiang.
