The Real Reason Jeopardy! Won’t Record to my DVR

  

For years, my Xfinity DVR has faithfully recorded every episode of Jeopardy!. Lately, for some reason, it refuses.

It records everything else. I can time-shift every series, every game, every movie. I can still record the local news on WDIV, the same NBC affiliate that carries Jeopardy. I just can’t record Jeopardy. I suspect Republicans.

No, this is not an existential crisis, but it has been enough of an annoyance that I was cajoled — or perhaps threatened — by my family into investigating the mystery. So I turned to AI (they/them) to see if they might know something about it. I withheld my theory about Republicans.

They walked me through all the usual diagnostic gyrations with the remote, and I dutifully followed all the steps I knew I’d already followed. They sagely deduced that the problem was not on my end, but Xfinity’s.

They concluded there was a “DVR/guide-data problem” in the Xfinity system, and they found other users in the Detroit area who’d reported the same glitch. Apparently, there isn’t much any of us can do except wait for Xfinity to fix it.

This has only deepened my suspicions.

As far as I can tell, most of the societal flaws we now encounter in our daily lives can be traced, one way or another, to the incompetence, greed, and bad faith of Republicans. And it’s totally obvious, at least to me, that the administration is trying to shut down Jeopardy altogether. It’s equally obvious that Xfinity is in on it.

They’re starting in the Detroit area, taking incremental steps. First they take away our ability to record and time-shift. Next they take away Jeopardy altogether.

Ah, but why Jeopardy, you say? Glad you asked.

First of all, Jeopardy is all about smart people. That will not do for an administration that values stupidity. They have no use for people who can read, let alone question the answers on Jeopardy.

As I’ve written before, Jeopardy is maybe the last place on Earth where you can see smart people from all walks of life — Black, white, Latino, Asian, queer, trans, disabled, celebrity — and catch them in the act of being smart. This flies in the face of the dumbed-down culture MAGA has promoted so aggressively. When you’re trying to raise a nation of dimwits, you can’t have smart people out there being role models.

And then there’s the matter of Ken Jennings, the host himself. Remember what he posted about the administration a few months back? I looked it up:

The ‘prosecute the former regime at every level’ candidate has my vote in 2028

For someone with as high a profile as Jennings, this was a bold statement indeed. Would it surprise anyone if that put a target on his back?

We know that Brendan Carr, the FCC chairman and Trump toady, has been busy lately, working to suppress any free speech he stumbles across. He has openly threatened major media companies over their broadcast licenses, and ABC has apparently had enough. It just sued FCC on free-speech grounds.

This is an obvious diversion. It’s designed to distract us from the real conspiracy: the covert undermining of Jeopardy, in all its DEI-drenched wokeness.

Don’t go for the head fake. We know FCC is now run by dim-witted Republican hacks who wouldn’t know ABC from NBC — it’s all fake news to them. These are people who will never have the tech chops to mess with my DVR, and they’ll never be any good at Jeopardy, either.

Xfinity, on the other hand, is good at all that stuff. Am I right?

Consider that Xfinity is, of course, a Comcast brand, and we know how cozy Comcast is with the administration. So I can see Trump asking for “one small favor” — which leads to Xfinity tampering with the guide-data so Detroit-area viewers can’t record Jeopardy.

This forces those viewers to watch the show live, which deprives them of a basic right, one of the few we have left: the right to fast-forward through commercials. A dastardly plot, indeed. But why Detroit?

Jeez, do I need to spell out everything here? Everybody knows it was Detroit that cost Trump the 2020 election. All those Black people whose ballots Trump tried to seize but couldn’t? In Trump’s mind, Detroit stole Michigan for Biden. He’s had a grudge against the town ever since.

So just to review, Jeopardy was deemed too woke to be allowed to survive in its current form. Ears were bent at FCC, Comcast, and Xfinity. A bug got placed in the Xfinity software that messes with the DVRs of Detroit-area customers. Including mine.

Do you think they’ve been reading this blog?

Clearly, the War On Jeopardy is underway. Detroit is proof-of-concept, and we can expect the DVR glitch to spread, slowly but insidiously, to other platforms.

They have to move carefully. They can’t just eliminate Jeopardy altogether — the backlash would be too fierce. But over time they could dumb it down to the level they aspire to:

Uh, let’s go with ‘Numbers Below 9’ for $400, Ken.

Speaking of Ken, they’ll need to find a replacement for him. I hear they’re considering Natalie Harp.