Point Breeze’s Victoria Groce won this year’s “Jeopardy! Masters” tournament on ABC on Wednesday night, vanquishing past “Jeopardy!” champs including Yogesh Raut, James Holzhauer, Amy Schneider, Mattea Roach and Matt Amodio.
“Masters” began taping in mid-April with its final episode, where Groce won $500,000 and the Trebek Trophy, recorded May 1.
By the time taping that last episode reached the Final Jeopardy round, Groce knew she was in the driver’s seat, writing alongside her answer, “Great games, y’all. See you next year!” (The Top 3 finishers automatically return the next year if ABC renews “Jeopardy! Masters” for another season.)
“I was pretty sure when I hit the final Daily Double that I couldn’t be caught,” Groce said this week.
Groce, a trivia quiz whiz, first appeared on “Jeopardy!” in 2005 and returned this year. She won $100,000 as the champ of the “Jeopardy! Invitational Tournament,” which followed her star turn on ABC’s “The Chase.”
“I had no expectations going into (‘Masters’),” Groce said. “I was playing (against) legends, so I knew they were real good.”
While confident in her game play during the quarterfinals, Groce’s nerves kicked in during the semifinals, in part because she got a migraine.
“My medication does not make me groggy, but I felt really nervous and not the most with it,” Groce said. “Then going into the finals, I felt pretty relaxed because the worst-case scenario is I finish third and I’d come back next year.”
Groce said her family will use her winnings in part for a trip to Portugal — she’ll stay a little longer to visit a “wine spa” — and she plans to redo her duplex home’s 1950s-era kitchen.
While ABC’s “The Chase” remains in limbo — not renewed, not canceled — Groce is working on a book proposal, but she declined to describe it in detail.
‘Evil’ ends
For several seasons I’ve sung the praises of “Evil,” the best supernatural, religious-themed comedic drama you’re not watching that aired its first season on CBS in 2019 and relocated to Paramount+ for subsequent seasons.
Now that seasons one and two are on Netflix, many viewers are discovering the series just as it’s about to end.
“We’re aware of that irony,” Michelle King deadpanned in a Zoom interview Monday.
Paramount+ canceled “Evil” after the 10-episode fourth season wrapped but gave producers an additional four episodes to complete the show’s story. Michelle King created the series, which starts streaming its final season May 23, with her husband, Robert King. The couple were showrunners on CBS’s “The Good Wife” and Paramount+’s “The Good Fight.”
“Evil” follows investigators for the Catholic Church who attempt to ascertain if odd occurrences are supernatural or scientific in nature. Catholic priest David Acosta (Mike Colter), psychologist Kristen Bouchard (Katja Hebers) and Muslim tech expert Ben Shakir (Assif Mandiv) explore all varieties of weirdness. This season includes potentially possessed pigs, a haunted particle accelerator and a robotic guard dog that attacks parishioners in a church cemetery.
Add to that the serialized stories involving Kristen’s ongoing duel with Satan-worshipping Leland Townsend (Michael Emerson), who’s had Kristen’s mother, Sheryl Luria (Christine Lahti), in his thrall at various points (not so much this season when Sheryl reaches a literal and metaphorical glass ceiling in Leland’s sinister patriarchal company).
Leland’s latest project is using Kristen’s stolen egg, implanted in a surrogate, to deliver what he believes will be the Antichrist. Kristen laughs in his face.
“I giggle at the thought of you waking up at 3 a.m. because the Antichrist needs changing,” she says. “Did you ever wonder why ‘The Omen’ skipped the infancy? Because that’s the real horror.”
Robert King said season four’s primary theme is the hubris attached to science.
“There is that mystery, even if you don’t want to say supernatural is a mystery, that makes a lot of us terrified of science and its competence that it solves something,” he said. “And then the last four episodes was really our attempt to answer the unanswered questions of the series, but also to give the characters a satisfying end, even if the end was not a happy end.”
Robert King said having just four episodes to wrap up the story didn’t change plans for the show’s denouement.
“We always knew what the arena of the ending would be,” he said. “That’s helpful when you’re doing a show that is both serialized and telling individual stories because your individual story should react to the world as it’s happening: Whatever is happening with AI, whatever is happening with social media. We wanted always the ability to have that flexibility.”
The Kings said the “Evil” finale ties up stories but also leaves some loose ends.
“We really want a feeling like you had an experience with the show,” Robert King said. “But also, it feels like modern life is about the ambiguity of what happens next. I think we’re all both terrified and sometimes chilled and thrilled (about) what is going to happen next. I hope that it comes through in the ending.”
On social media, Hebers has pushed Netflix to pick up “Evil” for additional episodes after it ends its Paramount+ run.
“We just had the wrap party two nights ago and we looked at all these wonderful craftspeople — because it really is an army with the people who create the creatures, people who set the lighting effects and visual effects — so you looked and you went, ‘Oh, my God, I wish we were together for another season,’ ” Robert King said. “So I’m not going to disagree with Katja.”
Canceled
The CW canceled “Walker” after four seasons; “The Spencer Sisters” is done after one season.
Amazon’s Freevee canceled “Primo” after one season.
Channel surfing
Production began this week in Montana on the final five episodes of “Yellowstone” that will air on Paramount Network in November. No word on which cast members are in the episodes. … 1980 Carnegie Mellon University grad Holly Hunter will star as the chancellor in Paramount+’s “Star Trek: Starfleet Academy.” … Comcast’s add-on bundle of Peaco*ck (with ads), Netflix (with ads) and Apple TV+ will be priced at $15 when it launches this summer.
You can reach TV writer Rob Owen at rowen@triblive.com or 412-380-8559. Follow @RobOwenTV on Threads, X, Bluesky and Facebook. Ask TV questions by email or phone. Please include your first name and location.
