[quote name=\'jmangin\' post=\'211724\' date=\'Apr 1 2009, 03:39 PM\']Taking all matters with a grain of salt, the
Wikipedia article on Jeopardy says that on one Fleming episode of the show all three contestants finished in the red at the end of Double Jeopardy. Does anyone have this episode in their collection or possibly a clip, or any recollection of the incident?[/quote]
While the kneejerk Wikibashing is unsurprising, one of you might have noticed that this particular claim was attributed. The reference is to Maxine Fabe's original work
TV Game Shows and sure enough, on page 241, she writes: "Contestants with negative scores were not permitted to play Final Jeopardy, and more than once, that was the case for all three contestants."
The problem here, of course, is that while Fabe's book is a landmark work for our genre's library, it was written in the days before GSN, before the internet, even before widespread use of VCRs, before anything that would help her actually be able to watch old shows again. She might have remembered such an event, or somebody might have told her it happened, or she might have made it up because it sounded cool and she wasn't thinking in 1979 that thirty years later, she'd be quoted by a reference work with its own reliability issues. The Fabe book, while a fun read, is riddled with inaccuracies and typos. I'd have a hard time accepting an offhand comment in it as definite truth.
Regardless, I'm sure that if someone had such a bizarre oddity among the tiny handful of surviving episodes, it would have surfaced by now.
