The set of “Jeopardy!” was given a shiny makeover last year, in preparation for the quiz show’s fiftieth birthday. The new look features that familiar, top-heavy, bubble-letter logo and a gorgeously tacky sunset backdrop that provides an odd companion to the sexless blue-and-white board. In fluorescent spirit, though, the set is unchanged since the 1980s, much like the program itself.

Contestants come and go. Here’s our returning champion. He’s from Maryland, she’s from Chicago. Some, like this year’s star, Arthur Chu, even briefly become big deals. But it is Alex Trebek who has remained the centerpiece. His extended tenure as America’s senior-most faculty member has made Americans forget that he’s playing a part; a few years ago, Trebek was voted the eighth-most-trusted person in the United States, sandwiched between Bill and Melinda Gates. “He’s like a Ward Cleaver figure,” says Ken Jennings, the most successful “Jeopardy!” contestant ever. “But for the past thirty years.” This month, in fact, the host will mark three decades as the face and voice of “Jeopardy!”; like the show’s theme music, he is almost post-iconic, such a known entity that he’s just there.

He might not be there for much longer, though. “Jeopardy!” continues to draw around 25 million viewers per week, making it second among syndicated game shows (behind only “Wheel of Fortune,” which “Jeopardy!” fans dismiss as little better than a televised jumble puzzle). But Trebek has hinted that he will retire when his contract runs out in 2016. Already he has outlasted Jay Leno and now David Letterman as one of the final one-man TV brands from the time before DVRs. Audience shares and attention spans, however, aren’t the only things that have changed during his run. In the Internet era, knowing a little about a lot provides diminished cachet: You don’t have to retain facts when they can just be Googled. These days there’s a throwback charm to the whole “Jeopardy!” enterprise and the appeal, in Trebek’s late-career performances, of a simple job well done.

Watch enough “Jeopardy!” in a row and the call-and-response of the games can become almost meditative. No, I’m sorry, that is incorrect. Who is Paul Revere? That’s today’s Daily Double! Watch ten shows taped over two days, as I did last fall, and you enter a fugue state. Trebek has by now done more than 6,000 shows, read out who-knows-how-many facts. Fact after fact after fact. He is a TV star who presides over an assembly line.

But a funny thing about the audiences at “Jeopardy!” tapings: The faithful pilgrims who’ve come to Sony Pictures Studios to see what it all is like in person—most don’t actually look directly at Trebek. As a loping Brontosaurus of a camera records the action for broadcast, it also pipes footage onto two jumbo screens that face the audience. It’s those monitors that the crowd members keep their eyes locked on, not the man below. Mediated Trebek is the Trebek they are comfortable with, the one they reflexively watch.