Will that guy on Jeopardy ever lose?

this excerpt from that ringer article feels instructive and suggests Richards is an empty suit company man. given the very public pushback trebek gave to sony over the past several years, i imagine they want full control over their billion dollar baby even if they don't know how to properly tend to it.

In his 2018 book The Big Picture, author Ben Fritz estimated that Wheel and Jeopardy! had “made total profits of $2 billion and $1 billion, respectively, over their decades on the air.” The shows’ immense successes afforded Friedman a rare level of autonomy within Sony, where Wheel and Jeopardy! were seen as off-limits to meddling from studio executives.

In August 2019, Friedman, then 72, gathered the staffs of both shows to the Jeopardy! stage to announce that he would retire at season’s end. Richards, who that June had signed an overall deal with Sony to “develop and produce game shows for network, cable, and streaming platforms,” was announced as the incoming executive producer a month later, and spent the latter part of Friedman’s final season shadowing him in the studio.

Then, just months into Richards’s debut season, Trebek died due to complications of pancreatic cancer. Coupled with the other recent departures of several key staffers—including the longtime head of the contestant department, Maggie Speak, and stage manager John Lauderdale—and the taping difficulties caused by the pandemic, which left many staff members working from home, there was a widespread perception internally of a power vacuum. One source close to Jeopardy! says that senior Sony executives were eager to fill it. “While previously Jeopardy! seemed to be its own island, under Mike the hand of Sony seems ever present,” the source says.

mero had a good bit this past week about how Richards was certainly hanging around an ailing trebek being like "you doing okay? you feeling alright?" while rubbing his palms together in machiavellian fashion

Bottom line is that a former host of Beauty and the Geek should be kept the fuck away from Jeopardy.

that excerpt is interesting. at the end of the day though you can find another empty suit and another host to keep the train chugging along w/o this level of controversy. even viewed thru the most cynical lens (removing any notions of the sanctity of jeopardy as a franchise) it just seems like bad business

i don't think you're wrong there but clearly someone at sony didn't take the time to properly vet this empty suit. anyways for all we know the daggers are being sharpened as we type. positioning mayim as an easy to pivot to alternative gives them a chance to see who the audience responds to but it's clear that the brass over there is pretty certain that the obvious answer to them is bland, conservative and white.

the thing i don't really understand is why sony is so invested in protecting him as host. i guess it has to be pure human stubbornness and unwillingness to admit you made a mistake. because there's like... plenty of other ppl in the world who are capable of keeping a jeopardy game moving. just pick someone else! like, is this guy so important that you're willing to risk the reputation of the entire franchise? it can't be that deep!

― J0rdan S., Thursday, August 19, 2021 12:02 PM (one hour ago) bookmarkflaglink

I said the same thing in 2018 about Brett Kavanaugh.

well, hopefully jeopardy turns out to be slightly less politicized than the supreme court. but you never know these days

There were so many things I heard listening to Mike Richards’s podcast that I couldn’t fit in the story. https://t.co/A8AEsPq1o0

— Claire McNear (@clairemcnear) August 19, 2021

i have a bit of a dissenting opinion in that i think richards will be fine. alex trebek in the 60s was a bro who had previously hosted random daytime game-shows. he wasn’t a trivia god like ken jennings or a nerd icon like levar burton. just an competent vaguely handsome guy in a suit. that he turned out to be a genius and tremendous weirdo and grew into the role so deeply couldn’t have been anticipated at the outset

i don’t think he was the best guest host but he also wasn’t the worst, and tbh no one was really that good

it’s also interesting how there were attempts to cancel both Ken Jennings and Mike Richards; in kens case by digging up old ableist tweets, in richards case finding sexist remarks made in podcasts or law suits. we itt all more or less shrugged and ignored the Jennings tweets, but are indignant about the Richards stuff. are his transgressions really that much worse? idk. i think it has more than a little to do with the fact that we like ken more. to the extent that people are asking “why not just go with another host?” i figure to the sony execs it looks like anyone who gets close to being picked will get some dirt on them dragged up, so it cancels out

ehm that should say

i don’t think Richards was the best guest host but he also wasn’t the worst, and tbh no one was really that good

out

anyways for all we know the daggers are being sharpened as we type.

potentially unpopular opinion: i hope Jennings gets it over Burton if they're still in contention

So I guess this means ... that guy on Jeopardy! *did* lose.

he does every other job at abc, its a lite time commitment & he was good hosting millionaire, make it jimmy kimmel maybe

Happy Friday, y’all!

— LeVar Burton (@levarburton) August 20, 2021

"i think it has more than a little to do with the fact that we like ken more."

Which is why he should be the host! Tho I don't know if he'd be my top choice, I've only seen one episode he hosted.

No way they want people talking about Jennings’ old (mostly funny) tweets after this.

Big congrats to Mike Richards on his upcoming Substack and podcast deal with Barstool

— Drew Magary (@drewmagary) August 20, 2021

yeah I hope it’s ken too

The pile of money that people have set fire from their career by posts on Twitter, Facebook or podcasts is becoming very impressive.

lol @ timing of my last post itt

feel like it’s got to be mayim bialik now

The pile of money that people have set fire from their career by posts on Twitter, Facebook or podcasts is becoming very impressive.

For a podcast that five people have ever listened to! If he wanted to make fat jokes to amuse his buddies he could have done it in person.

i frankly don't think that the idea of a full-time woman host on jeopardy will sit well with sony's test audiences; a significant portion of the fanbase is old and bigoted

otoh they will die soon

To be replaced by the next generation of old and bigoted people.

(Whites In) Jeopardy!

In the online discourse about who should host, I've observed a divide between those who see hosting as executing a set of skills and those who see it as representing a set of values. The former have treated the guest hosts as a series of auditions that can be picked apart in granular detail ("He fumbled over his words on the Daily Double but seemed at ease during the contestant interviews"). The latter may not have even watched the guest hosts but have an affectionate attitude toward the show as a cultural institution and are concerned primarily with how well a potential host lives up to their idea of what Jeopardy! means to them.

This article kind of cuts through all of that by making the point that both of those factions represent a small percentage of the Jeopardy!'s actual viewership (old people!), and what Sony really needs to figure out is who it wants the show's audience to be going forward:

https://slate.com/culture/2021/08/jeopardy-mike-richards-levar-burton-new-host.html

i agree with that and they would be wise to aim at a younger audience with quarterly rotation of Levar / Jennings / Buzzy imo though they really need to add at least one female host... why did Julia Collins not get an audition?

Bialik to host the first three weeks back and will be followed by TBA guest hosts.

Has Laura Coates ever said anything about Alex Trebek's desire for her to host the show? Assuming she's not averse to giving it a whirl, they should definitely invite her to be a part of the next string of guest hosts.

why isnt mayim being a huge zionist causing any backlash?

why isnt mayim being a huge zionist causing any backlash?

you just lashed back, so it's not like nobody noticed

i feel like im the only one!

That's like fourth on the list of her most pressing issues (see her anti-vaxx/pseudoscience history, her promotion of weird home-birth views, and saying women who don't dress "modestly" may invite sexual assault).

also she was on The Big Bang Theory

jfc get her the fuck off jeopardy!

these aren't my views, but I find statements like these hard to get worked up about:

https://www.instagram.com/p/COvj1-ardt1/

can't speak to any of that other shit, sounds bad!

can’t say I trust the executives at Sony to make the right decisions about this franchise at this point! they don’t seem to understand it as a product! Oh well!

I kinda think TV/Movie/music people had it better before the social media as they could be weird a$$ mf'ers and most people would not know unless it ended up with the cops or in People magazine.

Yeah, the existence of social media and a never-forgetting internet makes things much harder for people who would have slipped under the radar in previous eras.

That plus early social media era internet was pretty much 110% "look I'm rotten too!" posturing...

Right. I am reading through Richards’ comments now. Tasteless and insensitive stuff but it’s not like he was the only person making jokes like that in 2014.

It’s good for Jeopardy’s sake to escape this dark cloud but I understand why, in the first place, they didn’t anticipate these comments being a problem. Bialik seems more problematic honestly but she also is a better host imo.

solution: Max Headroom is host

Which is all to say I get the campaign behind LeVar B. Only Mr. Rogers'es in key host roles from here on out imo.

but I understand why, in the first place, they didn’t anticipate these comments being a problem

I too understand that not knowing a podcast exists means you don’t expect comments made on it to be a problem

Kareem Abdul-Jabbar:

The ideal host for Jeopardy! should embody what the show means to its viewership: a passion for knowledge and a respect for a diverse community. Maybe the host would also reflect that diversity in order to show that it’s not just white males who can be the gatekeepers to these values. What’s especially shocking is that the producers of a show that is about knowledge demonstrated a substantial lack of awareness of recent cultural history and the coming of age our institutions — from government to the academy to entertainment — have been going through.