Forget Mike Richards: Let Jeopardy! be guided by Alex Trebek’s philosophy
The longtime host of Jeopardy! had one overarching principle: The contestants, not the host, are the reason for the show’s existence
TV Features Mike Richards
We knew going into this week’s new Jeopardy! episodes that things were going to be awkward. Prior to Mike Richards’ ouster at the end of last month, in the wake of scandal and damning reveals of his past behavior, we already knew his one-week stint hosting would make for some strange viewing. (Richards had completed taping five episodes of the quiz show before he stepped down as host.) But after the full extent of his actions was brought to light, and he was also fired from his post as executive producer (simultaneously being let go from a similar position at Wheel Of Fortune), the prospect of having these installments of the long-running series air felt not just wearying, but downright uncomfortable. Should the series just yank them altogether, and spare us the sight?
They didn’t, and with good reason: It would really mess with the continuity of the program. As everyone who watches knows, whichever contestant wins the game one day comes back to defend their title as champion the next. Were the five new episodes featuring Richards as host to be pulled, it would throw a wrench in the machinery which guarantees the previous winner is back next time to fight for the privilege of retaining their crown. (Or at least potentially throw a wrench; current champ Matt Amodio is on quite the historic winning streak.) To mess with the continuity of episodes would not only be distracting for viewers at home, but also cause confusion with elements like Amodio’s total winnings, which would have appeared to swell without a single game being played.
But there’s a far more important reason to air these episodes, Mike Richards and all, and it has everything to do with a central philosophy of the show, one espoused by the late Alex Trebek, who would know best: The contestants, not the host, are the stars of the show. “My job is to provide the atmosphere and assistance to the contestants to get them to perform at their very best. And if I’m successful doing that, I will be perceived as a nice guy and the audience will think of me as being a bit of a star. But not if I try to steal the limelight! The stars of Jeopardy! are the material and the contestants,” he said in an interview. That mindset should serve well as a mantra when the hunt for Trebek’s permanent replacement resumes.
And it seems wise to follow his guiding principle when it comes to watching this week’s episodes. Forget Mike Richards—it’s not his show. (Admittedly, easier said than done, when he’s standing there on your screen, reading the clues.) The show belongs to the people who worked so hard to get there, contestants and winners alike. They’re the reason to tune in, and they deserve their moment in the spotlight. And by doing so, Jeopardy! also maintains fidelity to one of its other key themes: Ultimately, merit carries the day. Mike Richards didn’t deserve to be there, and soon he won’t be. But the real stars, the contestants? They earned the right to be on that stage. Let’s watch them do their best.
37 Comments
We’re trying to forget mike Richards. Can you stop beating us over the head with him, please?
I too am more than ready to forget that asshole, but for this week I’ve been making the best of it. My cry of “Dead maaaannnn walkin’!” each time he comes onto the stage brings me great delight.
I agree, make it more about the players. And they already have an easy way to accomplish that – bring back the old format where you could only win 5 times, and then there was a special “tournament of champions.” The Ken Jennings saga on the show was novel, but to me the “star player goes on a winning streak” theme has become counterproductive. I don’t really need a game show to manufacture additional dramatic elements. The game should stand on its own.
If anything has happened to take the focus off regular gameplay, it’s not the very occasional long winning streak, it’s gimmicks like the GOAT and all-star team tournaments (and I enjoyed those fine). The format is fine as it is.
I disagree. I also remember the 5 win limit, and I personally like the current format better. It isn’t really manufacturing dramatic elements, it just so happens that some people are great Jeopardy contestants, and I find it intriguing to see how long they can win. It also isn’t really a star player going on a winning streak, it is a regular player becoming a star because they are among the GOAT. I also admittedly have a soft spot for James Holzhauer. My son was in kindergarten at the time of his run, and we enjoyed watching it together every night. My son was very sad when James finally lost, so I encouraged him to write James a letter and draw him a picture. James responded by sending my son a nice handwritten card in the mail, which meant the world to my kid.
That’s so nice! Thanks for sharing.
It also sucks that so many others never got the chance Ken did.
I mean, of course. Can you imagine being on Jeopardy!, winning, and then your episode not airing because the guy giving the clues is an asshole?
I think I’d be okay with not appearing on tv with that Tom Wambsgans motherfucker. Give me my money and my Meineke and I’ll gladly win in anonymity.
Many years ago, in the late 80s/early 90s, I appeared on a low-budget game show on what was then The Nashville Network. They made it clear to us going in, in the rules of the game, that if you were on an episode, and the episode did not air, for any reason, technical or otherwise, you would not receive your prizes. And the prizes were not distributed until after your episode aired, which was sometimes many months after the taping. Now, of course, physical prizes are a special case, because in some cases the manufacturer is paying (or discounting the purchase price) in return for the promotion of having the prize appear and be described on the air, and so that legal relationship between the manufacturer and the producers comes into play and the producers might not have the prize to give you. But that doesn’t mean that some cash-based game shows don’t have the same rule.
I’ve been on 3 game shows in the last 9 years and I can attest that the no-prize-if-unaired rule is still around today. Still, it would be a real bad look for Jeopardy if they didn’t air the Michael Richards episodes and give the contestants the shaft. The show has enough bad PR as it is.
C’mon dude don’t bury the lede. What did you win?
Both times I was on the show (three years apart), I won my game, but did not win the bonus round, and then lost as the returning champion in my second game. I won a variety of small prizes, mostly forgettable — except for a set of Cutco knives, which I still use almost every day, 30 years later. Here are the two episodes from my first run on the show. When the show first went on the air, it had a general pop culture trivia format; by the time of my second appearance, it had a different host (Dan Miller) and had narrowed the trivia to music only.
Man Cutco knives. When I was in college, I got a job offer from a company called Vertex. They called me in and I waited in a room with 10-12 other people. One of them was a friend of mine from college. They interviewed us as a group then pulled us in one by one. Lady who pulled me in told me I (and I alone) got the job due to “great eye contact.” Called my friend right after and she got the exact same spiel. Looked up Vertex online soon after and it’s basically a scam company taking advantage of students who don’t know any better to try to get them to sell Cutco knives to their families and friends.Glad you got them for free but will never buy a product from that company no matter how good their knives are. There is no justification for taking advantage of people like that.
Man Cutco knives. When I was in college, I got a job offer from a company called Vertex. They called me in and I waited in a room with 10-12 other people. One of them was a friend of mine from college. They interviewed us as a group then pulled us in one by one. Lady who pulled me in told me I (and I alone) got the job due to “great eye contact.” Called my friend right after and she got the exact same spiel. Looked up Vertex online soon after and it’s basically a scam company taking advantage of students who don’t know any better to try to get them to sell Cutco knives to their families and friends.Glad you got them for free but will never buy a product from that company no matter how good their knives are. There is no justification for taking advantage of people like that.
Jeopardy actually had a similar instance of this sort of issue. The young guy who was the last ongoing champ during trebeks last episodes was Braydon Smith and he suddenly passed away from surgery complications, in early 2021 if I recall. But Jeopardy contestants apparently get their winnings within 120 days… And he died before even saw his winnings.
I lived that nightmare back in the late 90’s.
Host: Congratulations, you’ve won with the biggest single-day total in the history of the show! Once this episode airs, you’ll be world famous!
Me: Thank you, unexpected Jeopardy guest host Saddam Hussein.
Be a whole lot easier to forget Mike Richards if y’all didn’t keep posting clickbait articles about him, eh?
I think most viewers are on that same page. What solution to the whole “no host” problem do you propose?
I think they should have three hosts that speak in unison. Then at night, they could sleep in a bunk bed, snoring in sequence like the Three Stooges.
Two of them snoring with the third going “me-me-me-me-me” after and you’ve got yourself a deal, mister.
They should all have their faces hidden by the cowls on the grey hessian cloaks they wear, and end every clue they read out with “IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE PROPHECY.”
What was that supercomputer that was a contestant a few times as publicity / stunt? Watson, right? Watson for host!
No joke that would be pretty cool.
From the headline, I’m picturing “Alex Trebek’s Philosophy” itself hosting, maybe as some kind of dissolute glowing cloud.
If they have zero people lined up that can do the job, just grab someone from behind the scenes who’s been there a while and knows the rhythms of the show. As Richards has shown, it works fine.Or, just have Richards keep doing it until you can find another guest host or something. If the options are ‘have the fired guy keep working until his replacement arrives’ or ‘just shut down until the replacement arrives’, then Option 1 is clearly the better one.
Should’ve used a deepfake Trebek over Rich-tard’s mug
They probably have enough recorded dialogue of Trebek to have his voice read most of the questions, and they could get a sound alike to fill in the blanks. Chef-style
I still say he looks like a mashup of Michael Fassbender and Woody from Toy Story.
Fun fact: The previous exec producers of Jeopardy, Harry
Friedman and Steven Mosko, had established a plan almost a decade ago
for bringing in a new host with ease and dignity once Alex’s time came.
Mosko actually kept a short list of potential candidates by his phone
(this began after Trebek suffered a heart attack in 2012) so the search
for the next host wouldn’t need to begin from scratch and the show
wouldn’t be disrupted more than absolutely necessary.
But Mosko
left Sony in 2016, Friedman retired last year, and his replacement was
Mike Richards, who chucked their entire plan and decided to stage this
embarrassing farce where he paraded potential hosts around while
secretly always planning to crown himself the new Trebek. This is going
to go down as one of the biggest TV fuckups of the decade. Better
producers did 90% of the succession work for Richards and he still
managed to turn this into a fiasco because he couldn’t keep his ego in
check.
Yeah, I remember hearing of some random broadcasting names and hosts from various local news stations or sports teams. Nobody huge, so they could grow into the role as Jeopardy host, not some celebrity that got the job
The more I see the guy the more he looks like Slappy from Goosebumps.
This also points to why Levar Burton was probably always doomed, even before his lousy guest hosting job: the deranged stanning on twitter by bored twitter users made the whole thing about him instead of the show such that the suggestion that anyone else in the world was obviously out to get Burton. It made you feel almost dirty for thinking he was a good idea for the job in the first place (and probably could still be in a perfect world, his bad guest hosting stint notwithstanding). It reminds me of the time some writer mentioned he thought Adrian Lester was a better choice to be the next James Bond than Idris Elba, and people attacked him for being racist. The fact that Lester is also a black guy was irrelevant (in no small part to none of the stanners even bothering to even google what he looked like).
One thing against Burton is his age. He may be exuberant and chipper, but he’s 68. The corporate perspective is that Jeopardy will run forever, and they want whoever they pick as a replacement to hold the job for as long as Trebek did, mostly so they don’t have to go through this succession job again, but also to restore the sense of continuity and stability.
They are so giving Mike Richards the Sherry Pie edit, as in edited out.I clicked past last night and noticed the camera never went to the host as the questions were being read or in between contestants.
Should the series just yank them altogether, and spare us the sight?
Is this something that anyone has asked? And if so, why would they be paid attention to? Who is the us that needs to be spared the sight, and why do they need to be spared the sight? What happens if they are not spared the sight? Do they melt into a puddle of goo?