Today, Explained - Jeopardy!

Episode Date: August 26, 2021

I’ll take public scandal for $1000. This episode was produced by Victoria Chamberlin, edited by Matt Collette, engineered by Efim Shapiro, fact-checked by Laura Bullard, and hosted by Sean Rameswaram. Transcript at vox.com/todayexplained. Support Today, Explained by making a financial contribution to Vox! bit.ly/givepodcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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The formerly infallible trivia show has been recently humanized by scandal, and the scandal is mostly centered around one particular individual, a guy named Mike Richards. He was the guy who was chosen to replace St. Alex Trebek, and Claire McNear at The Ringer had been reporting on the search for Alex Trebek's replacement for months before her reporting changed the trajectory of the search last week. And now, here is the host of Jeopardy! We started with something I've been struggling to wrap my head around in all of this. Alex Trebek was sick for a very long time. Everyone knew this, and yet there was no clear plan of succession.

He announced his diagnosis in early 2019. Just like 50,000 other people in the United States each year, this week I was diagnosed with stage 4 pancreatic cancer. Now normally the prognosis for this is not very encouraging, but I'm going to fight this. So he continued to tape episodes. He was very vocal about what he was going through as he was being treated for cancer and going through chemotherapy

and just the pain he felt. I mean, he talked a lot about this. There were some good days, but a lot of not-so-good days. I joked with friends that the cancer won't kill me, the chemo treatments will. The key figure here is Mike Richards, and Mike Richards is this seasoned game show executive. He's 46, and he was hired by Sony to do an overall deal in 2019. Prior to that, he was the executive producer

of The Price is Right and of Let's Make a Deal, so these other big popular game shows. And he also had had some hosting experience. He'd done a few reality shows, a couple pretty short-lived game shows, and he had been very open about the fact that he wanted to get back in front of the camera. So he comes into Sony in mid-2019, and a couple months after that, Harry Friedman, who is the longtime EP of Jeopardy and Wheel of Fortune, which are sister shows and share a lot of their crew and tape next door to each other, he announced that he was going to be stepping back. And Richards was announced as his successor. And so there had been this group of executives

who seemed to think quite a lot about who would come after Alex Trebek and those people left. And so, and then there was a bunch of turnover within Jeopardy. So it kind of created this dual power vacuum that seems to have had a lot to do with what happened here. Richards comes in as the EP at the very beginning of the 2020-2021 season.

Then a few months into that was when Trebek passed away. I'm Mike Richards, the executive producer of Jeopardy. Over the weekend, we lost our beloved host, Alex Trebek. This is an enormous loss for our staff and crew, for his family, and for his millions of fans. He loved this show and everything it stood for. And do we have any idea who Alex Trebek may have wanted to host the show after him? Trebek gave an interview where he was asked, as he was pretty frequently,

Who would be a good, solid host of this show if you retire? And he named two people he thought would be at least good candidates to try for it. And they were Alex Faust, who does the play-by-play for the LA Kings hockey team. Yanni Card scores! And Laura Coates. There is an attorney. She's African-American. And she appears on some of the cable news shows from time to time.

And did either of those two people actually guest host the show in the past few months? That has been something that has certainly raised some eyebrows. I mean, so we saw 16 people and all come in to guest host over the remainder of the season. Let's be totally clear. No one will ever replace the great Alex Trebek, but we can honor him by playing the game he loved. But yeah, we never saw Laura Coates and we never saw Alex Faust. We don't know if they were ever approached. It's kind of unclear. I mean, it's things like that. And there was this fan movement, of course, around LeVar Burton.

I've been a fan of Jeopardy for all of my life. And when this opportunity came by, I could not pass it up. Butterfly in the sky, I can go twice as high. And LeVar Burton was not announced as a guest host till the very end of the season. He only got one week of episodes when a lot of the other guest hosts got two. His episodes ended up airing during the Summer Olympics, which of course kind of contributed to lower ratings perhaps than he might have had otherwise. So, you know, I think there are a lot of fans who feel that, apart from all the stuff

with Richards, which we can talk about, the will of the fans and the will of Trebek, perhaps, was not really taken into account here. And instead we get people like Aaron Rodgers, Dr. Oz, Katie Couric, Dr. Sanjay Gupta, Anderson Cooper, Savannah Guthrie.

Who has to make the decision between all of these people? It's sort of unclear exactly who made the decision and exactly what the factors were. So we know that it was a decision that was made at the kind of very most senior level. So that would be Tony Vincera, who is the president of Sony TV and the Sony TV chairman. And there are probably other people involved, but they haven't named a lot of names. Mike Richards was definitely part of this process that they have said that he stepped back from that once he himself became a contender. But of course, I think there were a lot of fans who didn't realize that he was kind of putting himself out as a contender.

He was the season's second guest host. But even if we believe Sony that he was no longer involved in that kind of, you know, sitting around being like, here's who should come next. He at least was continuing to serve as the executive producer and he was doing things like

training the other guest hosts. And he was the one in their ear throughout their episodes with the earpiece telling them what to do and what not to do and what to improve. And the New York Times has reported he was the one who was selecting which of those episodes would then go on to focus groups. So Sony talked a lot about the extent to which they were relying on data and analytics to determine who would be the next host of Jeopardy. But a lot of that data is itself kind of suspect because of Richards' involvement in the process. So then earlier this month, Sony comes out and announces that Mike Richards is going to be the new nightly host, so effectively succeeding Trebek, and that the actress Mayim Bialik, who was one of this season's guest hosts, and who you might know from Blossom or Big Bang Theory was her big show. I am Amy Farrah Fowler. We met the other night. I have spent my life in pursuit of pure knowledge. She is going to be the host of some primetime specials that will air on ABC. So they kind of

tried to bill it as them being co-hosts, but really, Mike Richards was announced as the new permanent host of Jeopardy! and Mayim Bialik will come in a couple times a year for these special tournaments. What happens to Richards next has a lot to do with your reporting. Let's talk about that. You know, after it was reported in early August that Richards was in advanced negotiations for the permanent host job, there was a lot of new scrutiny of a couple lawsuits stating from his time as the executive producer at The Price is Right. They kind of turned on the mistreatment of female employees by male leadership there, including Richards. One of those, a 2010 lawsuit, claimed Richards

criticized models who became pregnant. Richards denied any wrongdoing at the time. Both cases were eventually settled. In the wake of this, I sent out an email to the Jeopardy staff that said in part that these lawsuits are not a reflection of, you know, who I am or how we work together at the Price is Right. And that, for me, made me curious about, A, you know, what the work environment at The Price is Right was actually like. And B, you know, kind of curious about more of his past and in particular about his early work in television. And I'm not sure if it's still up at this point, but in his official Jeopardy.com biography, and he's mentioned it in a number of interviews, he mentions that as a college student, he hosted and created this comedy news show called The Random Show. Like, ran-dumb.

Exactly, ran-dumb. R-A-N-D-U-M-B. Okay. mb okay i was interested in seeing it because effectively it was his first work in front of a camera um as like a budding television personality but i i was not actually able to find any of those clips i mean it's all from the 90s i don't know how much of it has ever made it online period but i did find a podcast by the same name the random show inside knowledge on tv pop culture and game shows with the executive producer of let's Make a Deal and The Price is Right, Mike Richards. And this was a podcast that he hosted while he was the executive producer of The Price is Right. He'd been there for five years when he launched this.

This was 2013 and 2014, taped over about a year and a half. You know, and there are a lot of things that have raised some eyebrows in there. Well, okay. Let me ask you a question. Have you ever taken a nude picture? I'm not answering that question to you, Mike Richards. He uses a lot of troubling language. To the point to where Beth got a job being a, was it a booth hoe?

He uses a lot of sexist language. Like booby pictures? What are you talking about? Ableist language. Um, he uses some, uh some pretty ugly slurs and stereotypes. Because what if you got unemployment and food stamps? You'd be like, good Lord. I make, you know what I'm saying?

And he talks quite a bit about women's bodies. Everyone's going to wear one pieces and look really frumpy and overweight. But they all look terrible in the picture. They look fat and like not good in the picture. It's bad. So you publish this story. What happens next? So we publish early Wednesday

evening last week, and Thursday was Jeopardy's first tape day of the season. This had been scheduled before they had chosen a host. They begin ramping up, usually late July, early August. Bring in the first contestants. We have a very dominant champ.

And Matt Amodio, our returning Jeopardy! champion with $44,000. Did you get the correct response? What is Cartagena? That's correct. From Carthage. And what was your wager, Matt? $30,000. And there was a bunch of hoopla planned too. They were going to dedicate the sound stage that Jeopardy! tapes at as the Alex Trebek stage, and some Trebek's family was going to be there. And Richards goes in, and he tapes. He taped five games that day. He taped the week's worth of episodes that Jeopardy! usually films on a tape day. And the following morning, Friday morning, Sony puts out a statement from Richard saying that he is stepping down as host.

Mike Richards, who is also the show's executive producer, saying he's stepping down from the hosting job after coming under fire for past offensive comments, which he apologized for, and meant a lot of questions about the process that wound up choosing him. Just like that. Just like that.

Yep. So what comes next? Is Mike Richards still involved in the show? Who's going to be hosting it? Are they going to air those episodes he just taped? What happens? Great questions. And so right now, Richards is still the executive producer of both Jeopardy and of Wheel of Fortune. And I think a lot of fans have been asking, you know, if these things were

disqualifying to be the host of Jeopardy, it's not really clear why they're not disqualifying to be the executive producer of Jeopardy. And, you know, secondarily to all of that is the matter of as they re-begin this host search process, they've said they're going back to guest hosts. Mayim Bialik is going to come in and host, next three weeks of the season, but then they're going to renew the search. We don't know if it will be new people involved or if they're going to turn back to people they previously looked at. We don't know. But as EP, he will once again be very closely involved with whoever is hosting or guest hosting or, I guess, auditioning. And then, you know, your other question about whether they're just going to air those episodes, Sony right now is saying, yeah, they will. So the season premiere is supposed to be mid-September. So it seems like right now Richard is going to stay as EP

and they're going to air his episodes as if nothing strange has happened since then. So for now, the long and short of it is they just kind of blew it. It doesn't seem great for Sony. Jeopardy is really a very, very big deal. It is a very profitable franchise for the studio. It is a ratings juggernaut, and it has been for many years. It's kind of an outlier amongst game shows.

It's, you know, Jeopardy and Wheel of Fortune bring in a huge amount of money for Sony every single year. And to have suddenly endangered that, I mean, obviously there was going to be some uncertainty and, you know, probably a ratings drop off after Alex Trebek because, I mean, you lose your legendary host and face of the franchise. Some of that is inevitable. But then to have actually potentially damaged the Jeopardy brand, which I think is what may have happened here and not really just in a short-term way, to have imperiled what Jeopardy is and, you know,

how much money it can make because, like, do people want to watch Jeopardy now? Some might not. It's really just such a disaster for Sony. Double Jeopardy after these comes from Aura. Aura believes that sharing pictures is a great way to keep up with family, and Aura says it's never been easier thanks to their digital picture frames. They were named the number one digital photo frame by Wirecutter. Aura frames make it easy to share unlimited photos and videos directly from your phone to the frame.

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Part of it, I think, is that it is this very pure environment of right answers and wrong answers and the facts being important and intelligence and education being celebrated. And it's not about winning a million dollars. Only a couple of people have ever won a whole bunch of money on Jeopardy. Most people go home with fairly modest pay. I would certainly take $10,000 or $20,000 if somebody were offering it to me, but you don't really go on Jeopardy to get rich. Part of it is, I think, the nostalgia of Jeopardy. I mean, everybody has a Jeopardy memory, whether or not you are a person who watches every single weeknight. Maybe you watched it with a grandparent. Maybe you watched it with a teacher. It is this thing that has this incredible resonance with people.

And it feels kind of like a, you know, like an American institution and kind of a sacred one at that. And to have imperiled that is really just such a sad thing. It also just seems a terrible way to honor the legacy of Alex Trebek, right? Which he's kind of a rare example of someone who had a decades-long career in the spotlight and didn't seem to ruffle many feathers at all. As a Jeopardy! viewer,

you felt like you knew him because he'd been coming into your living room for 36 and a half years. But he also was this very anonymous, never-in-the-tabloids character. He wasn't on social media sounding off about whatever was going on. And I think some of that probably was being in his 70s and not were to weigh in these ways. And he knew that people appreciated him as this kind of neutral arbiter of facts. And to circle back to his illness, I think one of the things I've been really struck by as he was going through that and really in the months since his death is that he continued to Jeopardy. He really wanted to keep making Jeopardy. I mean, there's nobody in the world who would have faulted him

for, you know, stepping back after a very long, very successful career to focus on his health and his treatment, especially with, you know, what he said he was going through. I mean, it was, it's brutal, but he kept coming in and by all accounts, including his own, he just going through. I mean, it's brutal, but he kept coming in. And by all accounts, including his own, he just loved it. He just loved making Jeopardy, and it was really important to him to keep doing it. And we've heard a little bit from the Jeopardy staff in the wake of all of this kind of controversy around Mike Richards, I think there are a lot of people there who are really above all just saddened by what has happened because they feel, I mean, Jeopardy is an interesting workplace where many of the people who work there have been there

for years and years, for decades, have in some cases spent their entire professional career making Jeopardy. And they feel that now it has been screwed up, that they worked so hard to create this show, this place where facts mattered and where the audience knew what they were going to get and could trust in the show. And suddenly that is just shattered. Yeah, how does that happen exactly?

I mean, it was clear from the sort of online fan-driven campaign to get LeVar Burton guest hosting the show. And by just how much investment there was in who was guest hosting the show generally, that people cared so much about the future of this quiz show, this trivia show. And yet they didn't even do a real thorough background check on Mike Richards before naming him host? How exactly does that happen? I mean, that is a great question. And, you know, I would hope that some people at Sony are having to answer that same question to their own bosses right now, because what really seems like may have happened is a lot of these Sony execs who we know are involved in, you know, the selection of Mike Richards, a lot of these Sony execs who we know were involved in, you know, the selection of Mike Richards, a lot of them came to Sony pretty recently, and many didn't really have a ton of game show experience. And it's not really clear that they understood what is unique about

Jeopardy and what is special about Jeopardy and why people care so much about Jeopardy. Like, the fact that this news has kind of just been covered in newspapers everywhere. I mean, it was on the late night talk shows. It's been on the morning shows. People really care about Jeopardy in a way that they don't necessarily care about even other game shows with huge audiences. And for Sony to have failed to grasp that

either through just ignorance or misunderstanding or who knows what is shocking. And I think, you know, for Jeopardy fans, it's disappointing as well. And the thing you said about knowledge and right answers and wrong answers and facts mattering, I think Amanda Hess wrote about that well in the New York Times a few months ago. And she argued that Jeopardy takes on maybe a heightened importance in a time where we as Americans seem to really struggle to agree on a uniform set of facts, on a reality around this pandemic or our elections. Yeah, I mean, I think Jeopardy for so many people, I mean, during the pandemic, during the last five years, you know, whenever it has been comfort food and it has been a show that has avoided controversy.

And I think it has done that quite astutely. And part of that was Trebek's kind of being a very thoughtful custodian as the public face of this franchise. But part of it was also the people running it behind the scenes at Jeopardy and at Sony. And it was never something that you would argue about. It was never something that was divisive. And, and now suddenly it is. And listen, I, I think that it is possible that, you know, Jeopardy is, Jeopardy finds a way to right the ship and go back to being this steady, stable institution. But I think particularly if Mike Richards remains as the show's executive producer, there's a massive, massive amount of work to do to rebuild trust with the audience, with fans, with the contestant community,

and, you know, with the people who actually work for Jeopardy and make Jeopardy. I mean, is there a plan out there that fans of the show are proposing that former contestants are proposing that could get the show past this controversy around Mike Richards or even some of the smaller controversies that have been circulating around Mayim Bialik? Part of the difficulty that they created for themselves with doing this guest host rotation and hyping it as auditions is it really urged fans not only to root for their favorite, but to root against the others, right? You wanted your favorite host to win, and you thought this tick or that thing about a different host was disqualifying. So I think they have kind of created the situation

where, I mean, there's nobody who is going to make everybody happy, especially now. And I think that that was always going to be true because there was never going to be another Alex Trebek, right? Like that was, he is the host that people still want to see. And I think Ken Jennings even said that when he stepped in to guest host.

Like all Jeopardy fans, I miss Alex very much. And I thank him for everything he did for all of us. I don't know that there is one right person who needs to be named host and who is the perfect person who will figure this out and make everybody happy. I'm not sure that exists. But I think what Sony needs to do now as they reenter this search process is to be extremely transparent in a way that they were not the first time around. So I think turning to those people who do understand the magic of Jeopardy and do revere Jeopardy in the way that a lot of fans do is probably the way to move beyond this. No one's asking me, Claire, but I have a solution.

Do you want to hear it? Yeah, tell me. As someone who hosts a daily show and has built up like 880 episodes of an archive, I mean, the show's already mostly about historical facts. Why not just run the thousands of episodes they have hosted by the one guy everybody loves yeah what if they just ran old episodes for the rest of time would people care i well you know

who i i know for a fact would care is the 150 000 people who took the online contestant test last year for a place on jeopardy and they only led about 400 people on every season. So I think you'd have a non-minor revolt from those folks if nobody else. Claire, thank you so much for your reporting and for your time. Thanks so much for having me. Claire McNair is a staff writer at The Ringer. Thanks so much for having me. work on YouTube. We also use music from Breakmaster Cylinder, who you can find on TikTok, and Noam Hassenfeld, who you can find over at Unexplainable. Today Explained is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Today's episode was produced by Victoria Chamberlain, who really

wants LeVar to host. The rest of the team includes Halima Shah, who wants Cardi B to get the gig, Miles Bryan, who's rooting for Joe Pera. Will Reed likes Steve Harvey. Matt Collette wants Watson from IBM. Jillian Weinberger prefers Simone Biles from the Olympics. Liz Kelly Nelson thinks I should do it, but Laura Bullard wants Michael Barbaro, so... Hadi Mawagdi thinks Will Ferrell would be great, welcome Hadi. Amina Alsadi thinks it should be Laura Coates as Alex Trebek intended. And I think it should be our engineer, Afim the Dream Shapiro, who's never been on Jeopardy, but crushed it on Wheel of Fortune back in 2010.

Afim, you have $1400 and an Alaskan cruise. I will solve the puzzle, Pat. Go ahead. Saturday night fever reducer yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah

yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah

yeah yeah I'll see you on the board with $6,900.