Given all the catastrophic and potentially-catastrophic news around us, it's amazing that anyone has the time or effort to fret about who's going to host Jeopardy!, let alone get mad about it. But maybe that's the point. Maybe we sometimes need something inconsequential to get our minds off the consequential stuff. So I'll try writing about something that, when you get right down to it, doesn't really matter that much.
So the latest is that yesterday, they recorded the first five shows of the new season with this Mike Richards guy installed as the new permanent host. At the same time, there were all these new revelations of nasty things he'd said on podcasts and elsewhere. And this morning comes the news that he's "resigned," today's scheduled taping was canceled and the show will revert to guest hosts until a final, better decision is made.
There's a certain joy in corners of the Internet today. A lot of folks had come to loathe the guy because of who he is and/or how he got the job. A lot more celebrate, as we sometimes do, the sight of any Very Big, Wealthy Company making a Very Big, Costly Mistake.
And we have all this intrigue. What becomes of the five shows done yesterday? Presumably, Mr. Richards made comments about how honored he was to be the New, Permanent Host of Jeopardy! Do they air those words? Do they air those episodes? They have a current, ongoing Returning Champion and if he won on all five shows, do they not air them and just somehow announce that his Total Winnings jumped up on shows you'll never see? He probably didn't lose or we'd have heard but…well, you see the problem there.
Is Mayim Bialik going to get the post of hosting the syndicated shows? Or are they really doing more on-air auditions? It's a good day to not be the person who has to decide all this. And of course, it's a good day to not be Mike Richards, who has now achieved a notoriety that could (but probably won't) lead to him being the answer to a Final Jeopardy! question some day. He's still at this moment the Executive Producer of the show but that will change as some settlement is negotiated.
Here's what I think: Just pick somebody…anybody who can read and doesn't have a history of stupid, offensive remarks on the Internet. On this planet, there must be at least a hundred such people. The host doesn't matter that much.
Jeopardy!, since back in the days when Art Fleming hosted it, always struck me as a show you watch to play along; to think, "If I'd been a contestant, I would have won $13,500!" That's usually a bit of self-deception based on the premise that in front of cameras and an America that includes all your friends, you would have come up with the same correct answers you came up with at home with nothing on the line.
You're also assuming that you would have consistently hit the little button ahead of both other players. If you watch the show, you can often see two or all three of them trying to ring in at the same time. You probably would not have "won" that part of the game all or even most of the time. But it's fun to pretend.
This will sound like blasphemy to some but I never thought even Alex Trebek mattered that much. I don't mean he didn't do the job well. He did it about as well as anyone could…long enough to feel like a vital component of that show. But I don't think he was that irreplaceable.
There are game show hosts who bring a lot of themselves to the proceedings to the point where some people probably tune in to watch the host. Richard Dawson was that way on Family Feud…though I must say (more blasphemy) that I think the current host, Steve Harvey, does a much better job than any of his predecessors, Dawson included. I'm not saying he's the nicest, most deserving guy in the world. There are stories about him making the rounds, too. But he ad-libs better than almost any other game show host I've ever seen who was not named Marx.
Groucho, of course, was the only reason to tune in the old You Bet Your Life. (I'm hearing, by the way, that the new revival with Jay Leno is in production and that it's skewing more towards his old "Jaywalking" segments, the point of which were to demonstrate how dumb some people could look on television. Oh, I hope not.)
On shows where the "fun" came from celebrity panelists, fine hosting work was done by Garry Moore and later Steve Allen on I've Got a Secret; by Gene Rayburn or the Match Games of various eras; and by John Daly on the original What's My Line? I don't think any of the revivals of those programs have stumbled onto the right combinations of host and panel members but the shows still work well enough to attract decent audiences.
But Jeopardy! is not about any of that. It's about you sitting home and feeling good when you get as many right as the folks on the show do. I've been suggesting here that Alton Brown would make a good host but he's gotta be off the list that he was probably never on by now. He had his own minor said-the-wrong-thing scandal recently. But when you come right down to it, almost anyone who's doesn't have such a scandal and is comfy in front of a camera and can pronounce all the words right could do it.
Sony probably thinks they need a woman to atone for picking a seeming misogynist. Okay…fine. There are plenty around who could do it, including CNN legal analyst Laura Coates, who Mr. Trebek mentioned as a good fit for the job. Just pick someone already.