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--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Welcome to Today, Explained. I'm Sean Rameswaram.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Today, we're going to talk about a different daily show. This is Jupert. The formerly infallible trivia show has been recently humanized by scandal.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: 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 McNair 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.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And now, here is the host of Jeopardy!
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: 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.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: 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.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So he continued to tape episodes. You know, he was very vocal about what he was going through as he was being treated for cancer and going through chemotherapy. And, you know, just the pain he felt.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: 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.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: 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 an overall deal in 2019.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: 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.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: 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.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So he comes into Sony in like 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.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: 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.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: 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.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: 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.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I'm Mike Richards, the executive producer of Jeopardy. Over the weekend, we lost our beloved host, Alex Trebek.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: 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.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: 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 the show if you retired?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: 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.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: 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.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: 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.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I mean, so we saw 16 people in 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.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But we can honor him by playing the game he loved. But yeah, we never saw Laura Coates and we never saw Alex Faust.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: 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.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I've been a fan of Jeopardy for all of my life. And when this opportunity came by, I could not pass it off. Butterfly in the sky, I can go twice as high.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: 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.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: 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.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: 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.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: A reading rainbow. A reading rainbow. And instead we get people like Aaron Rodgers, Dr. Oz, Katie Couric, Dr. Sanjay Gupta, Anderson Cooper, Savannah Guthrie.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: 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.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So we know that it was a decision that was made at the kind of very most senior levels. So that would be Tony Vincera, who is the president of Sony TV and the Sony TV chairman.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: 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.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: 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.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: 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.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: 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.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: 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.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: 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.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But a lot of that data is itself kind of suspect because of Richards' involvement in the process.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: 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, you know, Big Bang Theory was her big show.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I am Amy Farrah Fowler. We met the other night. I have spent my life in pursuit of pure knowledge.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: 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.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: 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.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: What happens to Richards next has a lot to do with your reporting. Let's talk about that.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: 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.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: They kind of turned on the mistreatment of female employees by male leadership there, including Richards.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: One of those, a 2010 lawsuit claimed Richards criticized models who became pregnant. Richards denied any wrongdoing at the time.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Both cases were eventually settled. In the wake of this, sent out an email to the Jeopardy staff that said in part that these lawsuits are not a reflection of who I am or how we work together at the Price is Right.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And that, for me, made me curious about, A, what the work environment at the Price is Right was actually like, and B, kind of curious about more of his past, and in particular about his early work in television.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: 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.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Like Ran-Dumb. Exactly. Ran-Dumb. R-A-N-D-U-M-B. Okay. I was interested in seeing it because effectively it was his first work in front of a camera as a budding television personality.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But 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.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: 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, along with...
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And this was a podcast that he hosted while he was the executive producer, The Price is Right. He'd been there for five years when he launched this was 2013 and 2014 taped over about a year and a half um you know and there there are a lot of things that have raised some eyebrows in there well okay let me ask you a question okay have you ever taken a nude picture i'm not answering that question to you mike richard
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: 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 ableist language He uses some pretty ugly slurs and stereotypes.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Because what if you got unemployment and food stamps? You'd be like, good Lord, I make, you know what I'm saying?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: 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.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So you publish this story. What happens next? So we published like early Wednesday evening last week. And Thursday was Jeopardy's first tape day of the season.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: This has been scheduled before they had chosen a host. They begin ramping up usually late July, early August. Bring in, you know, the first contestants.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: We have like 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.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And what was your wager, Matt? $30,000.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And there was a bunch of hoopla planned, too. They were going to dedicate the soundstage that Jeopardy tapes at as the Alex Trebek stage. And some of Trebek's family was going to be there.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: 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.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And the following morning, Friday morning, Sony puts out a statement from Richards saying that he is stepping down as host.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: 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.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And it meant a lot of questions about the process that wound up choosing him. Just like that. Just like that. Yep.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: 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?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Great questions. And so right now, Richards is still the executive producer of both Jeopardy and of Wheel of Fortune.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: 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.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: 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.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Mayim Bialik is going to come in and host, you know, the next three weeks of the season, but then they're going to renew the search.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: We don't know if it will be new people involved or, you know, if they're going to turn back to people they previously looked at. We don't know.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But as EP, he will once again be very closely involved with whoever is hosting or guest hosting or, I guess, auditioning.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: 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.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So the season premiere is supposed to be mid-September. So it seems like right now, Richards is going to stay his EP, and they're going to air his episodes as if nothing strange has happened since then
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: For now the long and short of it is they just kind of blew it It seems great for Sony Jeopardy is really a very, very big deal.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It is a very profitable franchise for the studio. It is a ratings juggernaut, and it has been for many years.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: 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.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: 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.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: 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.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Because, like, do people want to watch Jeopardy now? Some might not. It's really just such a disaster for Sony.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Double Jeopardy after these messages from our sponsors.
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--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Support for the show comes from Charles Schwab. at Schwab how you invest is your choice not theirs that's why when it comes to managing your wealth Schwab gives you more choices you can invest and trade on your own plus get advice and more comprehensive wealth solutions to help meet your unique needs with award-winning service low costs and transparent advice you can manage your wealth your way at Schwab visit schwab.com to learn more
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Why do people care so deeply about Jeopardy, Claire? 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, you know, education being celebrated.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And, you know, it's not about winning a million dollars. Only a couple people have ever won a whole bunch of money on Jeopardy. Most people go home with, you know, fairly modest pay days.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: 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.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: 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.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Like 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.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And it feels kind of like an American an institution and kind of a sacred one at that. And to have imperiled that is really just such a sad thing.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: 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.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: 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.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But he also was this very, like, anonymous, never in the tabloids character. He wasn't on social media sounding off about whatever was going on.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And I think, you know, some of that probably was being in his 70s and not having much interest in joining Twitter.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But I think also part of it was he understood his role and what was at stake there if he were to weigh in these ways.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And he knew that people appreciated him as this kind of neutral arbiter of facts.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And, you know, to circle back to his illness, I think one of the things I've been really struck by in, you know, as he was going through that, and really in the months since his death, is that he continued to make Jeopardy.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: He really wanted to keep making Jeopardy. I mean, there's nobody in the world who would have faulted him for stepping back after a very long, very successful career to focus on his health and his treatment, especially with what he said he was going through.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: 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.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And it was really important to him to keep doing it.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: 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.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: 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.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And suddenly that is just shattered. Yeah.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: 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.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And yet they didn't even do a real thorough background check on Mike Richards before naming him host. How exactly does that happen?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: 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
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Because what really seems like may have happened is a lot of these Sony execs who we know are involved in the selection of Mike Richards, a lot of them came to Sony pretty recently.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: 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.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: 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.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Like people really care about Jeopardy in a way that they don't necessarily care about even other game shows with huge audiences.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And for Sony to have failed to grasp that, either through, you know, just ignorance or misunderstanding or who knows what, is shocking.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And I think, you know, for Jeopardy fans, it's disappointing as well.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: 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.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: 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.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: 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.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: 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.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: but part of it was also the people running it behind the scenes at Jeopardy and at Sony.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And it was never something that you would argue about. It was never something that was divisive.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And now suddenly it is. And listen, I think that it is possible that Jeopardy finds a way to right the ship and go back to being this steady, stable institution.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: 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.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: 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?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: 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?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: You wanted your favorite host to win, and you thought this tick or that thing about a different host was disqualifying.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: 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.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And I think that that was always going to be true because there was never going to be another Alex Trebek, right? He is the host that people still want to see.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: 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.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: 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.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: 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.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: 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.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: No one's asking me, Claire, but I have a solution. Do you want to hear it?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: 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.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Why not just run the thousands of episodes they have hosted by the one guy everybody loves?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Yeah. What if they just ran old episodes for the rest of time? Would people care?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Well, you know who 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.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: 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.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Claire, thank you so much for your reporting and for your time.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Thanks so much for having me.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Claire McNair is a staff writer at The Ringer. She's also the author of Answers in the Form of Questions, A Definitive History, and Insider's Guide to Jeopardy.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: This killer Jeopardy theme remix comes to us from OMG It's Chill Bill.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: You can find their 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.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Today, Explained is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Today's episode was produced by Victoria Chamberlain, who really wants LeVar to host.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: The rest of the team includes Halima Shah, who wants Cardi B to get the gig, Miles O'Brien, who's rooting for Joe Pera.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Will Reed, like Steve Harvey. Matt Collette wants Watson from IBM.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Jillian Weinberger prefers Simone Biles from the Olympics.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Liz Kelly Nelson thinks I should do it, but Laura Bullard wants Michael Barbaro, so... Hadi Mawagdi thinks Will Ferrell would be great.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Welcome Hadi.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Amina Alsadi thinks it should be Laura Coates, as Alex Trebek intended.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: 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.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Thank you.
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