{"id":1363,"date":"2021-08-12T10:54:45","date_gmt":"2021-08-12T14:54:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/nicolewillson.com\/blog\/?p=1363"},"modified":"2021-09-01T08:43:16","modified_gmt":"2021-09-01T12:43:16","slug":"what-is-an-extra-half-hour-of-free-time-every-weeknight","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/nicolewillson.com\/blog\/what-is-an-extra-half-hour-of-free-time-every-weeknight\/","title":{"rendered":"What is “An Extra Half-Hour of Free Time Every Weeknight?”"},"content":{"rendered":"

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(Final (!?)\u00a0Update 8\/31\/21<\/strong>:\u00a0And now Richards is even out as the EP of Jeopardy<\/em> and Wheel of Fortune<\/em>. Someone is going to write a crazy adaptation of all this some day: Mike Richards attempts to shove Ken Jennings out of the way as the new host of Jeopardy\u00a0<\/em>and ends up costing himself not just the hosting job but his entire career. Whew. You might have screwed something up lately, but whatever it was, I bet you didn’t screw it up this<\/em> badly.)<\/p>\n

(Update 8\/20\/21<\/strong>: Holy crap, he stepped down after one day of taping as the host. I’m shocked, but pleased. But what a mess Sony has to clean up now.)<\/p>\n

(Update 8\/18\/21<\/strong>: Claire McNear of The Ringer has been keeping on top of this story\u00a0and published an absolutely brutal piece today: https:\/\/www.theringer.com\/tv\/2021\/8\/18\/22631299\/mike-richards-jeopardy-host-search-process-past-comments<\/a>. This guy is a hell of a lot\u00a0worse than I thought. And I was hardly a fan to begin with.)<\/p>\n

Fasten your seatbelts. It\u2019s Rant Time, and we’re going to be experiencing some turbulence today.<\/p>\n

A while back, I told Bill I thought the new host of Jeopardy<\/i> had been chosen well before Alex Trebek died. The guest host parade\u00a0came about\u00a0to keep the new host from having to take over right away and suffer from the inevitable\u00a0comparisons to Alex.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

I\u2019m pretty sure I was right about that, but I was convinced the new host was Ken Jennings. And after Ken\u2019s guest host stint, I thought it should<\/i> be him. He did a great job, and something about him being there just felt right. After all, there\u2019s no person other than Trebek himself more associated with Jeopardy<\/i>.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Little did I know that Jeopardy\u2019s<\/i> answer to Dick Cheney had been lurking in the studio wings the whole time.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Jeopardy\u2019s<\/i>\u00a0executive producer Mike Richards was my least favorite of the guest hosts I watched (I didn\u2019t watch Dr. Oz). He claimed his hosting stint was a spur of the moment thing when the scheduled host couldn\u2019t make it due to COVID-19 restrictions.<\/p>\n

Richards struck me as a lab-created game show host, phony and saccharine, the antithesis of what Alex Trebek had been. When\u00a0I got to see Alex at work, during my episode and then at a Teachers Tournament filmed in DC a while\u00a0later, he was in full \u201cOld man gives zero fucks\u201d mode when it came to speaking his mind. There was nothing fake about him.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

I can’t think of a\u00a0better contrast between Ken and Mike than the way they both signed off every night. Ken\u2019s \u201cThank you, Alex,\u201d was short, simple, and sweet.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Mike chose to sign off with\u00a0an Alex quote that was long, convoluted, and felt more so every night he used it. \u201cI just want to say, as Alex said, we\u2019re trying to build a kinder and gentler society, and if we all pitch in just a little bit, we\u2019re going to get there.\u201d It\u2019s not a bad sentiment, but it’s not a natural sign-off, and the way Richards delivered\u00a0it felt awkward and fake, like the rest of his persona.\u00a0It’s as if he heard Ken’s sign-off and\u00a0figured he had to do one too but WAY BETTER than Ken’s.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

And then last week, I heard about the discrimination lawsuits. https:\/\/variety.com\/2021\/tv\/news\/mike-richards-jeopardy-price-is-right-brandi-cochran-1235035652\/<\/a><\/p>\n

Oh, and? The origin story Richards tried to sell the press\u2014Plucky Understudy\u00a0steps in when the star can\u2019t make it and steals the show!<\/i>\u2014was bullshit. Surprise! I was right; the dude is a total phony, on top of treating pregnant women in his employ like cattle.\u00a0https:\/\/www.theringer.com\/tv\/2021\/8\/5\/22611962\/jeopardy-new-host-mike-richards-sony<\/a><\/p>\n

Now Jeopardy<\/i> is pretending they\u2019ve chosen two hosts, and a lot of the media is running with this misdirection. Don’t buy it. Mike Richards is the new host of the syndicated version, also known as \u201cthe version everyone actually sees every day.\u201d Mayim Bialik, who\u2019s got her own issues, will be hosting primetime Jeopardy<\/i> specials. The last primetime Jeopardy<\/i> special was in early 2020. Bialik’s\u00a0not going to be terribly busy, I don\u2019t think.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

I’m not sure\u00a0Jeopardy<\/em>\u00a0could have bungled\u00a0this process and\u00a0squandered a fandom’s\u00a0goodwill this\u00a0badly if they’d actually planned\u00a0to nuke their reputation from outer space. No, they never claimed the guest\u00a0hosts were auditioning for the permanent spot, but they certainly didn’t\u00a0dissuade<\/em> anyone from seeing it that way. If I’m right that the guest hosts were meant to take pressure off Alex’s eventual successor, boy did that<\/em> ever backfire. Even if Richards is telling the truth that he had nothing to do with selecting himself (sure, Jan), this whole disaster\u00a0sure as hell made it look\u00a0otherwise.<\/p>\n

I was planning to watch next season if super champ Matt Amodio was\u00a0still playing (which is looking highly probable right now), but I have zero interest in watching Mike Richards after all this nonsense. Have it your way, Jeopardy<\/i>. You can shit in the\u00a0swimming pool, but you can\u2019t make me dive in.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

And for the record, this is not because I\u2019m upset LeVar Burton didn\u2019t get it. I like and respect Burton, and anyone who devotes so much time to getting kids to enjoy reading has a special place in my heart. But at the risk of causing half the Internet to fall on my head, I wasn’t impressed by his\u00a0hosting stint, or by\u00a0his fans’ annoying\u00a0insistence that he alone deserved\u00a0to be the new host.<\/p>\n

Which guest hosts did I enjoy? Ken, Buzzy Cohen, Aaron Rodgers (who I did not<\/i> expect to like), Robin Roberts, Dr. Sanjay Gupta, Bill Whitaker, and David Faber (who I\u2019d never even heard of before his hosting stint) were all especially strong. A lot of people in r\/Jeopardy were complaining\u00a0about Joe Buck before he hosted this week, but I like him too. I don’t know if I’d want to watch him as the full-time host, but after a long and emotional\u00a0season, it’s been good to laugh a little.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m not calling for a boycott. I\u2019m not expecting the show to die. I don\u2019t want the show to die; plenty of people enjoy it and want to be on it. I hope Matt has a long and legendary run and that everyone who wants to be a contestant gets a chance.\u00a0Seriously, send Matt some love. On top of all the other messes Jeopardy<\/em> made with this botched announcement, they’ve managed to step on news of Matt’s run, which would be big Jeopardy<\/em> news in any other time. This man\u00a0has managed to adjust to four different hosts and counting, something Ken Jennings and James Holzhauer never had to do.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

As\u00a0for me, I\u2019ve got an extra thirty minutes every weeknight. Maybe I didn\u2019t win my Jeopardy<\/i> game, but I got a photo with Alex Trebek and not Mike Richards. Money gets spent, but this is forever.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

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(Final (!?)\u00a0Update 8\/31\/21:\u00a0And now Richards is even out as the EP of Jeopardy and Wheel of Fortune. Someone is going…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[33,65],"tags":[77,93,76,92,10],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/nicolewillson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1363"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/nicolewillson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/nicolewillson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/nicolewillson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/nicolewillson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1363"}],"version-history":[{"count":16,"href":"http:\/\/nicolewillson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1363\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1391,"href":"http:\/\/nicolewillson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1363\/revisions\/1391"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/nicolewillson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1363"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/nicolewillson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1363"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/nicolewillson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1363"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}