As a Jeopardy fan, I know that I should just ignore the jokes that are coming from late night comic about the problems finding a host of the show. They come with the territory about everything that’s an icon. But the thing is there’s a darker truth to this that a part of me really doesn’t like and that goes in context with the fact that all of the sound and fury really does have nothing to do with who does host the show in the end.
So in this piece, I will concentrate on some things: why the deification of Alex Trebek is misguided and probably doesn’t help the search and why I think the people who are making the larger critiques don’t care about Jeopardy at all.
Let’s start with the obvious: Jeopardy completely botched the search for a replacement. It was badly handled with the concept that somehow one of these celebrities would be Trebek’s replacement (the fact that one was hasn’t stopped the furor, but never mind). Giving Mike Richards the job was ham-handled to the extreme and smacked of nepotism and given his history behind the scenes as producer (something that no less that James Holzhauer was willing to acknowledge) should not have happened. The series was absolutely right to get rid of him.
That said when Mayim Bialik was immediately named to replace him as an interim; the backlash against her was ridiculous. No one had a problem with her guest hosting the first time, but the moment she became seriously considered for the job, everybody started raising past comments that she has made against her.
That was when two related things became clear. First, whoever ends up hosting Jeopardy will never have a clean slate. In the world of social media and where a camera is everywhere, there is nobody who can survive this kind of scrutiny with a perfect record. If you can think of someone, I guarantee you they’re not famous enough to host the show.
Second, the reason so many people are supposedly raising an outcry is finding someone ‘good enough’ to replace Alex Trebek. This makes the critical assumption that Trebek was perfect. He wasn’t. What he did and was very good at doing was keep his entire life outside of Jeopardy private. As far as I know, he had no social media presence at all. He never was recording as saying anything controversial. And that had less to do with his opinions then what he represented – the white iconic game show host.
We now live in a world where there are so many game show hosts that its easy to forget that Trebek really was the last of his breed. Did anyone wonder what Bob Barker’s opinions were outside of pet population control? Did anyone care what Monty Hall did in his spare time? We heard rumors about Chuck Barris and every so often, Chuck Woolery or Pat Sajak will say something that we’re not comfortable with, but the fact is no one really cared what Trebek thought. And because he kept his private life private, we thought he was a saint. In fact, when he was hosting Jeopardy, there were at least two occasions where his reactions could very well have gotten him fired and ostracized. (The full details can be found in Claire McNeer’s brilliant history of the show Answers in the Form of Questions.)
In 1986 a female contestant had won four games. On her fifth game, Alex ruled incorrect when she mispronounced the word Loeb. This is not uncommon, and the practice is if there is a question about correctness to raise at the commercial. That’s not what she did. She left the podium, got in Alex’s face, and confronted him on it. Alex remained calm…at the time. Later on, it was decided by production and Alex that she would not compete in the next Tournament of Champions and her games would be removed from syndications.
I don’t have to tell you what would happen if that happened just in the last twenty years. Alex would’ve lost his job and the female contestant would be lionized in certain circles for speaking ‘truth to power’ , even though behavior was incorrect in every possible respect. Instead, this entire event – and it’s been in the public record since at least the early 1990s, so its not like they’ve been hiding it – was swept over.
The next event happened more recently and led to far more controversy at the time. Starting in 1999, Jeopardy would hold an annual competition week for children. Initially having to do with Holidays or Back to School, after awhile it just became known as Kids’ Week. Then in 2013, this week became the subject of controversy.
In the third game, one of the contestants Final Jeopardy dealt with THE CIVIL WAR: “Abraham Lincoln called this document, which took effect in 1863, ‘a fit and necessary war measure.” The second place contestant wrote down:”What is the Emanciptation Proclamation?” The judges ruled against him. (The winner, who spelled the response correctly, ended up winning $66,600 one of the highest records ever but that got lost in the shuffle.)
Now to be clear, the second place contestant had barely a fourth of his opponent's total. There was no way he was going to win. And Jeopardy has been penalizing for misspelling words pretty much since the inception of the series. None of this would’ve changed the results or what the contestant won an iota. No one seemed to care about this. Everyone. from the media to the child’s parents, just said how unfair this was to the child. Context was irrelevant.
The judges and producers made suggestions to Alex that they might want to make modifications to how they handled Kids’ Week going forward because of this. Alex, normally stoic about these kinds of things, told the producers that if they changed things, they could start looking for a new host. Jeopardy decided to get rid of the Kids’ Week to avoid controversy and disturbing their star.
Now we all know if this had gotten out then, there would’ve been yet another firestorm – a white man flexing his will so that children couldn’t have a good environment! – and there’s a good chance the show might not have recovered from that. That the show was in the right, that nothing had changed because of the original incident – and the fact that the media turned it into a ‘controversy’ just how hysterical the world can be – wouldn’t have mattered.
Again, in neither of the scenarios I mentioned was Trebek in the wrong. And in the world we currently live in – where social media makes you guilty and doesn’t care about proving you innocent – it would not have made a difference. Trebek wouldn’t have survived it, and neither would Jeopardy most likely. And it is in that context that we now realize trying to find someone with the ‘flawless’ reputation of Trebek is an impossibility. Because he was never flawless, he just played someone who was on TV.
All of this is a big deal – but I think it is a big deal to the wrong people. In the conclusion of this article, I’ll address why I think that the people who should care the most about this – the fans – are probably the ones who care the least.
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