Why The Search for A Jeopardy Host is Complicated, Part 2
No One Asking The Right Questions — In Any Form
There has been so much discussion about who the ‘right’ person is to replace Alex Trebek. What never seems to quite enter the discussion is who the people who watch the show the most — the people like me — really think. I’m relatively certain that in the past year everybody except Jeopardy viewers have been asked that question. The outrage over Mike Richards being chosen was so palpable that I don’t think anyway even bothered to create a survey of Jeopardy fans to see what they thought.
I’ve already expressed my opinion multiple times, but I think I need to make it blunter. Had there been no real controversy surrounding Mike Richards, I honestly don’t think the fans would’ve cared as much. We watch the show for the contestants at least as much as we did Alex Trebek. We all know there is a cache to being a Jeopardy champion that doesn’t apply to basically any other game show. I was going to make this a hypothetical, but let’s be honest: Has anyone ever wanted to buy a book about the secrets of a Wheel of Fortune champion?
As I’ve said repeated, Trebek’s job was to put the focus on the contestants and the champions. What far too many members of the media and the social world seem to think is that it should be the other way around. This is so ridiculous you should think it goes without saying. Yet somehow when LeVar Burton ended up hosting Jeopardy, TV Guide actually jeered the contestants for having their performances detract from Burton’s. That’s not fair to either the contestants or Burton.
But that argument is at the key of the search for a new host. More people seem to care about who hosts it than what the contestants are doing. And what makes this horrendous especially now is what’s happening on the show.
Matt Amodio has gone beyond being a great Jeopardy champion to one of the greatest game show contestants in history. On Friday, he became only the third Jeopardy contestant — behind James Holzhauer and Ken Jennings — to win a million dollars in his original run. He has won thirty games by now, second only to Jennings and Holzhauer and in total winnings he is currently fourth on the all-time list.
I’m not speaking in hyperbole to say that this is one of the great achievements in game show history. Under normal circumstances, millions of people who care nothing about Jeopardy would be watching, the same way they did for Jennings and Holzhauer and the way they often did for so many other great players like Julia Collins and Austin Rogers. And yet I can’t help but think that there’s a decided lack of interest in this particular story by the media in comparison to all of the questions about the problems with the host. I imagine that Matt himself, every time he does interviews (and trust me, by now they are coming out of the woodwork) is tired of having to answer questions about he feels about the hosting situation that his performance. I imagine he’s been asked: “How has having so many people host during your appearance affected your performance?” “Do you have an opinion about who should host permanently?” “What do you think Alex Trebek would think of this situation?” (It’s probably less stressful than having to answer questions about why he begins every response with ‘What’, but no less annoying.)
Matt’s accomplishments matter far more than whoever ends up hosting Jeopardy. They should be the Jeopardy story at the center of late night comics by now, not all the commotion over who hosts the show. Indeed, there’s a question that I don’t think anybody in the media or on the net has asked: How are the ratings for Jeopardy now? The thing is I have a good idea as to why. If it turned out the ratings for the show were as high or at least the same as they were before, then there would be no story. It would mean that Jeopardy fans will watch the show no matter what. And that, like so many other tempests in a teapot, doesn’t fit the narrative the media has constructed. And they will never admit that they made a mistake.
Like I’ve said over and over — and will probably have to keep saying over and over — people like me watch the show for the contestants. If you’re watching the show because you care about seeing who recites trivial facts for contestants, then you’re really watching Jeopardy for the wrong reasons. And if that is the case I beg of you, go away. Find some other controversy to make a big deal out of. I realize seeing a decades-long show struggle to find a successor to a TV legend is a big story, but for quite a few of us — and I include myself among those numbers — we honestly wish you’d shut up and let us watch the game. Frankly, I’m insulted that you only seem to care about Jeopardy when we were having problems — and would rather focus on those problems then the people who have made Jeopardy what it is for thirty-seven years. To drive the point home, Alex was only one of those people — and I think even he would have said that most of the time, he wasn’t the most important one. People weren’t trying out for the show last year on the off chance they would get Aaron Rodgers’ autograph. And they were still trying out despite everything that happened involving Matt Richards. We’d much rather you focus on how long Matt Amodio stays on the show, rather than how long Mayim Bialik does. And if you still have to ask who he is, there’s the door.