Editorial note: This story has been updated since its initial publication.
Jeopardy! has released its first major statements on the hosting situation since Mayim Bialik announced her decision not to host any Season 40 games when Michael Davies spoke about the situation yesterday at the Television Critics Association winter press tour.
“Over the past two and a half seasons, what we’ve heard a lot from our television stations and other interested parties is they were looking for more consistency, they wanted a single host. Mayim is a superb host—we hope to keep working with her on primetime versions and other spinoffs, those conversations are ongoing—but Ken really won the job,” reported TV Line, among other outlets who have been covering the TCA winter press tour.
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However, some critics at TCA felt that Davies did an inadequate job of handling further questions on the situation. Kathia Woods of Cup Of Soul Show later tweeted that she asked “why hosting Jeopardy! is a job that more people can’t compete for”, being told by Davies that “we need a host that appeals to America”. In the same tweet, Woods said she received “a word salad” when she asked a clarifying question asking if Davies “felt only a straight white man can do that”.
About nine hours after this story was first published, a more detailed account of the response to Woods’s line of questioning was published by Lesley Goldberg of The Hollywood Reporter. As per the report:
Shortly afterward, new Jeopardy showrunner Michael Davies fielded a question about the ethnicity of its hosts and contestants across its multiple iterations. “[Jeopardy] has a duty to represent everyone. Talent beyond the host, the contestants, the questions. It has to represent everything that’s great about this country, including diversity,” he said, defending his choice to tap Ken Jennings as the lone host of the syndicated show. “No, I don’t think a straight, white man is the only person who can host Jeopardy. As we expand the franchises, we will fail if that’s the only person who can host.”
Editorially: It’s really hard to justify giving somebody a job when nearly every single piece of critical press about a person generally leans negative, especially when you have to justify your decision to advertisers. It would have been nice for critical outlets to have potentially countered the negativity towards Mayim Bialik when that negativity was happening, instead of criticizing Jeopardy! after the fact for it.
It should also be pointed out that the producer who mistreated LeVar Burton to the point where Burton wanted nothing to do with the show was fired two and a half years ago and has yet to hold a high-profile industry position since that firing—to be honest, I’m not entirely sure what else Jeopardy! could possibly do at this point to rectify that situation, short of inventing a time machine, going back to 2019, and not hiring Mike Richards in the first place.
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Unfortunately, this probably isn’t the last we’re going to see of this either, as “the host of Jeopardy!” is one of the most high-profile jobs in television, and news about it will draw visits to entertainment news sites.
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Davies or Richards, I think they tried to at least consider diverse potential hosts, but Alex Trebek was so ingrained into the history of Jeopardy! for so long (not just “recorded history”, but in “hearts and minds”), that I think they realized they needed to go with someone who was the LEAST FAR from being Alex and Ken turned out to be that person.