Well, I'm a little surprised only because Sony has fucked this up so many times that I didn't think they would finally do something right. I guess broken clocks and all of that.
They're still saying the "we had hoped that by Mike stepping down as host everything would cool over" line, which says to me they still don't fucking get it.
Have people checked Micheal Davies background yet? Has he scrubbed ALL SOCIAL MEDIA? I don't want to wake up to pic of him fondling monkeys tomorrow morning!!!!!!!
Some of you may be aware that I spend my Saturdays docenting at the International Printing Museum (in Carson, California). For some years now, I've been the acting lead Linotype operator. The reason for this is that we lost our previous lead Linotype operator to "hoof-in-mouth disease." As a museum docent, there are three things you just don't do: 1. Unless you work for, say, the George W. Bush Presidential Library, you don't wear your politics on your sleeve. 2. You do not knowingly or intentionally say or do anything to cause unnecessary discomfort to fellow docents, paid staff, board members, or people who fall into more than one of those categories. 3. You never ever intentionally or knowingly say or do anything to cause unnecessary discomfort to visitors, paying or otherwise. We all have occasional lapses, but we acknowledge them and learn from them. Unfortunately, my predecessor, though anybody who knows him will agree that he's "mostly harmless," and though he taught me most of what I know about running linecasting equipment, could manage to do all three of those things in a single utterance. Nobody wanted to see him go, but we had to, for the good of the Museum. Jeopardy seems to be in a similar situation. Hmm. In addition to Millionaire, he also produced Wife Swap and a revival of The Newlywed Game. Not exactly sterling credentials.
I was driving when I heard the news and my initial thoughts have changed somewhat - I'm wondering if Sony was facing pressure both externally from advertisers and internally from staff and potential guest hosts who didn't want to work with Richards which led Sony to pulling the trigger. How many shows have been filmed so far? They've finished filming Richards first week and I'm guessing one or two of Miyam.
This is true. But all the same, people should not have expected 100% for a single-day filming of episodes, for anyone. It's an unrealistic expectation. If he's the wrong man for the job, then he's the wrong man for the job, and as people say, C'est la vie. But it's worth pointing out that despite Burton's hosting experience, aside from a short guest-hosting stint for CBS This Morning, a few weeks before his airing of Jeopardy episodes, I don't think he'd ever hosted a live-to-tape program. They were either scripted drama (Roots, TNG) or single-camera edutainment (Reading Rainbow). And I think in one of the articles posted, it was stated they didn't have much time to prepare from the time they arrived and stepped out onto the set. The way the search was conducted was like a bad reality show, which in retrospect isn't all that surprising given Richards' experience in producing Beauty & The Geek. He simply brought that experience with him. And we're now seeing it was the wrong call. Yeah, almost feels like a version of Groundhog Day. We all wish Sony would wake up from the nightmare and do the right thing. It's been like watching a train derailment in slow motion. Firing Richards from the Producer position is a step in the right direction. You have to get rid of an abscess to make an infection go away.
My point exactly. Actually, I don't regard the search as resembling "a bad reality show" (a phrase that seems virtually a tautology to me: if they're any good, then they're either competitions [whether athletic, culinary, or intellectual] or documentaries [q.v. This Old House, and the "Johnson & Wales" season{s?} of Cooking School Stories], rather than "reality shows"). They endeavoured to at least give the appearance of openness, even if they came up short on "walking the talk."
Richards filmed five shows in a day, that's the first week of the new season. Then after a brief pause in filming while they scrambled to get shit together, they were supposed to have done three days of taping (three weeks of shows) with Bialik. That covers them through mid-October.
True, one could look at it that way. I was mostly speaking in terms of what kind of 'flavor' this brought to the entire ordeal. Given that, I don't find it entirely surprising in retrospect as to how it turned out given that's the kind of experience he's had. I mean, you use what you know, and unfortunately for him, applying that type of experience to a search (especially in light of hearing the about the manipulation), was a terrible call and use of judgement on his part.
I'm reminded of a review I once read of Divided, one of Richards' old GSN shows, and it was along the lines of "This is akin to watching hobos stab each other in a dumpster (except less erotic)."
Based on the non-consideration of Ken Jennings based on the comparatively benign things he did, Jeopardy might need to resign themselves to just picking the first guy they see with an immaculate social media history and accept that if they're not perfect at first they'll grow into the role.
If you standard is “Never made a single joke in bad taste or took a controversial or unpopular position on anything” and aren’t even restricting disqualification to bigotry and misogyny, is it? You pretty much have people with the foresight never to talk about politics on social media. Ken Jennings, an otherwise ideal candidate was removed from consideration just for saying things a comedian could say in stage with nothing worse than a few groans from the audience.
Holzhauer is hardly "forgotten." His "all in" gesture has been picked up by many contestants since his run.
That's absurd. People don't need foresight about social media. They just need to be decent, kind people. That's not too fucking hard to ask.
Especially when Social Media is immediate. It's full of people living in the moment, and it's often exactly how it's designed.