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Anyone else been following the increasingly deeply embarrassing debacle over Sony's handling of naming the successor to Alex Trebek?
Like (all?) a lot of you, I couldn't pick Mike Richards out of a line-up of Pee Wee Herman impersonators. At first, I'm thinking, "Say, Kramer would make a pretty interesting Jeopardy host." So who is this weasel anyway? We've learned a lot lately, since he was announced as the official new host a couple of weeks ago. Since then he's quit, but still got fired anyway, and is now in some kind of PR rehab facility. This article from The Ringer offers the best summation of his background and career, including some extensive examples of his misogyny, classism and overall douchebaggery, as well as a number of specific examples of how he very deliberately rigged the selection process for the new host to all but guarantee his selection, all while pretending to not even be in the running. "A smile with sharp teeth" is how he's described, and there's a long line of collegues from his previous productions that are eager to testify to his slimey appetite.
So the jist is this: almost as soon as Trebek announces his pancreatic cancer, Richards weasels his way in to an executive producer position like he smells blood in the water. Tales of his ambitions to someday be the host of Jeopardy are legion among those he's worked with. He sabotages Ken Jennings (in some hot water over a dumb joke tweet that still sounds like Will Rogers compared to the quotes we've seen from Richards' podcast) by cutting his stint short and eliminating his role as a writer of some of the show's categories. He coached the other guest hosts in ways which may not have been favorable to their chances. He self-selected the episodes of the guest hosts which were to be analyzed and tested by Sony in determining the final decision, while sidelining other producers involved in the decision from the process. He publicly lied about why he was a guest host and whether he was being considered for the position. And then he took the most popular name on the list of guest hosts, LeVar Burton, and scheduled his episodes against the Olympics, where he was frequently preempted, spiking Burton's ratings. To add insult to injury, Sony announced Richards' contract for permanent host while Burton's episodes were still airing.
But the biggest insult to Alex, personally, besides all of this other professional grabass tomfoolery, is that it's clear that Trebek had already personally selected Ken Jennings as his replacement, leaving behind a pair of cufflinks in his dressing room to commemorate the succession. And Richards is not only styupid and crass, with little interest in trivia or the historical/cultural content of the show, but was also intending to dumb-down the show's categories and questions, and to ditch the long-standing qualification process by hiring a professional casting agency to choose future contestants (so they can be beauty vetted) rather than have them selected based on rigorous try-outs.
We may have dodged a bullet, or Richards just may be exactly the kind of milk-faced corporate monkey that is destined to come down the Sony pike. Either way, we're clearly not going to have another Alex Trebek in this business anytime soon.
Like (all?) a lot of you, I couldn't pick Mike Richards out of a line-up of Pee Wee Herman impersonators. At first, I'm thinking, "Say, Kramer would make a pretty interesting Jeopardy host." So who is this weasel anyway? We've learned a lot lately, since he was announced as the official new host a couple of weeks ago. Since then he's quit, but still got fired anyway, and is now in some kind of PR rehab facility. This article from The Ringer offers the best summation of his background and career, including some extensive examples of his misogyny, classism and overall douchebaggery, as well as a number of specific examples of how he very deliberately rigged the selection process for the new host to all but guarantee his selection, all while pretending to not even be in the running. "A smile with sharp teeth" is how he's described, and there's a long line of collegues from his previous productions that are eager to testify to his slimey appetite.
So the jist is this: almost as soon as Trebek announces his pancreatic cancer, Richards weasels his way in to an executive producer position like he smells blood in the water. Tales of his ambitions to someday be the host of Jeopardy are legion among those he's worked with. He sabotages Ken Jennings (in some hot water over a dumb joke tweet that still sounds like Will Rogers compared to the quotes we've seen from Richards' podcast) by cutting his stint short and eliminating his role as a writer of some of the show's categories. He coached the other guest hosts in ways which may not have been favorable to their chances. He self-selected the episodes of the guest hosts which were to be analyzed and tested by Sony in determining the final decision, while sidelining other producers involved in the decision from the process. He publicly lied about why he was a guest host and whether he was being considered for the position. And then he took the most popular name on the list of guest hosts, LeVar Burton, and scheduled his episodes against the Olympics, where he was frequently preempted, spiking Burton's ratings. To add insult to injury, Sony announced Richards' contract for permanent host while Burton's episodes were still airing.
But the biggest insult to Alex, personally, besides all of this other professional grabass tomfoolery, is that it's clear that Trebek had already personally selected Ken Jennings as his replacement, leaving behind a pair of cufflinks in his dressing room to commemorate the succession. And Richards is not only styupid and crass, with little interest in trivia or the historical/cultural content of the show, but was also intending to dumb-down the show's categories and questions, and to ditch the long-standing qualification process by hiring a professional casting agency to choose future contestants (so they can be beauty vetted) rather than have them selected based on rigorous try-outs.
We may have dodged a bullet, or Richards just may be exactly the kind of milk-faced corporate monkey that is destined to come down the Sony pike. Either way, we're clearly not going to have another Alex Trebek in this business anytime soon.
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