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Mike Richards
Daytime Emmy Awards 2021 through Getty Photos
The previous Jeopardy! producer who was famously fired after one day because the TV recreation present’s new host, as a repercussion of hateful feedback he’d made years earlier, is talking out about his expertise and revealing how a few of the high potential visitor hosts examined to interchange Alex Trebek got here from sudden skilled backgrounds and might need altered the present’s tone.
Mike Richards had a profession as a recreation present producer, working in high roles at reveals together with The Value Is Proper and Let’s Make a Deal, earlier than being tapped for the extremely sought-after internet hosting gig at quiz present Jeopardy! following the demise of longtime, beloved host Alex Trebek in 2020 from pancreatic most cancers. In a new interview with People reflecting on that point interval, Richards shared some particulars of the numerous well-known individuals who auditioned for or visitor hosted the enduringly fashionable night recreation present as producers sought to discover a appropriate substitute for Trebek, as he was being mourned behind the scenes and amongst followers nationwide.
“We might discover out in the event that they favored a Katie Couric-type, or perhaps Anderson Cooper, or Mayim Bialik,” Richards says of the method that finally led to him being named as the brand new host. He shared that Couric was a stand-out as a number who might reshape Jeopardy! as followers have identified it for many years.
“The present had a special look with Katie Couric,” he advised the journal. “She was so impressed by everybody’s data. I at all times puzzled if that was a missed alternative, to reboot the present along with her, a totally completely different host.”
Surprisingly, Jets quarterback Aaron Rodgers was additionally excessive up on his listing of potential hosts for the present.
“Aaron Rodgers was positively probably the most ready,” Richards stated. “I used to be blown away by that — the depth through which he prepped — and he was so pretty to everybody on employees.
However might the host of Jeopardy!, a tricky gig that he says requires a singular expertise that Trebek positively shared with audiences each weeknight, be cut up with the massive duties of the NFL?
“I used to be like, ‘How are you going to work this out with soccer scheduling?’ He stated, ‘You’ll determine it out!’”
Prior on-air work Richards had dabbled in as he climbed the ladder in TV manufacturing, together with stints on the relationship collection Magnificence & the Geek, internet hosting the New Yr’s Rocking Eve in 2005, and the present Million Greenback Pyramid, led to his identify being tossed round for the high-profile Jeopardy! gig. The chief producer of the favored quiz present and its night comply with up, Wheel of Fortune, says he was “extra stunned than anybody” when he was selected by a panel for the gig in August 2021. Audiences weren’t happy, although.
“Everybody was so offended as a result of it appeared like I had gone right into a room and picked myself,” he advised Folks. “And that’s not what occurs in tv, however I understood that that’s what the outward appearances have been.”
That anger turned to scrutiny of Richards’ past and after internet hosting the present for in the future, he was sacked. Unearthed by the Anti-Defamation league have been disparaging feedback he had made on a podcast whereas it turned identified that he was additionally embroiled in wrongful termination and discrimination instances from fashions who appeared on The Value Is Proper. Richards advised Folks it had been insinuated that he was being personally sued for sexual harassment; this was not true and he was finally dropped from the lawsuit.
Different half-truths have been written about him, he claims, as he shortly turned a nationwide pariah.
“Everybody was like, ‘Oh he’s only a horrible individual’” he says provides, “It was the value you pay for getting thrust into the zeitgeist in a really inopportune second.”
Richards’ subsequent retreat from public life and work in TV, which was spent largely along with his household (whom he says didn’t escape harassment) whereas engaged on new recreation present ideas, is now coming to an finish as he makes a plea for open discussions of controversial points over swift cancellation of individuals like that he skilled two years in the past.
“We will all disagree about loads of issues,” he advised Folks. “We will disagree about politics, we are able to disagree about who hosts Jeopardy! We will disagree about liking a closing Jeopardy! clue. And we must always. However I felt like there was a this rush to judgment, and lots of people bought pleasure in saying, ‘I bought you.’”
Jeopardy! is now hosted by Ken Jennings, the present’s highest-earning American contestant. Actor Mayim Bialik, who co-hosted with Jennings following Richards’ very transient stint on the podium, left the show amid the 2023 SAG-AFTRA strikes.
