Mike Richards
Daytime Emmy Awards 2021 through Getty Pictures
The previous Jeopardy! producer who was famously fired after sooner or later 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 prime potential visitor hosts examined to switch Alex Trebek got here from sudden skilled backgrounds and may need altered the present’s tone.
Mike Richards had a profession as a recreation present producer, working in prime roles at exhibits together with The Worth 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 dying of longtime, beloved host Alex Trebek in 2020 from pancreatic most cancers. In a brand new interview with Individuals reflecting on that point interval, Richards shared some particulars of the various well-known individuals who auditioned for or visitor hosted the enduringly standard night recreation present as producers sought to discover a appropriate alternative for Trebek, as he was being mourned behind the scenes and amongst followers nationwide.
“We may discover out in the event that they appreciated a Katie Couric-type, or perhaps Anderson Cooper, or Mayim Bialik,” Richards says of the method that in the end led to him being named as the brand new host. He shared that Couric was a stand-out as a number who may reshape Jeopardy! as followers have recognized it for many years.
“The present had a special look with Katie Couric,” he informed the journal. “She was so impressed by everybody’s information. I all the time puzzled if that was a missed alternative, to reboot the present together with her, a very completely different host.”
Surprisingly, Jets quarterback Aaron Rodgers was additionally excessive up on his listing of potential hosts for the present.
“Aaron Rodgers was undoubtedly essentially the most ready,” Richards stated. “I used to be blown away by that — the depth during which he prepped — and he was so pretty to everybody on workers.
However may the host of Jeopardy!, a troublesome gig that he says requires a singular expertise that Trebek undoubtedly shared with audiences each weeknight, be cut up with the massive obligations 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 title being tossed round for the high-profile Jeopardy! gig. The manager producer of the favored quiz present and its night observe up, Wheel of Fortune, says he was “extra shocked than anybody” when he was chosen by a panel for the gig in August 2021. Audiences weren’t happy, although.
“Everybody was so indignant as a result of it seemed like I had gone right into a room and picked myself,” he informed Individuals. “And that’s not what occurs in tv, however I understood that that’s what the outward appearances had been.”
That anger turned to scrutiny of Richards’ previous and after internet hosting the present for sooner or later, he was sacked. Unearthed by the Anti-Defamation league had been disparaging feedback he had made on a podcast whereas it turned recognized that he was additionally embroiled in wrongful termination and discrimination circumstances from fashions who appeared on The Worth Is Proper. Richards informed Individuals it had been insinuated that he was being personally sued for sexual harassment; this was not true and he was in the end dropped from the lawsuit.
Different half-truths had been written about him, he claims, as he shortly turned a nationwide pariah.
“Everybody was like, ‘Oh he’s only a horrible particular person’” he says provides, “It was the worth 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 together 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 informed Individuals. “We will disagree about politics, we are able to disagree about who hosts Jeopardy! We will disagree about liking a remaining Jeopardy! clue. And we should 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 present amid the 2023 SAG-AFTRA strikes.