Basically, it sounds like Mike Richards (who also happens to be Jeopardy‘s EP) is The Chosen One. ETA: Although worth pointing out that “advanced negotiatons” doesn’t yet mean “has the job”.
Mike Richards apparently getting the Jeopardy gig is roughly culturally equivalent to Dermot o’ Leary hosting Mastermind. Possibly worth noting that Alex Trebek hosted a load of lowbrow stuff before and in addition to working on J.
I’ve always felt Mike a smart guy, as a producer pretty good at understanding modern audiences even if he probably wouldn’t bleed gameshow if you cut him with a knife.
I’m sure he’ll do fine, but it’s quite a boring, safe choice for 2021 really. Maybe that’s what it needs, I don’t know, it gets by largely on inertia these days.
Originally tweeted by Brig Bother (@BothersBar) on August 5, 2021.
QUALITY TWITTER ANALYSIS from people with no skin in the game. Hopefully someone will try Jeopardy in the UK again just to get it out of their system. It will fail. See also: Raid the Cage.
Ah yes, Raid the Cage. Mexico seems to have gotten the format right (“Escape Perfecto”) with a successful weekday run and excellent hosts, although it’s apparently on hold due to Covid.
I’ve really been getting into it lately, now that two free Sony streaming channels (at least in the U.S., maybe elsewhere) show it nonstop. I know enough school-level Spanish to enjoy it, especially with captions turned on., and I now know the Spanish words for almost every household appliance or kid’s toy. 🙂 Plenty of eps on YT as well.
By its nature, it’s a daytime show. The physical aspect leads to so many close calls and arcane rules on how things can be brought out of the cage, that playing it for giant prime-time stakes would take all the fun out of it and make many of the rulings seem cruel or arbitrary. (For instance, I saw one clip recently that revealed you can’t just stack boxes one on top of the other and carry them out; each prize apparently must be touching a part of the player’s body to be valid. (I’d love to see the full rule sheet the players get!) )
Another thing that makes the Mexican version refreshing: Zero product placement. Every logo or manufacturer name on every prize is covered with a giant “Escape Perfecto” sticker, and you get none of the extended prize descriptions you’d see on something like TPIR. Especially if this was tried in America, half the runtime would be taken up with “this beautiful new blender from Hamilton Beach,” etc.
Lack of straddling hurts a bit, though, since any time you’re into the second half of the program, you know the current team is sticking around till the end of the hour and no more. And it’s almost always a given that the first team of the show is going to crash and burn … although I’ve seen exactly one episode with just one team the whole hour.
And the Mexican version is exceptionally well-paced, unlike some of the other LatAm versions that drag things out, especially answer reveals, for-freakin’-ever. Usually 9-12 rounds per hour. The host sometimes does a bit of semi-serious tension building before an answer reveal, but his smirk shows that he knows what he’s doing, and he knows that we know he knows.
It’s always fun, never cruel, and too many game shows these days have too much cruel and not enough fun.
I,ve actually been thinking since Anne Robinson came back to do Countdown
that Stellify Media should pilot and plan a UK Jeopardy with her in mind
she,d be a great host
Anything to get her off Countdown.
Just watched the below episode of Raid the cage Mexico. It is a surprisingly fun show that would fit right in to early Saturday night on ITV.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Hw4u3zPAuU8&t=1256s
High quality seven-point-turn action there, marvellous. Thank you for sharing the link.
In some ways, perhaps we should be surprised that there haven’t been more transitions from producer / EP to host. William G. Stewart: excellent. Richard Osman: excellent. Nigel Lythgoe only had one season of some sort of cheating-related show but was perfectly competent, and I have half a feeling that Wheeeel McDonald of TFI fame had a season of something as well. Any others I’m forgetting?
Wiiiiill had that kebab or not kebab quiz didn’t he, the name of which escapes me right now.
Carry On Campus.
There’s actually an episode on YouTube, which is new to me:
Thank you for sharing, though it is Significantly Lacking in Greatness.
I promise I have watched the whole thing, but by far the most interesting thing is the opening credit sequence:
1) It has the most “will this do?” depiction of the show’s title that I can remember. Even shows from the ’60s and ’70s that just flashed the title up on screen did it with more style and thought than what was shown here.
2) On the other hand, it can’t be a regarded as a contender for the worst ever, because it has the show’s host holding a question card within the opening credit sequence itself, which is a brushstroke of borderline brilliance that I don’t think has been repeated elsewhere.
Unless you know otherwise…?
It’s a bit of a shame it’s not Jennings,. who always seemed like the ideal choice for me, but it’s not really a personality-driven show – anyone who can read out questions quickly and clearly should be fine.
With regards any new UK adaptation, I do believe Jeopardy is a fundamentally good format – it’s a rapid-fire quiz with lots of questions of varying difficulty and variety. It’s a bit dated in presentation but the core is pretty timeless.
Would a new UK version of Jeopardy succeed? Probably not.
in the US, it fills a large niche of being both the high-brow quiz (vs the UK having OC, UC, Mastermind etc) and the rapid-fire quiz (whereas the UK has a long history of them, with Mastermind, The Chase, !mpossible, Weakest Link, even Cash Trapped etc). It’s also pretty fundamentally different to the US other daytime gameshow stalwarts of Wheel of Fortune, Let’s Make a Deal, The Price is Right, Family Feud, etc. In the UK there are plenty of other options.
It would be a tough concept to sell as a new show, especially with the US presentation being so outdated for historical reasons.
It seems inevitable that any UK broadcaster would try to stretch it out to an hour when it’s not a format that can be stretched without ruining the essence of the show as a rapid-fire quiz. An hour-long Jeopardy would suffer the same fundamental issue as the Fifteen-to-One reboot. Successful hour-long formats (such as The Chase, !mpossible, Tipping Point etc) are structured in a way that they can be stretched out to an hour and aren’t hopelessly stretched out.
Jeopardy! works better as a daily format than a weekly format. Any reasonable amount of prize money on a daily format would be prohibitively expensive for a UK broadcaster – a weekly version would have reasonably big prizes by UK standards even if you quartered the prize money.
The only way I could see it succeeding is if the BBC decided to make a half-hour version and wedge it between Only Connect and University Challenge, and I just don’t see them doing that.
My hope is that one day someone just decides to air the US version on a week’s delay.
It’s been announced today that Mike Richards will indeed host the daytime syndicated version. However, it’s also been announced that Mayim Bialik (Blossom, Amy Farrah Fowler etc) will host primetime spin-offs such as the upcoming National College Championship
Blimey – now Mike’s stepping down after some not-so-smart things he said in the past were dug up…
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-58285996
Oh dear… Jeopardy! just can’t catch a break right now. First Alex dies, Ken is too busy with The Chase and now Alex’s replacement has resigned before even really starting!
It’ll be interesting to see where the show goes from here. hopefully production wont be affected too much. Maybe they could get Mayim to host a couple of weeks on daytime before going back to guess hosts?
Personally, I would have picket LeVar Burton to be the new permeant host.