For anyone who was rooting for LeVar Burton, today it was announced that he’s going to host a Trivial Pursuit show.
Excellent! That means we can stop nitpicking LeVar as host and start nitpicking the wrong answers in Trivial Pursuit.
And me!
Moops! Do I win?
No, easy for me to say because I care about right and wrong. It’s not like she’s hurting for money and needs to promote snake oil to survive. She can break her contract, and then pay the fee. Heck, she doesn’t even have to go that far. She can just say that she’s since learned it doesn’t actually work, and then wait to see if they try to go after her. Doing so might actually backfire, and thus they might not want to do it.
And, again, it’s not like this is the only issue. We already know that she blames rape victims for being too promiscuous. We already know that she spread falsehoods about vaccines. And, being a neuroscientist, she should have known before she took the deal that the stuff was snake oil. She has this pattern of doing bad things, and then giving a token apology after the fact that doesn’t actually fix the problem.
And, so, if I see someone coming in with an excuse for her behavior, I’m going to point out the flaws in it. Your reply was a one line thought-terminating cliche, and is not a refutation.
Right now, it seems that Jennings is at least as good, and has less baggage. I see no reason we should look the other way on Bialik’s past. Past behavior is the best predictor of future behavior, and she’s likely to get Jeopardy in even more trouble as she moves on to her next bit of woo.
In fact, I’ll make a prediction. Even after her contract expires, she won’t be seen admitting that the pills are all garbage. She might give a token apology to people who are upset, but she won’t repudiate the actual product or admit she was wrong to promote it in the first place.
That level of integrity is not something I’ve seen from her before, and I don’t expect it now.
Ken doesn’t seem to be sure that he wants to be permanent host.
One downside I’ve noticed about Ken: his pronunciation of French is atrocious.
Not necessarily a deal killer, and I don’t recall if Mayim was any better.
Alex, of course, being Canadian, had pretty good French pronunciation (to my American ears, at least, YMMV).
Maybe the writers could use less French in the future. That would be nice.
Anyway, another vote for Buzzy. (although Jennings is fine with me too)
Here’s something I don’t like about Mayim, which I admit is extreme nitpickery:
In the FJ round, where there are two Daily Doubles, when a contestant finds a Daily Double, she says “there’s a Daily Double!”
Alex always kept mental track of which Daily Doubles had been found. When someone found the first one, he’d say “the answer there is… the first of the Daily Doubles!” Then when someone found the second one, he’d say “that’s the other Daily Double!” It bugs me that Mayim doesn’t do this.
Ken seems to be following Alex’s practice, at least some of the time.
Nobody cares except you.
Mayim figures you are smart enough to keep track of it yourself?
He also telegraphed that the clue was going to be a DD. You’d think after a gazilllion years hosting, he’d have stopped doing that.
He’d also get snooty if the contestant didn’t make a “proper” wager. Fuck you, Trebek.
“A thousand only? All right.”
(Subtext: “It’s barely worth my while to even read the clue now.”)
She also sometimes says it in a way that doesn’t quite make logical sense given the round. Sometimes in the first round, she’ll say “there’s a Dailiy Double” even though there’s only one. Or in DJ, she’ll sometimes say “there’s the Daily Double” when there are two.
Geez, I had no idea my post would bring out primarily hatred of Trebek.
I stopped watching Jeopardy after Alex died so I missed all of the hosting stuff. However, recently I started watching some again because I wanted to see this woman that kept winning. Now I didn’t watch when Ken was on the show because I didn’t like them ditching the 5 game limit. It just seemed cruel for contestants to get on the show and be pitted against a superstar who never seemed to lose. It made the show more boring when you knew he was always going to win so I had some unjustified resentment toward him. Having watched recently, I fine I prefer Ken to Mayim. I think the host should be fairly unobtrusive, and he does a fine job while for some reason she grates on me. Just my kneejerk opinion but I wouldn’t mind if Jennings became permanent host.
That seems unlikely, because ever since the beginning of the year they’ve opened Ken’s shows with “Hosting Jeopardy, Ken Jennings,” and Mayim’s with “the host of Jeopardy, Mayim Bialik.” This seems to indicate a preference for Mayim.
After the Mike Rogers debacle, they said those two would host through the end of this season, but that leaves open the question of what happens after that. The original announcement was that Rogers would be the regular host and Mayim would host some primetime games and tournaments. It’s possible that they’re quietly looking for a permanent daytime host other than Mayim that they’ll announce sometime this summer. But on the other hand, Mayim could be building her cred and fan base as the permanent host.
I prefer Ken, and I’d prefer Buzzy to either of them, but if I had to bet I’d say it’s going to be Mayim.
I don’t really read too much into that – when they announced Richards as the regular host they simultaneously announced Bialik at the “specials and spinoffs” host (in what frankly seemed like a ham-fisted attempt to distract from all the negative publicity Richards was getting over allegations of sexual discrimination during his time on The Price is Right). They couldn’t very well walk back her being a “host” after Richards imploded, so she still gets introduced as such. If they really wanted to make her the regular host, the easiest thing would have been to do so immediately after Richards’ departure rather than keep dragging things out.
That may have been their wish, but she does have another major commitment.
Perhaps next season (if her sitcom survives) she might be able to arrange her schedule to do both.
This.