Alex Trebek RIP

Discussion in 'Visual Arts' started by leemelone, Nov 8, 2020.

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  1. Strummergas

    Strummergas Senior Member

    Location:
    Queens, NY
    This is the way it should've happened all along.
     
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  2. 40WattPhasedPlasmaRifle

    40WattPhasedPlasmaRifle Forum Resident

    Location:
    Pineville, NC
    "Here's tonight's host"?
    "Here's a guy who won't last as long as our returning champion"?
    "Here's a guy who only says "Who is... ME?" when playing at home"?
    "Here's the Twitterati's latest target"?
     
    bartels76 likes this.
  3. Jim Pattison

    Jim Pattison Forum Resident

    Location:
    Kitchener ON
    It's too bad that all the discussion about who should (or should not) be the host of Jeopardy! has drawn attention away from current champion Matt Amodio, who's one of the most successful contestants in the show's history. He's won more consecutive games and more money in regular season play than anyone except for Ken Jennings and James Holzhauer, and he's in fourth place on the all-time winnings list (including tournaments) behind Brad Rutter, Jennings and Holzhauer. During his winning streak, five different hosts have come and gone: Robin Roberts, LeVar Burton, David Faber, Joe Buck and Mike Richards. Monday's game with Mayim Bialik will be his sixth host.
     
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  4. bartels76

    bartels76 Forum Hall Of Fame

    Location:
    CT
    Mayim has been in the public eye for 35 years so I doubt it. Ken is too boring to have any skeletons.
     
  5. aorecords

    aorecords Forum Resident

    I still think they should just hire Buzzy.
     
    guitargal, Rob P S, DISKOJOE and 2 others like this.
  6. Jack White

    Jack White Senior Member

    Location:
    Canada
    Years ago, Bialik made a comment about researching vaccines before her young children were inoculated. (Long before covid.) It resulted in somone being outraged on-line and got blown out of proportion. That "scandal" was resurrected around the time she was named as a Jeopardy host. (I think some people wake up each morning thinking whose life they can make miserable today from their phone or keyboard.)

    Not certain if he still is, but in the past Jennings has maintained a presence on social media and in the podcast world. He has been criticized for some of jokes he has made. (Of the ones I've seen, curiously, most involve someone's death.) Jennings has said that he likes irreverent, dark humour and those jokes are right in line with that. There was nothing that would offend or upset me, but there was a minor kerfuffle on-line at the time. (Is there anything that someone in social media isn't offended or outraged by?) As far as I read, he's pretty much what you see from his appearances on TV - a generally friendly, but not terribly warm, nerdy, boring smart, know-it-all, who's happily married with no personal scandals. He's the kind of a guy you'd expect to be a bookkeeper in an insurance office who goes home and plays an on-line dungeons and dragons type game at night, and has memorized all of the lines from 'Monty Python and The Holy Grail'.

    His jokes are this type of thing (from Wikipedia):

    "... he was criticized when he tweeted a joke about the death of Daniel Fleetwood, a lifelong Star Wars fan who died of cancer. Fleetwood's dying wish was to see Star Wars: The Force Awakens, fearing he likely would not live to see the film when it opened in theaters in December 2015. An online campaign was started on his behalf and his wish was granted only days before he died. Jennings said, "It can't be a good sign that every fan who has seen the new Star Wars movie died shortly thereafter."
     
    Last edited: Sep 18, 2021
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  7. 40WattPhasedPlasmaRifle

    40WattPhasedPlasmaRifle Forum Resident

    Location:
    Pineville, NC
    Yeah, Mayim cleared up her old vax statements, and it's not like the suits at Jeopardy can tell her family they have to move inside the 1967 borders if she wants the gig. And Ken's wheelchair tweet was thankfully not a firing offense either.
     
  8. thegage

    thegage Forum Currency Nerd

    I actually think Mike is doing an OK job, but he has a serious lack of personality to make him interesting over the long haul. A good thing that others will be taking over.

    JohnK
     
  9. Manapua

    Manapua Forum Resident

    Location:
    Honolulu
    Preach! I enjoy him more than Jeopardy James and only wish Alex had been around during this run so he could stop dropping JH's name and focus on the new GOAT.
     
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  10. czeskleba

    czeskleba Senior Member

    Location:
    Seattle
    You can’t blame them for being cautious at this point though.
     
  11. Rob P S

    Rob P S Senior Member

    Location:
    Pittsburgh, PA
    Matt only needs 10 more wins to topple James's win streak. He tends to run into trouble on Thursdays and Fridays but he always works his way out of it.
     
  12. Manapua

    Manapua Forum Resident

    Location:
    Honolulu
    Matt had some scares this week no doubt. Even ended up in the red for once. His opponents have been better competitors lately, making the games more interesting. 'Course, once Matt kicks into gear, it's all over.
     
  13. MekkaGodzilla

    MekkaGodzilla Forum Resident

    Location:
    Westerville, Ohio
    You mean after lunch?

    "Jeopardy!" tapes a week's worth of episodes in one day.
     
  14. JediJones

    JediJones Forum Resident

    Location:
    Pennsylvania
    You can blame them for thinking that a background check doesn't mean just checking your criminal history, but trying to find every recording of everything you've ever said in your entire life, and interview everyone who's ever met you, to see if anything can be pinned to you that supposedly offends someone, even if the offended people were already out to get you anyway.

    It means anyone is vulnerable to it who is simply high-profile enough to be known by the headhunters who are looking for a fresh scalp. It doesn't matter if you're high-profile or not. The less high-profile you are, the faster the company would let you go if the media decided to attack you.

    He wasn't fired for anything relating to job performance. He was fired because of the media deciding to make a "scandal" out of things he said or did in the past, unrelated to his job at Jeopardy. This is a Simpsons joke played out in reality. "This says you grabbed a dog by its hind legs and pushed it around like a wheelbarrow." "But that was in the third grade!" "Well, it all goes on your permanent record."

    Because his firing isn't based on job performance, he will most certainly have a hard time getting hired by any other company in the same industry. The firing is based on a standard that anyone who is smeared publicly for supposedly "offending" someone will be fired. Anyone looking to hire him would be afraid that the media will simply aim their guns at him again and relaunch the negative headlines. If it was solely the Jeopardy company who thought this way, you might have a point, but it's not. This is widespread corporate thinking right now.

    It doesn't matter if they're monolithic or not. A large segment of the public and the media had the goal of destroying his career before they knew if he had done anything that could be perceived as "wrong" or not. They set out to research everything about his life, related to his job or not, and spin it into a public character assassination. There isn't anyone who could emerge from that kind of targeting unscathed. And when a company actually gives the vultures what they want, all they do is encourage more of this. Every time someone like this is fired, it threatens the jobs of millions more. Because the assembly line of character assassination can be geared up to take down any innocent, unsuspecting individual who stands in the way of someone else's goals.

    Take your pick. The people who deemed him not an acceptable host because of his race and sex. The people who sought to assassinate his character and get him fired by researching everything he's ever done in his life and publishing the carefully edited selections that could make him sound the worst. The corporation who cowardly kowtowed to these demands, which only encourages more people to be subjected to this kind of scrutiny that was only reserved for political candidates in the past. But it's worse, because the voters are much more forgiving than corporate executives and lawyers.

    There is an army on social media, with allies in the internet and other press, who are eager to witch-hunt and destroy almost anybody. Every time they win, it makes life more miserable and treacherous for everybody else. The paradigm it creates is that everybody, at every time, must always be careful that what they say or do cannot possibly offend anybody else at any time now or in the future, if they want to protect their job. It's the equivalent of living in East Germany where the law of "show me the man and I'll show you the crime" is the order of the day.
     
    Last edited: Sep 19, 2021
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  15. thegage

    thegage Forum Currency Nerd

    The grievance-hammer (or maybe this time the outrage-hammer) is out again.

    It was because of job performance, on another job, where it came to light how he treated those who he managed.

    Yup, and they work to cancel people who don't hold the same opinions as you do.

    Oh, wait, you didn't mean that both sides do it?

    Hyperbole won't win an argument. Because of course it is no worse than it ever has been, except that in the old days instead of just shunning you they could have hung you, or burned you, or pressed you to death. The only difference is that the unequal megaphone of modern social media makes some people think there's a crisis, when there isn't.

    JohnK
     
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  16. MekkaGodzilla

    MekkaGodzilla Forum Resident

    Location:
    Westerville, Ohio
    Back in Summer 2008, I was interviewing for jobs as a School Guidance Counselor. I was fresh out of grad school and this would have been my first job in the field. The first interview I had was with an online charter school which was in need of bodies - they were known to have a very HIGH turn-over rate. So, I go in for the interview and after about 30 minutes of basic Interview 101 questions, the interviewer, a white male about 15 years my senior, opens up his laptop and brings up a youtube video of a noisy celebration in a bier hall somewhere in Germany. I couldn't really tell what was happening in the video, but he said a "search" using my name brought up this video. Would I care to explain it? I "explained" I was only in Germany ONCE back in 1990 and I did not attend a bier garten at ANY point in my time there. I knew from that moment on I was NOT going to accept a job offer from this clown (which DID occur several weeks later), so I quickly wrapped things up by providing very short answers to the rest of his questions. My point? Even as far back as 2008, folks were having "fun" trying to dig up non-existent "dirt" on people via the interwebs, even in the non-entertainment fields.

    But hey, I get it. If I fly to and from Germany on the weekends, making a noisy, drunken rukkus at sundry bier gartens, how am I going to successfully schedule virtual gym classes?

    School went under less than 10 years later.

    I'm just grateful my name isn't Manson Charles.
     
  17. Kyle B

    Kyle B Forum Resident

    Location:
    Chicago
    Mike Richards was fired as host due to his comments on his old podcast, not because of how he treated those he managed in the past.

    “Sony Pictures Television has released a statement following Mike Richards' exit as the new permanent host of Jeopardy!. The network has chosen to stand by Richards' decision, adding that it was "surprised" to learn of the host's rocky past. "We support Mike's decision to step down as host," Sony Pictures TV said. "We were surprised this week to learn of Mike's 2013/2014 podcast and the offensive language he used in the past. We have spoken with him about our concerns and our expectations moving forward."

    The Hollywood Reporter later did a hit piece on his management performance, but he was already out as host by then. And there was little in that piece that couldn’t easily be explained by resentment against a new manager who was charged with reducing costs.
     
  18. beccabear67

    beccabear67 Musical omnivore.

    Location:
    Victoria, Canada
    I (deliberately) haven't read what Richards wrote that set off explosions for some. I can't say if it would for me but probably not, I would just want it to stand for anyone to make of the source as they will. It's generally important that a (inter)national network game show's host be inoffensive lest their presence effect ratings. If Jack Barry had been caught punching kittens when nobody was looking it likely would've put me off wanting to watch The Joker's Wild. Remember what happened to Arthur Godfrey's tv career once caught on air tearing into a singer!

    I don't watch Jeopardy because of the host, but a more than just functional one certainly helps, and Richards' performance there was fine. There is an extreme PC thing going on that is making them very much like their supposed 'enemies'. I expect almost all the men of my grandparent's generation, had there been recordings of stupid sexist things they would spout from time to time, would have been unemployable.

    I think people should fight their own fights most of the time, learn to stand up for themselves in the face of a bully or name-calling; it's overzealous people doing it unasked on behalf of others and who justify an extreme to destroy a 'worse' enemy.
     
  19. thegage

    thegage Forum Currency Nerd

    I take your point, except that the lawsuits, one in 2010 and one in 2011, predate the podcast. Unless someone was in the room with the Sony decision makers, we have no way of knowing what all of the factors truly were in his firing. The statement says one thing, but having been on the drafting side of official statements, I take them all with a grain of salt.

    JohnK
     
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  20. 40WattPhasedPlasmaRifle

    40WattPhasedPlasmaRifle Forum Resident

    Location:
    Pineville, NC
    People don't seem to mind that Matthew Broderick killed two people.
     
  21. aorecords

    aorecords Forum Resident

    Wait. What?
     
  22. thegage

    thegage Forum Currency Nerd

    AKAIK, he was tried for it in Irish court and accepted the court's verdict, which I believe was that it was an accident, not intentional like Richards. Is there some other point?

    JohnK
     
  23. czeskleba

    czeskleba Senior Member

    Location:
    Seattle
    Get back to me in five years and we'll see whether he's unemployed. I suspect he will land on his feet. In fact, I suspect there are people who are probably more likely to hire him as on-camera talent now, because of what happened and what he said on his podcast. He'd be a perfect poster child for the grievance/victim mentality that so many folks have today, if he's willing to play that card and exploit that angle.

    You didn't answer a couple questions from my previous post: Do people not have a right to protest if someone has said something that offended them? And do private companies not have a right to fire someone who they feel is harming their public image?

    And here's another question. Let's imagine hypothetically that it was discovered that Richards had said on his podcast that he wished pedophilia were legal, or that he thought Hitler was right about exterminating Jewish people. Would you be upset if Jeopardy had fired him in that case? Would you be saying he'd been "cancelled" and protesting the unjustness of the firing then?
     
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  24. 40WattPhasedPlasmaRifle

    40WattPhasedPlasmaRifle Forum Resident

    Location:
    Pineville, NC
    MB was vacationing in Ireland with then-gf Jennifer Grey. He was driving on the wrong side of the road and caused a head-on collision.
     
  25. Jack White

    Jack White Senior Member

    Location:
    Canada
    Barry was at the centre of the game show cheating scandals back in the '50s - 'Twenty One' - the movie 'Quiz Show' was based on it. The scandal temporarily ruined his tv career. I'm surprised it ever recovered.

    Arthur Godfrey was an egomaniac with a severe mean streak, whose popularity gave him enormous power in show-biz. He was cruel and hypocritical. He eventually stepped over the line one too many times and his popularity and influence crumbled.
     
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