Over-the-Air Fare

Trebek died with 35 more unaired shows in the can, and those will be shown.  The new host, whoever it turns out to be, will pretty much start with the new year.  They didn't say when they would announce who will be the new host, but rather obviously they're not ending the show.

Ken Jennings Will Be First Interim Jeopardy! Host. Apparently he will be part of a series of interim hosts. I suspect this is a way to fix things short-term and to have real, live auditions, as it were.

I think it’s hard to quantify why Alex Trebek was so effective. He elocution was top-notch. His personality was fine. But he certainly wasn’t effusive. He was low-key congenial. He never made the show about himself. There was an air of reserved class. That is, he was about as far away as the typical TV goofball as you could get.

Can you read the answers consistently without getting tongue-tied? It’s probably a lot harder than it looks.

I haven’t seen Master Minds. I don’t get the Game Show Network which is apparently a cable channel. Sounds interesting.

This could indeed be a problem.  His abject apology (using the leftist buzzword "ableist") will cost him some conservative sympathy, and of course the mild insult enrages the Wokeists.  The other tweet is more a mockery of the movie than the person.

Ken Jennings has been guest-hosting Jeopardy! this week. I’ve watched three of the shows so far. I missed his first on Monday.

Although Alex Trebek was smoother, Jennings has excelled at the #1 job of a Jeopardy! host: Reading the answers without tripping over your tongue.

And he’s been personable as a host given the pressure of the situation and whose shoes he is filling. Not quite as smooth and personable as Alex but I think he’d get better if given the permanent hosing role. Ratings are king, but I would assume his trial guest-hosting performance is going to be tough to beat.

I’m not sure when the next guest-host starts. I would assume this Monday. However this shakes out, give the guy an A for effort. He earned it.

Still working my way through the Columbo episodes. The one with Richard Kiley is very good. The one with Robert Vaughn is particularly good as well. Interestingly, the one with Dick Van Dyke I didn’t find all that appealing. He didn’t come off as the criminal type. And certainly his murder was one of the most convoluted I can remember. Columbo could have phoned this one in.

Oh yeah. He kills Martin Milner who doesn’t last long in this one. Marcia Wallace has an uncredited role. Whatever you think of Cassidy, you have to love the job that actress did as a sort of trailer-trash grocery store owner. I LOL’d over that one. And she was practically begging to be murdered. What could Jack do?

With the Robert Vaughn one, it's very Agatha-Christie-like. Columbo is on a cruise with his wife (who we never see). Robert Vaughn takes out a blackmailing woman who he had an affair with. I wouldn't call Vaughn the greatest actor either but he was good in this. He fit the part. Columbo's wife, much like Norm Peterson's wife, is never seen. I like the way they play it. A nice departure for the series.

This is probably old news to you. But I just read the other day that Mike Richards, executive producer of Jeopardy! — and after a long and extensive series of auditions by various people — has been chosen to be the next Jeopardy! host.

That’s scandal #1. Scandal #2 is some irreverent words were dug up from an old podcast, he was thrown under the bus, and he then switched into apology mode. (Oh how dare I utter a word, even in jest, that upsets the bitchy, Nazi-like feminists.)

I suspect now that means that LeVar Burton (if he wants it) has the job, merely because he is a “person of color.” Not that LeVar wasn’t good at it. He was fine. In fact, none of the candidates that I saw were bad in the role.

An article at CNN speculates, however, that Ken Jennings is the favorite for the job. Frankly, he makes the most sense to me as well. The rest are just talking heads. Ken has a connection to the show.

But how stupendously stupid to go through the motions of this search and end up choosing the executive producer. It made a farce of it all, with or without his naughty words in a podcast.