Goodbye and Good Riddance to Mike Richards

I have not watched it in years but if you were to ask me what my all-time favorite game show was I would eagerly answer “Jeopardy.” For years Jeopardy was appointment television for me. In the vast wasteland of daytime television Jeopardy has long served as an essential oasis of intelligence and class. 

So you can imagine how deeply flattered I was when I had the surreal honor of being an answer on my all-time favorite game show a few years back, back when Alex Trebek was the host and that still meant something. 

I am also deep into the process of finishing my third book about the man who wrote and recorded “I Lost on Jeopardy” so I am deeply invested in Jeopardy even if I haven’t been a regular viewer for some time. 

When Alex Trebek died recently and the show began a high-profile hunt to find a replacement host I thought Al would be perfect for the gig. He’s a geek icon beloved by EVERYONE but particularly the kind of brainiacs and unapologetic geeks who love Jeopardy. 

Al is a consummate television professional whose TV career spans eras and decades and thanks to “I Lost on Jeopardy”, he has a long and distinguished history with the pop culture institution. 

But Al hasn’t even gotten a chance to guest host so far. Instead that honor went to folks like NFL superstar Aaron Rodgers, beloved actor and reading advocate Levar Burton and Ken Jennings, the greatest champion in the show’s history. 

Folks were rooting for Burton and Jennings but when a replacement host was announced it wasn’t Burton or Jennings but rather Mike Richards, who in a funny coincidence was already the Executive Producer of Jeopardy and led the search to find someone to take over for Trebek. 

Richards’ coronation as the new host of the most prestigious of all game shows sent a powerful message to the show’s audience: it doesn’t matter how smart, talented or qualified you are, or how badly you want a gig: a pathologically ambitious, calculating straight white man with connections and no scruples is probably going to get it instead. 

I did not watch the post-Trebek episodes of Jeopardy or I would have found Richards’ selection even more soul-crushing. 

Richards was always going to be a deeply unexciting choice to take over for Trebek but a series of troubling revelations about Richards’ checkered past turned a boring choice into an appalling one. 

As a game show producer on Price is Right, Richards had a LOT of ideas about women, mostly involving them being as skinny and scantily clad as humanly possible. Richards was sued for sexual harassment for allegedly firing a model on the show for getting pregnant. 

Richards also hosted a podcast appropriately named Randumb where he said a bunch of sexist, tacky shit wholly unbecoming a future host of Jeopardy. I don’t know much about Richards but everything that I do know is terrible. 

Because Richards has nothing to hide he had every episode of Randumb deleted but The Ringer listened to all of the episodes hosted by Richards before they were destroyed and preserved some of his most toxic moments for perpetuity. 

Richards becoming the new host of Jeopardy after helping lead the search for a replacement for Alex Trebek can’t help but remind me of when George W. Bush had Dick Cheney find a Vice Presidential candidate for him and after looking long and hard at all the contenders chose what he saw as the best pick: himself. 

We all know how well that went. Thankfully, Jeopardy realized what a terrible mistake it made and changed course, as I have no doubt that Richards’ stint as permanent host would have been every bit as disastrous as Cheney’s Vice Presidency.  

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