TMZ and a few other sources said that Ken Jennings was originally planned to take over after Alex. But then Ken shot himself in the foot when he had posted some offensive tweets and liked a friend's offensive tweets.
TMZ Live said yesterday, that after Mike Richards was fired as the new host, but he was still exec producer, he had decided to go with another round of guest hosts until they find a permanent replacement.
Now that he has been booted from even executive hosting, the new person/people/maybe even Sony, have decided to do this dual hosting with Mayim (who has always been their 1st choice of the guest hosts after seeing her,) and Ken Jennings, to at least the end of this year. Maybe the whole season, which ends in about May.
TMZ Live hypothesizes it may be likely they are doing a test run for Mayim to see if she CAN fit hosting Jeopardy into her weekly schedule until her sitcom probably ends. THEN take over as full host. OR, this stuff with Ken finally blows over and Jeopardy fans decide they want him no matter what he did
in the past.
The five episodes Mike Richards hosted before being fired would all be shown this week as there is a current contestant, Matt Amodio, now turning out to be the third ranked Jeopardy player of all time, (as of that announcement on Tues,) so Jeopardy didn't want to just scrap all those five episodes. It wouldn't be fair to Matt.
A few weeks ago that they found out LeVar Burton was NEVER, ever considered by Sony to host, even when they put him on the guest hosting line up. They considered him too OLD to host. Bill Whitaker, at 70 is even older.
LeVar was also scheduled during the Olympics, which is traditionally nicknamed "Jeopardy-Olym" to reflect that it Jeopardy usually gets it's worst ratings during that time period. And LeVar naturally got the worst ratings of all the guest hosts, along with all the technical glitches he suffered. Ken, of course got the best ratings, being at the start. Mike Richards, after "letting go" of Ken for "scheduling conflicts" that Ken later claimed were untrue, and Mike inserting himself into the next weeks, naturally got the second highest ratings, as curiosity of the initial guest hosts boosted viewership. (The ratings successively, pretty much went down during subsequent weeks, as guest host "fatigue" and lack of curiosity set in.)
Aaron Rogers & Buzzy were never talked to about the possibility of being permanent host. Only Mayim was spoken to.
I watch the
TMZ Live show, (more so that I'm not pop culturally out of the loop on a variety of stuff.
) Yet, all this info can be searched for somewhere on the TMZ website.
