Although it’s been easy to forget—as the show has just sort of rolled along for the last season with Mayim Bialik and Ken Jennings handing off hosting duties, and a number of high-profile winners seemingly unaffected by the transition—but Jeopardy! has been running without a permanent host for nearly a year at this point. That is, since August 2021, when producer Mike Richards was announced as the new permanent host for the show’s regular daily broadcast…and then swiftly un-announced after filming just 5 episodes.
But that state of trivia-adjacent uncertainty might soon be coming to an end, as revealed by series executive producer Michael Davies at the Daytime Emmys yesterday, where the game show picked up its latest Outstanding Game Show trophy. (The show has won for the last three years running, and seven times out of the last ten; it also has the most wins overall in the award’s history.) Davies didn’t shy away from talking about the Richards situation, saying that it was referred to as “the awkward months” around the Jeopardy! offices. “But,” he said, “It showed the power of our audience and how passionately our fans care about the program, which is just so important.”
Name-checking a number of big winners in the intervening period—including Matt Amodio, Amy Schneider, Mattea Roach, and Ryan Long, all of whom had long streaks on the show, with Schneider and Amodio both breaking the million-dollar winnings barrier—Davies asserted that the show is making moves to shore up its hosting situation. “We hope to have a hosting announcement very, very soon,” he said. “But with all of our plans for Jeopardy!—which is more Jeopardy!, not less, more versions—we’re going to need multiple hosts to represent the entire audience, to represent the entire country, in order to take this franchise forward.” It remains to be seen whether these expansionist plans mean Bialik and Jennings should keep their schedules open for the foreseeable future…but you have to imagine, right?
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