“Jeopardy!,” the apparently eternal TV game show that has persevered even as its once difficult questions have become increasingly pitched to the less-than-astute, ended its 2023 with a surprise. Mayim Bialik, the actress who is also (for an actress) unusually credentialed educationally, announced this month that she has been let go as a host of “Jeopardy!” Since 2021, Bialik, who had previously portrayed “Big Bang Theory” head nerd Sheldon’s girlfriend on the series, had shared the role of host with legendary “Jeopardy!” champ Ken Jennings. Bialik was the more reliable and professional of the two, perhaps because of her long performing background. Jennings was at the center of far more gaffes and controversies, though Bialik had her share. This season, for example, she disallowed all three contestants’ answers of ”Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn” because she found their pronunciations of the Russian writer and dissident’s name insufficiently accurate.
That isn’t what got her fired, however. Though Sony’s cover story is that it decided that the show should have a single host as it did in the halcyon days of Art Fleming and Alex Trebek, the real reason seems to be that Mayim’s outspoken support for Israel and condemnation of some of Israel’s critics as anti-Semitic were deemed too likely to alienate substantial numbers of the show’s fans.
In this ethics episode, the producers are on firm ground. I have never heard of a controversial game show host, though “Wheel of Fortune’s” Pat Sajak has come closest by being openly conservative. A TV quizmaster can’t be a distraction, and politics is distracting. Bialik had to know she was putting her plum job at “Jeopardy!” in jeopardy by wading so ostentatiously into this sensitive area. That she did so anyway was either courageous or a breach of responsibility to her employers—I can’t decide.
Before Bialik’s firing, the “Jeopardy!” year had the usual number of ethical issues pop up. I flagged one earlier this year in the category of cultural literacy, when a contestant couldn’t identify sports legends Bill Russell, Bob Feller and Bob Gibson, a Boston Celtics icon and two of baseball’s most famous pitchers. But I missed this one: Alex Gordon, a medical student, had $15,000 on the board when he landed on a Daily Double in the category “Stitch Incoming.” All of the answers in the category had related to medicine and health care. Before Gordon decided how much to bet on the question, Jennings asked him, “How confident are you in a medical category, Alex?” Gordon bet $12,000, and the “answer” was “Joba Chamberlain used the scar from below the elbow surgery named for his fellow pitcher as part of a smiley face tattoo.”
Gordon clearly isn’t a baseball fan, since he had never heard of Tommy John surgery, named after Tommy John, the first pitcher to undergo the radical career-saving arm surgery (and it is ridiculous that John isn’t in the Hall of Fame, but I digress) that about a third of all pitchers in the major leagues have endured. Gordon wildly guessed “Who is Joe DiMaggio?” (He couldn’t name a single pitcher? Not even Bob Feller or Bob Gibson?) and lost most of his winnings.
Of course I have no sympathy for anyone who goes on a trivia show unversed in the trivia treasure trove that is baseball history, but many fans were irate. “WTH! You tricked this doctor into believing the question was a medical question,” one viewer wrote on ‘X.’ It wasn’t! It was about a tattoo and baseball players.” Another wrote that “#Jeopardy pulled a dick move by slipping in a baseball question when everything else in the category was medical related… I think if @KenJennings kept his mouth shut, #AlexGordon would only have bet $5000.”
It was a medical question. Would a question asking whom the dread disease that killed Stephen Hawking, David Niven and Senator Jacob Javits was named after be regarded as being about baseball?
The most illuminating of the 2023 Jeopardy kerfuffles may have occurred when, in a June installment, none of the three contestants could fill in the blank of this “answer”:”Matthew 6:9 says, ‘Our Father, which art in heaven, [THIS] be thy name.’” The fact that none of them knew the Lord’s Prayer sufficiently to answer “hallowed” convinced many viewers that Satan had taken over the country.
Ethics Alarms 
Bialik was actually on “The Big Bang Theory” with the Sheldon character. “Revenge of the Nerds” was a movie from a few decades ago.
ARRGH! Fixed. What a stupid mistake. I bet I wouldn’t have done that on “Jeopardy!” This comes of writing too fast, but also of having stumbled onto “Revenge of the Nerds” recently for the first time since I saw it in the theater. Lots of actors in that movie who went on to bigger things, especially on television.
Oh my gosh! You went to Revenge of the Nerds in the theater?
I won’t say I’ve lost respect but…
My parents took me, and it cost 75 cents. Dad got to go to all the movies at Hanscom Air Field at military prices. How do you think I know all those old movies? We’d sometimes see four in a week. I also saw “Valley of Gwangi” starring James Franciscus, and “The Wicked Dreams of Paula Schultz” starring Bob Crain.
Jack,
I think you missed the perfect opportunity to ask whether an answer relating to Lou Gehrig’s disease is a baseball question, or a medical one.
After all, it is Tommy John SURGERY.
-Jut
You have completely confounded me. Didn’t I ask that question? “Would a question asking whom the dread disease that killed Stephen Hawking, David Niven and Senator Jacob Javits was named after be regarded as being about baseball?”
What am I missing?
Lou Gehrig?
Sorry, skimming it at the grocery store as I tried to think up names of ANY disease.
-Jut
Dammit, I should have responded, “Stephen Hawking never played baseball!”
-Jut
I presume Bialik expressed her thoughts on the growing antisemitism and widespread unchecked call to murder Jews off air. Apparently she values the lives of Jews more than her Jeopardy paycheck. Now is not the time to be meek and cower in the face of rising antisemitism and woke madness. She has the support of Batman, which is no small thing.
I find it troubling that her stance is seen as “political”.
In some conflicts/wars, maybe there’s a place for trying to stay out of it (Ireland, itself a BIG perhaps, and never understood how that whole thing spun so out of control).
But in the case of the current war in Israel, there is zero room for equivocation as to what side is evil and what side is good, what is right and what is wrong.
That should hardly be controversial.
To say anything else is to be at best willfully ignorant, at worst blatantly and willfully evil.
Neither is an excuse.
If we can’t call out THAT kind of evil, Satan has assumed full control.
I remember the “Solzhenitsyn” episode and that was very frustrating. The most serious snafu that I’ve seen?… the Bible-related question for Final Jeopardy during the big tournament that only Sam Buttrey answered correctly. The problem?…his correct answer was ruled incorrect because whoever wrote the question failed to do the proper research. It cost Buttrey a daily win in the best-of-seven championship and earned the show an email from me.
Anyways, we have witnessed numerous inconsistencies in judging, particularly as it relates to spelling and pronunciation, and those are maddening. An eight-day champion – who was Asian for whom English was clearly his second language – was denied a ninth win because he knew the Final Jeopardy answer, but slightly misspelled it, after we heard on numerous occasions that misspellings are not generally counted incorrect. I was completely gob-smacked by that one.
I did not like Mayim Bialik as a host – I found her banter with the contestants superficial and frankly, stupid – but relieving her of Jeopardy duties because of her pro-Israel stance is way more stupid than anything she said during the show. I agree with Bad Bob: there should be no question and no controversy as to which side is in the right in that conflict.
This isn’t the same as Colin Kaepernick taking a knee, since I don’t believe she was on the job at the time. Off the clock, she should be able to say what she wants, even if her producers don’t agree with it.
We enjoy watching Jeopardy, but my frustration with it is mounting. The situation with Mayim doesn’t help matters.
Regardless of the host (and their occasional errors), Jeopardy is always a lot of fun to watch.
Another show of that ilk is Mastermind – a BBC show that began in 1972. What makes it particularly interesting is that each show includes two segments
1) 2-minutes of questions related to a topic that the contestant claims as their area of specialized expertise. True to form (you know, British eccentricities), some of the topics are really, really specialized and it always makes you wonder how many years the contestant spent studying and learning such minutiae. It never fails to entertain.
2) 2-1/2 minutes of questions related to general knowledge.
The show’s still running and (amazingly) they’ve retained the original format for 50+ years. Here’s a recent example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xtFq0tnRSB4
And the specialist topics are: The Poirot Novels of Agatha Christie, The Calvin and Hobbes Cartoons, Drake and Red Clydeside
Thanks for the link — I watched that show and it was quite interesting (although going in I assumed ‘Drake’ referred to the seaman, especially since it was a British show). It does appeal to the same sorts of things as Jeopardy does. The contestants broad grasp of trivia is quite impressive.
I think the comments here hit all the high points, the only thing I’ll push back on is this, from Bad Bob:
“But in the case of the current war in Israel, there is zero room for equivocation as to what side is evil and what side is good, what is right and what is wrong.”
I think that on a superficial level this is true, and you’ll never convince me to support Hamas or Hezbollah, but I think that part of the reason we’re in this situation is a tragic death spiral of “what are they supposed to do?”
The Israeli side is obvious and easy: The country has a right to exist, they don’t have to put up with random rocket attacks, they have a mandate to remove Hamas, and because Hamas hides in residential areas and use human shields, it is unsurprising that the number of civilian casualties are unusually high.
The Gazan side is more complicated.
Historically, the original “Palestinians”, who didn’t really have a Palestinian identity or deep attachment to the land (most were tenant farmers of the Ottoman Empire) were promised an Arab state in the same area Jews were promised a Jewish state, which was the British mandate for Palestine. The mandate system was a kind of a fascinating cutthroat mess. Mandated areas were (and I’m simplifying the hell out of it) allowed a certain amount of time to sort things out and at the end of the mandate, the area would be turned over to the most competent form of government that emerged from the area. This is how most of the current borders of the Middle East were drawn. Israel was the only nation to emerge from the British Mandate for Palestine.
There’s all kinds of background discussions here… How Israel had great spokespeople, but a not so great cause, the massive influx of European Jews to the area, the treatment of Arabs in the area. I think at all points, Israel’s choices stand out in two ways: They were always self interested, and they were always better behaved than their neighbors.
But that’s cold comfort to the Arabs from the area who were promised a state and didn’t get one. So they went to war. In 48. And in 56. And 67. And 73. And 82. And 06. And while I have a lot of sympathy for the cause of the Arabs in some of the earlier conflicts, at some point they just lost. What started out as a good cause (or at least an understandable cause) with bad spokespeople morphed into a bad cause with good PR. On the Israeli side, a sketchy cause with great spokespeople has over time morphed into a good cause with moderate PR. Which is why the young and underinformed are moved.
It’s easy to say what they should have accepted… They should have accepted a state when one was offered, many of the times it was offered. They should have accepted Jordanian citizenship. They should have, they should have, they should have. But they didn’t. And we have to deal with that reality. And the reality is that on the topic of Jordanian citizenship, a significant number did, which is why something like 30% of Jordan is ethnically Palestinian Arab. Jordan, unlike Egypt, naturalized those people who came in, and that would have continued until the Palestinians tried to overthrow the Jordanian King. But they did…. Giving Egypt, Lebanon, Syria and Jordan all the excuse not to touch the remaining Palestinians with a pole. They’re not necessarily refusing refugees because it makes Israel’s life harder (although that is a fringe benefit, I’m sure), they’re refusing refugees because, to put it indelicately, Palestinians have a history of fucking shit up wherever they go.
Which is how we got here. We can explain, easily, why the plight of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza are so fraught. But again… Cold comfort to the people living there. Fully half of which are under the age of 21, which means that most weren’t even an itch in their father’s robes when a lot of this shit came down. They were born into poverty because their leaders are corrupt, and fed propaganda like mother’s milk. Worse, absent the context of the last 80 off years of history, the way Israel treats them does seem to be kind of shitty.
“They should just stop fighting” “They should just accept peace” “they should, they should, they should”. I’ve recently started thinking that the answer might be a three state solution, because I think that what might emerge from the rubble of Gaza might be able to work towards statehood… The West Bank is a mess. And it’s a mess on purpose. Israel is looking like they’re going to annex area C, the network of roads and settlements are constantly encroaching on Arab territory, if a map were to be drawn of uncontested West Bank territory it would resemble a trypophobia meme more than a country. Either Israel will have to demolish massive swathes of settlement, or they just aren’t serious about dealing with the issue. From the Arab perspective, the first time in most of their lifetimes people are seriously talking about their plight happened to coincide with one of the most violent uprisings in their history. That is kind of fucked up.
I’m not going to pretend the Arabs don’t have a point, and while it’s easy and obvious to say what we’d like them to do, I’m not sure how reasonable it is to ask them to do it. Israel has not made a serious overture to deal with the Palestinians peacefully in the last 20 years. They seemed to have abandoned the two state rhetoric. There was no plan. No progress. The West Bank occupation, and unlike the Gazan situation, it is an occupation, is getting uglier by the day, and harder and harder to justify.
All that said… I support Israel. I understand their position. I get why we’re where we are. Frankly, I think that even if Israel were willing to take a couple terror attacks on the chin in order to open the door to peace, that would just open the door to more terror attacks because the polling from the West Bank is horrifying. If an election were held tomorrow, Hamas would win. And then what?
Which is a long way of saying “This is all very fucking complicated” but I don’t think either side is indefensible.
What came first, the occupation, or the terrorist? And how do you break that cycle?
I just wrote a novel. Took 20 minutes of my life. I was very proud of it. I hit post. WordPress apparently required a new login. So I logged back in…. And my comment was gone.
My point, from a high level, was a response to Bad Bob’s:
“But in the case of the current war in Israel, there is zero room for equivocation as to what side is evil and what side is good, what is right and what is wrong.”
And how that was a very shallow look at the conflict.
To highlight some of my main points:
-The British Mandate for Palestine was complicated.
-The Arabs were probably justified in their earlier conflicts.
-At some point, probably after the 67 war, that was no longer true.
-Palestinians have a history of fucking shit up wherever they went (see the attempted coup of Jordan).
-Which is part of the reason why Palestinians aren’t being accepted as refugees anywhere.
But
-Most of the Palestinians are under 21 years of age.
-Which means that they almost certainly don’t remember the last time a two state solution was floated.
-And that in a lot of ways, they’re being generationally punished for something people long dead have done.
-More, a two state solution seemed to have been given up on, particularly in the West Bank, which if borders were drawn today of uncontested area, would more resemble a trypophobia meme than a country.
-Which means that Israel is setting itself up for a really ugly reconciliation when the occupation resolves, and it has to resolve. If one state, what happens to the Palestinians, if two, what does that even look like?
-And the first time in their life people are seriously talking about a two state solution again happened to come after the bloodiest attack on Israel in their lifetime, which is a fucked up incentive structure.
Also
-Because most of the Palestinians are under 21, they’ve never known peace. They’ve never known freedom. They were born into poverty because of the corruption of their leaders and fed propaganda like mother’s milk.
-Part of that propaganda is the belief that if they struggle long enough, they will win.
-Which is why I don’t think that Palestinians want peace, at least not most of them.
-And that’s not me being racist: That’s polling data: If an election were held in the West Bank tomorrow, Hamas would win. Which is why the PLO isn’t calling an election any time soon.
Which was a very long way of saying that the situation is complicated.
The novel is now up. It was sent to spam, but this comment wasn’t. WHAT”S HAPPENING?????
HT, your comments ignore that the charter of Hamas is the genocidal elimination of Israel. It leaves out that all those Palestinian young men are taught to hate Jews. It is rampant in the culture.
Peace offerings in the last 20 years, but what about every offer prior to that has been rejected? Often times violently.
It may feel simplistic, but it’s just truth. There is NO way to justify any of what happened on October 7, there is ZERO reason to try and negotiate with the Arab Nazis.
Your comments seem not take in to account lots of Israeli Arabs who get along just fine with the Jewish majority.
There are certainly a fair number of Gazans who are tired of Hamas, and have helped the IDF. They’ll be killed when Hamas finds out. And as a relative said, many of them just want to get on with life, and don’t care about all the crap on any side. So those people are stuck in a horrible middle, and that is tragic beyond words. But you can’t ignore what vast swaths of Palestinian society are and what they have been taught, for generations now, about the Jews.
In sense that there are Arab Israelis, and people from Gaza had permits to work in Israel (i.e. outside Gaza), peace is possible – IF you can get the media to stop spreading lies and fomenting the violence. They’ve literally chosen evil, and it’s just as simple as that.
Imagine media reports about it being from 30s and 40s Germany instead of Israel. Those reparations were harsh after ww1, after all, and prior to 1871, all those small places were overrun by the French, the Austrians, whatever European titan of the time ran roughshod over their neighbors. They needed their own nation, for godssakes. I mean, you can understand how they’d kill the French, the Russians, the Slavs, and especially the Jews. Absurd, right?
But that’s the reporting coming out of Israel.
AP had it’s media headquarters in the Hamas HQ building, for crying out loud (Hey CNN Iraq, hold my beer).
There’s literally nothing complex about choosing good and evil in this case. One side seeks to finish what Herr Hitler started (and it’s just not even debatable), and the other side has done everything short of voluntarily walking in to the gas chambers to find peace.
Some things are complex and difficult to sort out, but this is not one of them.
“IF you can get the media to stop spreading lies and fomenting the violence. They’ve literally chosen evil, and it’s just as simple as that.”
Israel must now contend with the propaganda media that truly does represent those who wish to tear it all down. The legacy media is purposefully interfering with Israel’s prosecution of Oct. 7th while continually ignoring the human shield phenomenon every time they report on Palestinian civilian deaths in living color.
Douglas Murray, while appearing quite depressed and reporting from Israel a few days ago, made a comment that stuck with me.
Paraphrasing: Palestine could be Singapore right now considering the billions received over the years, but instead of building UP they chose to build DOWN (like rats) to create a massive network of terrorist tunnels. That imagery perfectly illustrates the medieval mindset of radical Islamists. There is no more room for Hamas than there is for ISIS, and naive open borders Europe is finding this out the hard way. Apparently sacrificing a huge number of their girls/women to brutal rape at the hands of medieval immigrants is but a small price to pay for appearing virtuous.