‘Jeopardy!’ Boss Admits to ‘Horrible Error’ After Fan Protests
Jeopardy! executive producer Michael Davies has addressed that major snafu from last week’s High School Reunion Tournament, which saw the players’ final dollar amounts appear on screen at the top of the show.
The moment happened last Wednesday (March 8), on the first night of the two-night finals. As host Mayim Bialik explained what was at stake ($100,000 and a spot in the next Tournament of Champions), the camera switched to the players, where the podiums showed their total winning amounts. The editing error resulted in fans protesting that the production mistake had ruined the show for them.
“Right off the bat, apologies to our entire audience,” Davies said on Monday’s edition of the Inside Jeopardy! podcast. “We totally blew it at the top of the show. We made a horrible error where we revealed the final scores at the end in the opening cutaway shot during Mayim’s monologue.”
He went on to say that part of Mayim’s monologue was reshot later in the taping, which sometimes happens in case of incorrect facts or performance issues. “It is standard procedure to take the scores in the podium back to the original level, but it didn’t happen,” he explained. “This was then not caught in post [production]; it was not caught in the final QC [quality control]… there are so many elements that should check this.”
To stop this from happening in the future, Davies said, “We have now put in place a new series of protocols that will prevent this from happening again.”
“My whole thing is to always focus not on what happened and why did this happen in order to punish people; it’s what happened and why did it happen so we can build a protocol to make sure it never happens again,” he stated.
“We apologize for anybody whose experience of this program was ruined,” he continued. “We take these mistakes to heart so hard, the self-flagellation that happens across the senior management team and the post team and everybody involved, that’s a good thing about Jeopardy, we take mistakes really, really seriously.”
Davies said they will strive to be “transparent” with viewers when they make mistakes and will do everything they can to make sure something like this never happens again.
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