What is a Fiasco? Mike Richards Will Not Host 'Jeopardy!'

Exactly a week ago, we gathered in this same internet space to discuss what a complete mess had been made of the search for a host to succeed Alex Trebek on Jeopardy! After months of guest-host stints that were received as tryouts but were perhaps not tryouts after all, executive producer Mike Richards was announced as the next host. There were a lot of very carefully worded descriptions of said messy process, as it certainly wouldn’t have been Richards alone who chose the next host. But the undercurrent of a lot of the public reaction was not that different from what it would have been if the headlines had just said, “Man Looks Far And Wide To Find Perfect Candidate For Coveted Job: Self.”

But now, a different headline: “Man Quits Job, Keeps Job In Which He Gave Himself That Job.”

Richards stepped down from the days-old hosting gig in a note on Friday morning, saying that it was clear to him that he would be “a distraction” as a host. He apologized not for any of his behavior, but for the “unwanted negative attention” that the show had experienced, and the “confusion and delays” that the shuffle was creating. He apparently intends to stay on as the boss.

It was a fittingly sloppy end to this effort. From the moment Richards was announced, the whole thing had been called out as disingenuous, sketchy, shady, whatever words you prefer—even for a lot of people who thought Richards had been a good guest host substantively, the process left a bad taste.

And then came the discussions of past discrimination lawsuits at The Price Is Right, the show where he used to work (uh-oh!), even though Richards assured everyone that “the way in which my comments and actions have been characterized in these complaints does not reflect the reality of who I am or how we worked together on The Price Is Right.” Okay, then! Doesn’t reflect the reality of who you are, doesn’t reflect how you work? Everything’s fine! Maybe this would do it, as far as tamping down the criticism?

And second, how does Richards continue in his producing role? However unfair he likely finds it, the story of his Extremely Loud And Incredibly Short tenure as the host of one of the calmest and most dignified syndicated shows on television is going to be that he gave himself the job and then had to bail after he got caught calling women “slut” and “ho” on a podcast that, again, was made behind the scenes of a show where he was managing people.

Is it the intent that he would now oversee a new host selection process? That he would be the person a candidate would sit down with, who would say, “What do you think makes you right for this job?” And that this candidate would have to resist saying, “I have never made a podcast with ‘dumb’ in the title at any of my workplaces?”

If anything, you can argue that it’s more pressing that Richards be relieved of the EP job than of the hosting job, and that the only reason he’d leave the latter and not the former is that he’s leaving the one that draws more attention and thus more fire. The substantive problem with these remarks is not that he was somehow going to make them on the air on Jeopardy! in his capacity as host, since he probably wasn’t going to call anyone a slut while calling on her during the Daily Double. The substantive problem with these remarks is the attitude they convey, and in the context of management jobs, the environment they could create for employees.

It comes down, honestly, to this: How do you leave someone in charge of your show who opened with a catastrophic handling of the biggest possible executive producing task, apparently to his own benefit? And how do you make someone the boss who didn’t meet the character requirements to be the host?