Mike Richards has stepped down as Jeopardy host after his misogyny and anti-Semitism came to light. [Just Jared]
Rita Ora posted a bunch of IGs to show that she threw a birthday party for her boyfriend Taika Waititi. I still don’t get this couple. [Dlisted]
Meng’er Zhang wore Loewe during a promotional appearance. [RCFA]
The “let people enjoy things” meta-commentary. [Gawker]
Review of The Green Knight (with Dev Patel). [Pajiba]
I like Minnie Driver’s dress but I would play with the design a bit. [Go Fug Yourself]
Brett Goldstein’s brilliance & the joy of Ted Lasso. [LaineyGossip]
Rami Malek is getting pap’d more often these days, weeks before No Time To Die finally gets released, how weird! [Just Jared]
Details from the R. Kelly trial in Chicago. [Buzzfeed]
Sinead O’Connor wrote an open letter to Prince Harry. [Towleroad]
What is Erika Jayne lying about now? [Starcasm]
Bella Hadid & Dua Lipa are on vacation together. [Egotastic]
Note by CB: Sign up for our mailing list and get the top 8 stories about Kate’s Keen Plans! I only send one email on weekdays around lunchtime.
Good, that’s all I have got. Good!!
Exactly he doesn’t even deserve a full sentence! Just “Good”
Good doesn’t capture how friggin’ hilarious it is, though.
“Stepped down” or “F-ed off”?
I read that he still remains on the show as executive producer, so it must be nice to have such a soft landing. This is SUCH a mediocre man!
Seriously, WHAT were they thinking with him in the first place?
Bye douche.
Must be nice to be able to fire yourself.
But he’s still executive producer on the show so he will have a say in picking the next host.
My hope is that he’ll be removed from the selection committee as well. Fingers crossed.
At least I won’t have to look at his face.
Wasn’t anyone responsible for vetting Richards in the first place? Talk about amateur hour. This incident was totally avoidable and, dare I say, even Alex Trabek would have been appalled.
He chose himself. He was always going to chose himself. The quest host runs were a joke and when they went to Twitter, he was never in the running.
And he knew the Sony execs would go along with it because he was the cheaper option, since he was already getting paid well for his executive producer role. Adding a little extra to his salary wouldn’t be as much as hiring someone from outside.
This should be so embarrassing for the Jeopardy! team. They made such a huuuuuge and drawn out show of the “vetting” process, only to reveal that it was never a vetting process. They didn’t even do the minimal work into the guy that was chosen.
What a spectacular, obvious f*ck up. And even though he is a producer on the show, he’s not singularly in charge of it. Other professionals should have seen this coming a long way off. Amateurs.
That show chose a dopey looking fk when so many other candidates were available. He reminds me of someone who sings show tunes in his head to calm himself down.
Buh-bye
He ruined price is right. Get him away from my favorite!
This is the right thing but I’m still unhappy that they considered him a viable candidate for the Host job at all. They had to know about the Price is Right lawsuits and his fakakta podcast in which he thought calling women “sluts” and “prostitutes” was cool. They knew and they still allowed him to hire himself. I feel like the people who let him hire himself share his views. Jeopardy is not the same for me now.
“fakakta” 😀 love it – geez I miss my mom.
It’s one of my favorite words. I hope it gave you a happy memory.
Gawker is back??
I loved Gawker, this reboot does not feel like Gawker.
If it were, that same A-hole would sue it into the ground again.
I’ve missed Gawker so much but I had a look around today and it’s totally different. It’s like a Buzzfeed version. Also no comments? Or at least none I could l see.
Good, bye bye! (Wonder if Mayim will now be the FT host?)
Gawd, I hope not.
Pretty sure this is the universe saying *literally everyone* wants Levar Burton.
Even God Tweeted to give the job to Levar Burton
Did you see Levar just Tweeted “Happy Friday, everyone!” as soon as this news dropped! hahahah
Just read this and am laughing delightedly. Dang, how embarrassing for Jeopardy. I don’t know who’s going to host now but this whole Michael Richards thing was just gross on many levels.
This guy is like the Donald Trump of game shows, in that he’s screwed up all over & left a trail of lawsuits and inappropriate remarks all around yet was STILL allowed to advance to a cushy position. Even after all that he’s still executive producer of a top show. What, does he have to do, shoot someone on 5th Avenue before they say enough?
I’ll take it. We’ll see how long he lasts as EP now; my guess is that he will quietly resign in short order.
I know someone who was on Jeopardy! in one of Trebek’s last couple seasons and he says Mike Richards is hated by the Jeopardy! contestant community for dumbing down questions and other stuff he’s done as executive producer. His first choice for host was Blossom, actually.
Wow. I really thought they were going to let him stay! Glad he was told to resign! (Highly doubt that was his decision). Wonder if they will give Laura Coates a chance?
Wouldn’t that be a wonderful surprise twist? I’d love to see Coates at least given the chance that she should’ve had to begin with.
Bring back LeVar!
I don’t know. If I was Levar, I’d turn them down.
Yeah it’s like who wants to be second choice. Levar will be fine on his own…everyone loves him.
I agree, but also feel like if he hosts for as long as Alex did, two whole generations will have known no host other than Levar Burton, and he can rewrite game show history.
@bettyrose
From your lips to god’s ear. #WeNeedLeVar
I’m so happy to read this! Now just go beg LeVar to be the host as it should have been all along – then everything will be right in my world!
He should go as EP too. Next should be that awful Mayim Bialik for all of her victim blaming and anti-vaccine bullsh*t. She has got to go too.
Is Mayim Bialik really anti-vax? Isn’t she a neuroscience PhD? How is that possible?
If you google the fact-check.org it has a summary
Basically she was, let’s say, vaccine hesitant years ago (she says something like skeptical of Big Pharm)
At some points Facebook dopes made posts exaggerating her position and applying it to potential COVID vaccines. last year she posted something about how she and her family had all gotten their 2020 flu shots, and then this year confirmed that they have been vaccinated for COVID too.
So it sounds like she was a skeptic but was no Jenny McCarthy and is not a COVIDidiot.
(She may be problematic or not on other issues, but that’s the entirety of my MB knowledge- gleaned entirely from Google searches stemming from Jeopardy host horse-race and resultant douche-bro Jeopardy host fiasco.)
I have highly educated relatives, including one who is a doctor currently working in a hot spot that’s made national news, who are anit-vax when it comes to COVID. Never, ever underestimate the ability for people, even highly educated ones, to let emotional thinking get in the way of logic.
My relatives are in the orange cult, and I have no idea what MB’s political thinking is so have no idea what impacted her stance on vaxxing. And I know just as many people who are ‘liberal’ who hold opinions I find disgusting. I’ll just say that MB’s victim blaming ‘opinion’ piece in the NYTs was incredibly telling.
I know Mayim and she’s talking about the flu vaccine, not all vaccines. I’ve spoken to quite a few scientists who believe that some vaccines are imperative, but not all of them. Scientists are not coming out against the Covid vaccine and neither did Mayim. I also didn’t have a flu vaccine for 25 years, but I started again when I turned 60. Mayim is not someone who would let PR put words in her mouth. She’s proud (in a good way) of her ability to speak to and reach diverse groups of people.
I follow her podcast. While she’s definitely put her foot in her mouth in the past, she’s not anti-vax at all. She and her two kids are both fully vaxxed. I guess you could say, pre-COVID, she was vaccine-hesitant. And I’ve listened to probably 15 episodes of her podcast and there has been zero victim-blaming or shaming or anything like that close to that. So she’s clearly evolved.
She didn’t evolve, she just got a better PR team
She made a clumsy statement once, she’s actually a supporter of women’s rights. I really can’t stand this stuff about Mayim, I think she’s lovely. But then, I myself am not perfect.
I’ll take ‘TV Clusterfucks’ for $800, Alex.
OMG this would make a great Jeapardy question though wouldn’t it? “Who was the shortest running host of Jeapardy”?
HA HA ( in my best Nelson Muntz voice)
That letter to Harry from Sinead was nice!
So nice. She’s an outspoken (or once was) critic of Britain and the RF, so her heart felt letter to Harry feels very genuine to me.
Something about the RO/TW thing has been bugging me and it finally hit me seeing this link – they are so performative. Each of them are individually but together it’s like 20 fold.
I never get the sense of them going and doing stuff just together… it’s like they are going and doing stuff together AT the rest of they world.
Wow, what genius on the vetting committee picked this guy…? /s/
I think they should stick with short term hosts for awhile longer, just to ease the transition for whoever comes next and put less pressure on them. Plus, I wonder if this whole thing has sullied the job a bit. Like, if I were Levar Burton or one of the other runners up, I would let my calls go to voicemail for awhile.
He picked himself. He was the Head of the Selection Committee.
Good news
I loved Bill Whitaker as guest host, his voice was so smooth.
Buh-bye!
LOL! that was quick. Good riddance!
Ok but he’s still working for the show right? Isn’t he a producer or something? He’s still getting paid. He lost a job he barely started. Is he really that mad? Is this really a punishment for the sh*t he said. I don’t know.
I saw someone recommending alternative hosts for Jeopardy and someone suggested Al Franken. Which would be kind of awesome.
Plus doubly entertaining for the number of heads it would cause to explode!
Why would it be awesome to pick Al Franken who had his own harassment scandal? Oh I guess you think it’s fun for women to report sexual harassment. And/or you think women lie.
We don’t need an old white harasser man. Done. Thanks.
Because there was no sexual harassment.
They need to get Alex’s picks in there. Easy replacements, and they”d be honouring his wishes.
Excellent! Can they get LeVar Burton now?
What a load of BS, this entire host situation was a huge fix.
Alex was a icon and very difficult to try to fit into his shoes. But this whole mess is just cheap and nasty.
Shady, shady biz.
Get lost, loser.
And yet this entitled yahoo remains a producer on the series. He needs to be cut loose.
Of course Kate Beckinsale was there. I’m sure she’s friends with someone but that woman shows up for anything as long as there’s a camera.
Rita Ora and Taika Waititi: generation Z Tara Reid gets together with insecure aging late-bloomer who is having a mid-life crisis and is trying to re-live his 20’s as a “cool LA guy.” Both of them have a compulsion to stage sad d-list “celebrity” parties for the ‘Gram. Each for their own reasons. He get to pretend he’s an Instagram cool kid doing what the other Instagram cool kids do. She gets publicity which she will later use for her yachting and oil prince-meeting career.
This entire comment is gold, but this killed me:
“Rita Ora and Taika Waititi: generation Z Tara Reid gets together with insecure aging late-bloomer who is having a mid-life crisis and is trying to re-live his 20′s as a “cool LA guy.” Both of them have a compulsion to stage sad d-list “celebrity” parties for the ‘Gram. ”
☕☕☕
Why does this job require white skin and a male appendage? Open up the candidate pool again. Find somebody better. A woman, for instance. This is what corporations do when they’ve f**up.
This also sucks: Richards will remain in the role of executive producer. The man who hosted a podcast called “The Randumb Show,” whose 41 episodes were reviewed by The Ringer. They found Richards asked his co-host and assistant if they had any nude photos, used derogatory terms for little people and those with an intellectual disability and called women fat. He also has made insensitive remarks about Jewish people.”