Last week, Jeopardy! aired what some are calling "the show's biggest flub yet" and now, producers are addressing it and taking responsibility. It happened on Wednesday during the first episode of the finals of the three-week-long High School Reunion Tournament. Before gameplay started, as host Mayim Bialik was congratulating the contestants for making it this far and wishing them good luck, the camera cut to the three players at their podiums, yet the podiums showed all three finalists' final scores.
Executive Producer Michael Davies took to the show's podcast, Inside Jeopardy!, to speak about what happened. He started by apologizing, saying, "My apologies to the audience at the top of the show. We totally blew it. We made a horrible error and revealed the final scores at the end in the opening cutaway shot during Mayim's monologue."
Davies explained:
"It's a series of errors that it's somewhat remarkable that they all happened, starting with the decision to pick up [reshoot] the monologue. We can't remember exactly what was wrong with the monologue but we do occasionally pick up monologues for some reason - sometimes there's a fact that's incorrect, and sometimes there's a performance issue, so we pick it up [reshoot it] at the end of the show - there is a cutaway shot there, of course, it should be standard procedure and it is a standard procedure that we take the scores on the podiums back to the original level, but it didn't happen. This was then not caught in post [production] and it was not caught in the final QC [quality control]."
Davies added, "So many elements that should check this. We have now put into place a new series of protocols that will prevent this from happening again but I gotta tell you, I'm sure if you're honest with yourselves there are mistakes made in every single one of your businesses. We're trying to be more transparent with mistakes when we make them. Every part of the Jeopardy process - there is some pressure, we're making more episodes and working more hours so that does lead to more mistakes. But there is no excuse."
Viewers were pretty put off by the error with one calling it "inexcusable" and another referring to it as "a pretty significant screw-up."
It didn't affect the game though, and after the second of the two final High School Reunion Tournament shows, Brown freshman Justin Bolsen won it all, earning $100,000 and entry into the show's 2023 Tournament of Champions.