The team at Jeopardy! is issuing an apology after an on-air mistake that some consider to be one of the most catastrophic mistakes that’s happened on the show.
The mistake aired in early March during the first episode of the finals of the High School Reunion Tournament, and Jeopardy! producer Michael Davies shortly thereafter issued a comment addressing what happened.
Viewers were surprised when the final scores of the contestants were shown at the beginning of the episode. I Heart Radio explains, “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.”
Michael Davies said, “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.”
He continued, “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].”
He concluded, “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.”
There’s more in the video below.
