Jeopardy! watchers saw a rare goof on March 9 when the final scores of contestants in the High School Reunion Tournament were shown during host Mayim Bialik’s opening monologue. And there wasn’t even a spoiler alert.
Now Jeopardy! executive producer Michael Davies has explained what went wrong, and has offered his apologies to viewers.
“Right off the bat, apologies to our entire audience,” Davies says on 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.”
According to Davies, the opening monologue in which the host welcomes the players and sets the stage for that episode’s competition is occasionally re-shot post-game and inserted into the final tape. The reshoots might be necessitated by a misstated factual error or a performance issue during the initial monologue. Cutaways to the contestants and their final scores are then replaced by the cutaways shot during the earlier, pre-game monologue.
“It is standard procedure to take the scores in the podium back to the original level, but it didn’t happen,” Davies explained, adding that the mistake was not caught in post-production or final quality control.
“It’s a series of errors and it’s somehow remarkable they all happened,” he said, adding that he couldn’t remember what prompted the monologue reshoot.
Davies assured viewers that new protocols have been put in place “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,” he said. “It’s what happened and why did it happen so we can build a protocol to make sure it never happens again.”
He continued, “We apologize for anybody whose experience of this program was ruined. 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.”
As for the High School Reunion Tournament, as March 9 viewers know, contestant Jackson Jones won that day’s game. Contestant Justin Bolsen went on to win the tournament.
Below is video of the blunder…