On Fri, Aug 20, 2021 at 10:59 AM Adam Bowie <[email protected]> wrote:
> With all the news that's going on in the world right now, both the NYT and > WP sent push notifications of this major breaking story :-) > > (OK - it *is* big news around here!) > This whole story is bonkers. Sony took the tragedy of Alex Trebek's passing and came up with a plan to grab attention and build engagement with the show by announcing guest hosts with a permanent host announcement right after the last show of the season airs. They hit the mark and it came off beautifully as talk about the guest hosts drove MSM stories and took off on social media. The process really worked until they named Mike Richards host and the entire enterprise went against them. All of the attention turned negative as people referenced Dick Cheney or a boss doing a wide search for an open position and finally choosing his son-in-law. Enterprising journalists dug through Richards's background and found some skeletons nobody - at least not the execs at Sony - knew about. We have to give credit to Claire McNear of The Ringer of sitting through 40 episodes of his podcast. That had to be excruciating. And today Richards concedes that he's not the man to host the show but whatever his failings are it's not enough to disqualify him from being EP. And apparently Sony had no Plan B. We don't know if they are going to air the shows they taped or who would want to be a guest host now. In the alternate universe where Sony simply liked what they saw in Richards test shows and named him permanent host in January, would any of this have come out? I think people would have just accepted him and moved on. I doubt we will ever know what the tipping point was here. Maybe somebody will write a book or do a podcast in the future where they can interview the people involved and get insight. My idea of what the tipping point was that a number of contestants who passed the audition let the audience coordinators know they weren't interested in doing the show with that host. That could push Sony to move in a way that bad press won't. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "TVorNotTV" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/tvornottv/CAJE-FiHFRDXnrjZ9%3DnUSepjCNj%2BM24dN%2BrbbctTmrOZXrQNsWw%40mail.gmail.com.
