Bialik tries to smooth the waters as ‘Jeopardy!’ host
After the succession debacle at “Jeopardy!” turned one of television’s most respected game shows into a punchline for late-night hosts and at the Emmy Awards, Mayim Bialik took over as a temporary host this season with a simple goal: not to draw too much attention to herself.
Her job, as she sees it, is to simply deliver the clues, and she has been favoring subdued colors like navy blue over the electric pink she wore last season. “I didn’t want to be distracting — like, ‘Oh my gosh, there’s that lady!’ ” Bialik said in a recent interview. “I think a lot about ‘Jeopardy!’ just needs to be very neutral to pleasant.”
Neutral to pleasant: It’s a fitting phrase for “Jeopardy!” a staid television staple. But the show’s efforts to find a successor to Alex Trebek, the beloved host who died last year, have hardly been either. In August it announced Mike Richards would get the post and that Bialik would lead prime-time specials. Then the Richards appointment imploded over a series of offensive comments he had made on a podcast. Now Bialik has stepped in as an interim host, while making it clear that she would like the top job permanently.
But Bialik — a popular sitcom actor who blogged when blogging was popular, vlogged when vlogging was popular and now has her own podcast — has long drawn attention and controversy, with copious public statements of her own. Nearly a decade ago she wrote in a book of making an “informed decision not to vaccinate our children,” prompting her to clarify last year that they would get vaccinated against the coronavirus. She blogged about donating money to buy bulletproof vests for the Israel Defense Forces. She endorsed a “brain health supplement” earlier this year for a company that agreed to settle a class-action lawsuit accusing it of false advertising.
Scrutiny of her many past statements has now become the latest chapter in the saga that is the game show’s attempts to find a host who sticks.
“Right now we’ve got someone absolutely free of controversy, Mayim Bialik,” John Oliver joked on a recent episode of “Last Week Tonight,” going on to describe her as “a person I think is great because I don’t have Google.”
The show has not addressed the criticism publicly, and Bialik’s episodes have seen a slight ratings bump compared to the five episodes that Richards had taped before his departure (likely helped by the winning streak of the reigning contestant, Matt Amodio). Bialik — who hopes to become the first woman to permanently get the top job on “Jeopardy!”— joked in an interview that the public scrutiny could have been worse.
“I credit me and my publicist, Heather, that like there really wasn’t a lot more,” Bialik laughed. “I’ve been talking for a long time.”
Bialik has been in the public eye for decades. She became the young star of a network sitcom, “Blossom,” in 1990. Later, she spent years as a character on the “The Big Bang Theory.” But her freely shared opinions have often attracted criticism.
“The notion of subtlety and nuance is something that’s been lacking from our culture for many, many years now,” she lamented in the interview.
The show recently announced that Bialik would continue as host through Nov. 5; after that she will split hosting duties with Ken Jennings, a former champion also seen as a contender for the top job, until the end of the year. Part of the challenge for Bialik — and anyone in the running for the job — will be the comparison to Trebek, who started as host in 1984 and cultivated the image of an impeccably impartial omniscient narrator.
Bialik, who earned a doctorate in neuroscience, has a matter-of-fact way of speaking that suggests the kind of authoritative intelligence Trebek projected as host. Her acting experience — she is currently starring in a
Fox sitcom called “Call Me Kat” — has accustomed her to the on-set demands of TV. Bialik called the “Jeopardy!” job a “combination of everything I’ve ever worked for.”
But her willingness to share her opinions publicly on everything from parenting to the conflict in the Middle East represents a striking departure from the studied neutrality of Trebek. In his end-of-life memoir, Trebek wrote that he held his opinions so close to his chest that he got letters from Republican viewers thinking he was Republican and Democratic viewers thinking he was a Democrat (he was an independent).
Googling Bialik’s name brings up expansive archives of written and recorded thoughts on subjects including her positions on shaving, the movie “Fifty Shades of Grey,” swearing, online dating, third-wave feminism, women’s sexuality, pop music and a billboard featuring Ariana Grande in a revealing outfit. An essay she wrote in The New York Times in 2017, “Being a Feminist in Harvey Weinstein’s World,” in which she lamented the objectification of women in Hollywood and noted her personal choice to dress modestly, prompted criticism; Bialik later clarified that the only people responsible for assaults are “the predators who are committing those horrendous acts.”
She has shared myriad personal details, discussing her divorce, her struggles with aging and body image, and her approach to raising children. This year, she started a podcast about mental health, speaking openly about dealing with anxiety and an eating disorder.
During the interview, Bialik said that her superiors at “Jeopardy!” had not asked her to tone down her outspokenness as the current face of the show but that it was something she had been thinking about.
Two topics Bialik has often weighed in on publicly are her devotion to Judaism and societal pressure on women’s appearances. But when asked about her reaction to the departure of Richards — who had made a joke on his podcast centered on an antisemitic stereotype about the size of Jewish noses, along with demeaning comments about women’s bodies — she declined to share her opinion.
“I had a reaction, but I don’t really feel like it’s for public consumption,” she said. “It further potentially complicates any discussion about trying to return to a state of normalcy for ‘Jeopardy!’ And so I’m kind of respectfully choosing not to talk about it.”