![]() Ways to Give Overview Donate Now PurpleStride Walks & Runs Host Your Own Fundraiser Create a Legacy Corporate Partnerships How You Change Lives Donor Stories.Ways to Get Involved Overview PurpleStride Walks & Runs Volunteer Local Events & Activities Be an Advocate Host Your Own Fundraiser Social Media Supporter Stories.Resources & Services Personal one-to-one Support Clinical Trials Know Your Tumor ® Patient Registry Support Groups Survivor & Caregiver Network For Healthcare Professionals.Learn About Pancreatic Cancer Overview What is the Pancreas? What is Pancreatic Cancer? Symptoms & Diagnosis About Genetic and Biomarker Testing Treatment Living with Pancreatic Cancer Diet & Nutrition Educational Webinars Stories of Hope Pancreatic Cancer and the Black Community.The glow Trebek lent, having been dimmed by a year of small-scale scandal and mismanagement, can’t be brought back. The show will surely go on in a literal sense - “Jeopardy” has its own momentum that not even a year of the most extreme kind of turbulence can upset - but what was once a show that stood apart, thanks to the work of Trebek and others, now looks a lot more like the rest of television. Those decisions, too, suggest that today’s “Jeopardy” cares much more about filling Trebek’s seat than it does about the aspects of his legacy that make the show special, and sustainable. The bad decisions made over the course of the year after Trebek’s death have made “Jeopardy” a lot less special, or revealed how much of its specialness was the result of unique effort by a host and producers now gone. (From afar, Bialik, as guest host, does at least seem to have stabilized the show after Richards’ exit.) The attention-begging year that followed has yielded a show that feels exhausting, and exhausted: This viewer, at least, needs some serious distance from the show before even considering watching it again. Trebek’s words mattered because they were special, not just rote.) Trebek’s work, and the show he anchored, became a part of the American pantheon because he so rarely made for a trending topic: His “Jeopardy” was conducted with care, kindness, professionalism, and a lack of flash. (Notably, Richards recited Trebek’s call for kindness at the end of each of his episodes, in what came to seem like an attention-begging gambit. Here, though, it came freighted with meaning: A silence-breaking by someone who had for many years allowed his work with nervous, excited game-show contestants to speak for his values. It’s not lost, surely, on series fans that in one of his final episodes, Trebek urged viewers to build a “kinder society,” a call that - made by someone whose life’s work had been in politics - might seem woefully vague. And after a year of brassy self-promotion by potential Trebek replacements, and one in which several of them were found badly wanting, Trebek’s cultivated appeal to all potential viewers, and his power as a uniting force, seems sadly bygone. In Trebek’s case, that meant living with a great deal of circumspection - a shocking amount, for someone who appeared on television five nights a week. ![]() But so is simply showing up and presenting one’s example. What was noteworthy about Trebek was not that viewers could count on his consistently agreeing with them - it was that the role he played did not necessitate venturing into the realm of the controversial, and so he did not.Īdvocacy for that which one believes is a powerful thing. Many of these stories suggested a hunger to be at the center of the story that Trebek rarely exhibited. Mini-eruptions among the talent pool of potential Trebek replacements, before and after the selection was made, have included Ken Jennings’ tonally off tweets, Katie Couric’s revealing she selectively edited an interview to protect a public figure she admired, Aaron Rodgers’ vocal vaccine skepticism, and Mayim Bialik’s conflicted public relationship with vaccines. (In addition to his less-than-electric profile as a broadcaster, Richards made news for offensive comments he made about women, Jews, and other groups on a podcast, and he eventually lost the job.) A year on, Trebek seems remarkable not merely for the fact that he avoided getting snared in similar controversies - it doesn’t take much to outclass Richards - but for the ways in which his bearing seemed to belong to a lost generation of television talent. But the process had begun to wear thin even before it came to seem engineered towards the installation of Mike Richards, the show’s executive producer and a figure whose unworthiness seemed obvious to all but those who had done the picking.
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