The grievances of Jeopardy! fans tend to be obscure. Maybe it’s the pronunciation of “Barry,” or the ruthlessness of the modern tiebreaker system, or competing Schisms, or the mild chaos of a Daily Double hunter. I’ve spent a lot of time talking to people in the Jeopardy! community in the past few years, and I cannot remember outrage anything like the response that followed Tuesday’s announcement that Mehmet Oz will serve as one of this season’s revolving guest hosts.
There’s no shortage of Jeopardy! alumni ruffled by the news. “Jeopardy! celebrates knowledge and facts and Dr. Oz has largely broken from that in his medical advice,” said Kristin Sausville, who won five games in 2015. “Not super interested in Dr. Oz hosting a show about correct information,” wrote Louis Virtel, another 2015 contestant. The mood on the Jeopardy! subreddit is, erm, something less than positive.
Hours after the news broke, I put out a call for former contestants to reach out with their thoughts on the host candidates; by Wednesday morning, dozens of responses had come pouring into my inbox. “Can I say ‘sucks’?” asked one. “If so, Dr. Oz fucking sucks and so does the decision to let this crackpot host our beloved Jeopardy!” “One word … WHY,” wrote another. Said a third, “Inviting Dr. Oz to stand behind Alex Trebek’s podium is profoundly disrespectful of Alex and of everything Alex loved about the show.”
“Science is really a verb—not a noun,” says Lindsey Shultz, a four-game winner from 2019 who works as a public health analyst. “When you’ve made your career in the popular media by at best conveying confidence in unproven remedies—and at worst implicitly causing your audience to doubt the process the rest of us live by and have been at wit’s end trying to defend for a full calendar year—I’m not sure a show based around facts is the best place for you.”
So let’s talk about the specifics of Dr. Oz and why he makes such a lousy fit for Jeopardy! A trained cardiologist, he rose to national fame as a health expert on The Oprah Winfrey Show in the mid-aughts, when he made a habit of hawking dubious, and sometimes outright offensive, remedies.
In 2009, Oprah’s production company bankrolled the launch of The Dr. Oz Show, where he swiftly began to peddle medical falsehoods and exaggerations. He has provided a platform to “debate” the merits of conversion therapy and to Robert Kennedy Jr.’s conspiracy theories about vaccines and autism. In 2013, he defended his approach as a matter of science itself being subjective: “You find the arguments that support your data,” he said, “and it’s my fact versus your fact.” A British Medical Journal study of medical claims made on his show found in 2014 that half were baseless. That same year, a group of prominent physicians wrote an open letter stating that Oz had “repeatedly shown disdain for science and for evidence-based medicine” and called for Columbia to remove him from the school’s faculty; his propensity for pseudoscience earned him a dressing down by then–Senator Claire McCaskill during a congressional hearing on scam products. Oprah’s network severed ties with his radio show the following year.
When the coronavirus pandemic began to pummel the country in early 2020, Oz seized the opportunity, refashioning himself as a Fox News pundit and talking up debunked and dangerous “solutions” like hydroxychloroquine. In return, ratings of his own show boomed; in September, it was renewed for two more seasons. In the middle of a pandemic that has killed nearly 450,000 Americans, the misinformation that Fox spread—that Oz personally spread—did real harm. He has consistently distanced himself from science and the world of fact generally, openly admitting to courting nonsense on his show for the simple reason that it’s “very entertaining.” It is, to put it mildly, difficult to square a career built on pseudoscience and misinformation with a quiz show about facts.
So what’s in it for Jeopardy!? For starters, he brings name recognition and intra-studio ease: Like Jeopardy!, The Dr. Oz Show is distributed by Sony Pictures Television, and cross-promoting one highly rated syndicated show on a second highly rated syndicated show from the same studio is hardly an outlandish concept. (Although BuzzerBlog, which covers game shows, pointed out that those ratings might not actually be that impressive.)
More than that, however, is what Dr. Oz might bring in terms of audience. In recent months, Ken Jennings—the 74-time champ who is now in his fourth week as the show’s inaugural guest host—has become a target of a certain sort of right-wing, bad-faith noisemaker, including Donald Trump Jr. and The Federalist. In December, Jennings apologized for what he characterized as “unartful and insensitive” remarks on Twitter over the years. Given that the apology came just days before his episodes as guest host began to air, it was widely interpreted as a nod to—if not a request from—Sony, albeit one seemingly meant more to address ableist comments than any previous remarks about the 45th president. Then, last month, Page Six published a report that Katie Couric, who has also been tapped as an upcoming guest host, had been ruled out as a permanent host after she suggested that some members of Congress would have to “deprogram” from “the cult of Trump.” While hardly controversial, a source told Page Six that producers were concerned: “Jeopardy! viewers are quite a traditional bunch,” the source said. Toss in the skewering of Trump by Savannah Guthrie, another just-named guest host, during an October town hall, and suddenly you’ve got a trend: Is Jeopardy! risking alienating its conservative viewers?! In that light, Oz—the “Fox News favorite” who had then-candidate Trump on his show in 2016 to praise his fishy health records and later joined President Trump’s health council—does check a box.
The result is what feels worryingly like an attempt by Sony and Jeopardy! to balance the scales. But these aren’t opposing sides to find a compromise between. There is no middle ground between fact and pseudoscience, just as there’s no in between in the game itself: The answers are right or wrong, black or white. The beauty of Jeopardy! is that there is no gray area. It’s a space—a rare one—where holding up knowledge and certainty is celebrated, special, literally worth something. Of course Jeopardy! fans and contestants are upset: Looking the other way here, whether because it’s easy or profitable or attention-grabbing or whatever other rationale, is a betrayal.
It is all, perhaps, much ado about nothing. While Trebek was always (OK, usually) studiously apolitical, Pat Sajak—the longtime host of Wheel of Fortune, which tapes next door to Jeopardy! and shares an executive producer—has hardly been shy about his conservative (and occasionally problematic) beliefs through the years. If Sajak’s tenure is any guide, Sony does not view political outspokenness as disqualifying. But Wheel of Fortune isn’t Jeopardy!, either in its focus on facts or in its place in television and beyond. Contestants spend months and years trying to make it to the Jeopardy! stage, and many find that decades after they played, it still means something to say they did it. There’s nothing quite like it—no test of brainy mettle quite so pure.
We don’t know how long Jeopardy! intends each guest stint to last, or to what extent the guest positions are functioning as auditions for the permanent gig. They could be auditions—Jennings and Anderson Cooper, who has also been named as a guest host, have long been considered front-runners for the position. But given what we know about the search—including the fact that the show has reportedly informed contenders that it expects the permanent host to make Jeopardy! their primary occupation—it seems that many of the choices have been made simply to entertain.
That is, at any rate, the one thing Oz seems to be qualified for. But even if he hosts just a single episode of Jeopardy!, it will have been half an hour too long.
