‘Jeopardy!’ Blunder Explained By Apologetic Producer

deadline.com:

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.