Ken Jennings Attacked By Jeopardy! Fans After Controversial Ruling On Contestant’s Answer
Jeopardy! co-host Ken Jennings is under fire from fans after taking an answer away from a contestant from mispronouncing a word, and awarding it to another contestant who also mispronounced it.
Between categorical missteps and hosting drama, tensions are running high on the beloved long-running game show, Jeopardy! with fans once again lashing out in anger after one contestant’s correct answer was passed on. Host Ken Jennings is taking the heat on this one after a Jeopardy! question was answered correctly but with a mispronunciation. Telling the contestant that he got it wrong, another player buzzed in, only to deliver the same answer and secure the points.
The clue in question was, “After the Last Supper, Jesus traveled to this garden to pray & was arrested there.” The correct answer was the Garden of Gethsemane which a competitor named Kevin correctly nailed on his first try, although he seemingly mispronounced the answer, naming the garden with a “d” instead of an “n”. Immediately shutting it down, Ken Jennings then bounced the question to Tamara, who gave the same answer to the Jeopardy! question, but with a different pronunciation, leading her to nab the win.
Surely, Ken Jennings had a recent event in mind in which another episode of Jeopardy! saw a similar conundrum between players with fans lashing out against the show for awarding a win to a competitor who incorrectly answered a question. To make matters worse, if the garden’s pronunciation is what blew it for Kevin, it was unfair for Tamara to land the win as she used a soft “g” to sound out Gethsemane rather than the correct hard “g”. Acknowledging Tamara’s supposed win, Jennings said that they were looking for the word’s “n”, also saying “Gethsemane” with a soft “g”.
Facing one of the most loyal and vocal fandoms out there, Ken Jennings, and the rest of the crew behind Jeopardy! soon found themselves under attack from their audience who took to social media platforms like Twitter to share its upset with the way the question was handled. One Twitter user slammed the game show commenting that the first contestant was “robbed of his points” after answering the question correctly the first time. Like many others, the user also added that the victor of that question “didn’t even pronounce it right.”
Another exasperated tweet came from a follower pointing out the hard “g” in Gethsemane, while even a pastor came out of the woodwork to share his upset with the way the answer was handled. In his tweet, the Reverend Joseph Rose shamed Ken Jennings and Jeopardy! writing that Tamara’s answer shouldn’t have been accepted as “Jess-seh-muh-nee” was “an entirely different word than Gethsemane, sharing the proper pronunciation of the latter.
This shakeup is just the latest in snafus on the game show as fans have been taking up grievances following nearly every episode. Host Mayim Bialik may have thought she was widely despised during her time behind the podium, but the grass hasn’t been much greener for Ken Jennings since his return to Jeopardy! Cutting his hiatus early, the Jeopardy! all-star-turned-host was initially set to be off through the summer but graced audiences with an unexpected return to work.
Unfortunately for him, Ken Jennings has been facing the heat of the Jeopardy! fandom as the show continues to drop the ball on questions and categories that audiences disagree with. While we’re certain that the long-running game show will keep ticking, it’s bound to lose part of its following if it continues to disappoint them episode after episode.
