Jeopardy!‘s Ken vs. Mayim Debate: EP Reveals Who Gets Better Ratings
It’s the Jeopardy! question on everyone’s mind: Which of the syndicated phenom’s two rotating hosts, Ken Jennings or Mayim Bialik, are winning the ratings game? Executive producer Michael Davies is buzzing in with the answer.
“When Ken is hosting and Mayim is hosting, there’s zero difference,” Davies tells Vulture. “It’s exactly the same [viewership] and that’s the broadest part of the audience.”
And although the EP is well aware of the fierce Ken vs. Mayim debate that exists online among fans, he maintains that there’s no “absolute” data that points to one being more popular than the other. “In terms of the tiny percentage of our audience that do go on Reddit or Twitter, there are Ken fans and there are Mayim fans,” he notes. “There are some people who love Jeopardy! and will watch both. We also have various fans who post that they don’t like either of them. That’s just part of the data we look at.
“I back both of them,” Davies adds of Jennings and Bialik. “I go to the studio every day and try to make both of them better at hosting the show and make a better program environment around them. They have my full support.”
As we reported earlier this month, Bialik — who was slated to continue hosting the show’s syndicated version through the end of the current Season 39 — exited one week early due to the current writers strike. As a result, Jennings is stepping in for Bialik for Season 39’s final week, which tapes this week airs the final week of July.
