Fans Revolt After ‘Jeopardy!’s Ken Jennings Makes ‘Positively Disgusting’ Game Decision
Ken Jennings had some Jeopardy! fans raising their eyebrows after he made a dicey game decision.
The host of the ABC game show made the controversial call during the Wednesday, July 4 episode, when he refused to accept an answer that some fans at home thought was close enough.
The situation went down during the last clue of Double Jeopardy in the category “Waterfalls,” when contestant and one-day champion Kelly Proulx was off by just an “s” in her response.
The clue in question read, “A Yosemite fall with a wispy ribbon of water that flutters in the air like diaphanous cloth bears the name of this marital wear.”
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Proulx, a communications director from Billerica, Mass., guessed, “What is Bridalveil Falls?” to which Jennings, 50, replied, “No, I’m sorry.”
“It’s actually Bridalveil Fall, so we couldn’t take that. It is, ‘What is a Bridalveil?'” he clarified.
But some fans thought the clue’s wording was confusing, and many took to the internet after the episode to claim that the ruling against Proulx’s answer was unfair.
“yeesh, that’s a brutal call on the last clue,” one Jeopardy! viewer wrote on Reddit after Wednesday’s episode. Another fan wrote, “That ruling was garbage.”
“That was positively disgusting,” someone else on Reddit argued.
Other critics of Jennings and the show’s judges called the ruling “arbitrary” and “pedantic,” and some others were convinced that the decision ultimately cost Proulx the game.
“Wow, Kelly was robbed,” one person wrote. Someone else said Proulx “should hold a grudge on this one.”
Either way, an alternative ruling likely wouldn’t have affected the outcome of the game, as none of the contestants guessed the correct response in Final Jeopardy.
Proulx, who went into Final Jeopardy with $8,000, finished with $1,000 while the winner, Isaac Hirsch, entered FJ with $19,800 and then dropped down to $19,185. The third contestant, Dana Keane, came in last place with just $300.
“Guess it doesn’t really matter since nobody got Final Jeopardy right but I’d still be pretty frustrated if I were her,” another Reddit user wrote about Proulx.
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