We’ll take unlikely — and controversial — Jeopardy! hosts for $1,000.
Dr. Mehmet Oz, known for hosting The Dr. Oz Show, will step in as guest host of Jeopardy! for two weeks starting on Monday. He’s the latest in a series of temporary guest hosts the show has been bringing in since Alex Trebek’s death, but let’s just say fans aren’t exactly thrilled with the pick.
After all, Oz has been slammed for “promoting quack treatments and cures,” as a group of doctors wrote in a 2015 letter to Columbia University, and in 2014, a study found that “medical research either didn’t substantiate — or flat out contradicted — more than half of Oz’s recommendations,” The Washington Post reported.
So when Oz was tapped for Jeopardy! last month, some users on the show’s subreddit immediately declared they’d be skipping his episodes, with one fan blasting Oz as a “charlatan champion of pseudoscience” in a highly-upvoted comment.
In February, The Ringer also heard from former Jeopardy! contestants who were none too pleased with the selection, with four-game winner Lindsey Shultz saying, “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 — I’m not sure a show based around facts is the best place for you.”
