If you look at my tweets along the right panel of this blog, you know I was stunned to hear that there would be no topping $300,000, no 12th victory, no on-going Chu dynasty on “Jeopardy.”
It was sad following the roll-out of the pre-recorded game. Arthur Chu was live tweeting from 7pm EDT, and though I couldn’t see the show, I could sense from the tweets something was going wrong. Very wrong.
From the start of the week, I knew something was a bit askew. Arthur just seemed off his game on Monday and Tuesday. He won handily,yes. But he got some easy answers wrong. Fortunately, he was not up against very savvy opponents.
But on Wednesday, he was up against two tough women, Julia and Diana, who both played aggressively and knew their stuff. Diana started strong with literary questions on Willa Cather and David Copperfield and when Arthur answered one with “Two Penny Opera,” I knew he would be at least a penny short today.
By the first break, Diana was leading $5400 to Arthur’s $3,200, and Julia’s $2600.
The pattern only continued.
When Arthur couldn’t get a Native American question, and Diana got “Hopi,” that’s when I sensed hope was lost on this night.
There also seemed to be a few glitches worthy of competitions like Olympic figure skating. In Double Jeopardy, even as she was getting all the Daily Doubles, Diana seemed to answer a question twice, changing from “Peptic” to “Peptide.”
It would only make Arthur fans dyspeptic. Foul? It would get fouler.
There were at least two more irregularities, like on the Monty Python question, whereby Arthur got a CREDIT before Final Jeopardy. And according to Arthur’s wife, there was much discussion off camera that all came out in the edit.
But even with all that, Diana was still way ahead. Even with a double, Diana would have had to fail and bet illogically.
She didn’t.
And so with British Royalty, and the wrong question, “Who is George II,” King Arthur zeroed out.
Still a good run.
The negative sentiment about how he played the game, seemed to have died. And many of his detractors admitted to liking him now that he was a loveable loser.
It was just exciting to see a regular Asian American guy get on a show for 3 weeks or so and get exposed to an average audience of 10 million people a week.
He should run for something.
In the era of social media, Arthur is the image of the Asian American male. For the moment.
CHECK OUT THE NEW HOME FOR THE AMOK COLUMN: www.aaldef.org/blog
LIKE and FOLLOW us on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/emilguillermo.media
And FOLLOW on Twitter http://www.twitter.com/emilamok
