continued to host the program until his death in November 2020, with his final recorded episode airing January 8, 2021; a series of guest hosts helmed the series for the remainder of that season. Mike Richards, the show's executive producer, was named host prior to start of the 2021–22 season but resigned after the first week of episodes when a string of controversies emerged after Richards's hiring; Mayim Bialik and Ken Jennings (the latter being a consulting producer and prominent former contestant) have rotated as host since then. Early years Initially, Jeopardy! was relegated by managers of some television stations to unpopular time slots, and it was not unusual for both Jeopardy! and Wheel to air either non-consecutively, on different stations, or even against each other. However, the new version built upon early ratings successes in Cleveland and Detroit, where it was slotted in the same 7:00–8:00p.m. block (the Prime Time access hour) in which Wheel also appeared. Coinciding with the peak of popularity for the board game Trivial Pursuit and the installation of electronic trivia games (e.g. NTN Buzztime) in pubs and bars, Jeopardy! was slowly becoming a major success despite some markets still airing it in unfavorable time slots. One such market was New York City, the largest in the United States. There, King World sold its new show to WNBC, which had been the flagship of the original Jeopardy!. When it premiered in the fall of 1984, Jeopardy! initially aired at 1:30a.m. on WNBC, following Late Night with David Letterman. Although the series was indeed proving to be a hit, its late timeslot in the country's largest media market began to concern its distributor. Even though Letterman's show and The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson were strong ratings winners and Jeopardy! was able to retain a good amount of the audience from its lead-in shows, a late-night timeslot is not usually considered beneficial for a first-run series, cutting out younger audiences with obligations to school or college, and older viewers. WNBC's more favorable fringe time and daytime slots were all filled with other programming, a situation that was also true at all of the other major stations in the city; WABC and WCBS also cleared their networks' schedules completely and had other programming, including other long-running syndicated game shows and reruns, filing the holes in their schedules, as did independents WNEW-TV, WOR-TV and WPIX, which also carried