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Fans boo after 'Wheel of Fortune' contestant gets 'unfair' puzzle with worth $1 million

The fans couldn't keep their cool.

via Wheel of Fortune/YouTube

Contestant gets a very tough 'Wheel of Fortune' puzzle.

The usually respectful crowd at a “Wheel of Fortune” taping aired on Wednesday, May 22, couldn’t hold back after they felt that a puzzle given to finalist Rob Dodson was too harsh. A big reason for their outrage (and why the puzzle was so tricky) was because $1 million was on the line.

Before the puzzle, Dodson chose from a selection of cards that held the prize he would win for solving it. Amongst the cards was the $1 million jackpot, so, understandably, tensions were high. Did Dodson choose the million-dollar card? Will he solve the puzzle under the “What Are You Doing Category”?

Well, things didn’t start too great.

After the usual R, S, T, L, N, and E were put up on the board, Dodson was looking at “_ _ _ _ _ L _ N _.” He quickly guessed C, H, P and A, none of which appeared on the board. He then guessed “funneling” and “finding,” but they didn’t work.

The final answer: “Quibbling.”

- YouTubewww.youtube.com

After the solution to the puzzle was revealed, the audience began to boo because they didn’t think it was fair. It had 2 Bs in the short answer, started with a Q and was a word that isn’t used often in casual conversation. The crowd’s reaction was an excellent show of support for Dodson, who encouraged the crowd to keep going by raising his hands.

Host Pat Sajak, 77, pushed back against the boos, jokingly asking the audience, “Who asked you?”

So, would Dobson have won the $1 million if he guessed quibbling? Nope. The card he chose would have earned him an Infiniti car if he had guessed correctly. But all in all, it wasn’t a bad outing for Dodson, a father of 2 from Aurora, Ohio. He managed to win $33,500 against Venetia Brown ($7,550) and Jessica Huffman ($2,000).

The tough puzzle earned a lot of boos on social media as well. Twitter was lit up with people who thought that Dodson got cheated by being given a challenging puzzle with a word seldom used in conversation.



Big changes are in store for “Wheel of Fortune” in the coming weeks. The final episode with Sajak as host will air on June 7. Sajak has been the host of “Wheel” since 1981. Vanna White, his co-host since 1982, will remain with the show. “I couldn’t be happier to have shared the stage with you for all these years with one more to come," she wrote on X last year after Sajak announced this would be his last season. "Cheers to you."


Sajak has been a beloved host on "Wheel of Fortune," earning 19 Daytime Emmy Award nominations for Outstanding Game Show Host and winning three times. In 2019, he set a Guinness World Record for the longest career as a game show host for the same show, beating the previous record held by Bob Barker.

ryan seacrest, seacrest out, uso, wheel of fortune, tv personalitiesRyan Seacrest, television and radio host and producer, hosts the 2016 USO Gala, Washington, D.C., Oct. 20, 2016.via Jim Greenhill from McLean, USA/Wikimedia Commons

A familiar face replaced Sajak, Ryan Seacrest, best known for his work on “American Idol” and “Dick Clark’s Rockin’ New Year's Eve.” "I can't wait to continue the tradition of spinning the wheel and working alongside the great Vanna White," he said after it was announced he was the new host. So, how did he do after taking over the coveted role of host? The first week that Seacrest took over for Sajack, the ratings took a giant leap, bringing in the most viewers since 2015, making it he number one syndicated show that week. Time will tell if Seacrest can replace Sajak's magic, but he has time; reports show that he has signed on for the gig into the 2030s.

This article originally appeared last year and has been updated.

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Would we feel differently about our bodies if we didn't watch TV? Science seems to think so.

Researchers set out to study this question — and walked away with some really fascinating new data.

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Television has a way of tuning off... healthy images.

Do we all, instinctively, find the same types of bodies attractive? Or do TV, movies, and pictures in magazines subtly influence what sorts of bodies we're attracted to?

Researchers at Newcastle University in the U.K. set out to study this question — and walked away with some really fascinating new data.

The question they posed: Do people who have limited access to TV have different beauty ideals than those who watch more frequently?

It's hardly a secret that Hollywood prefers thin. A 2003 study published in the American Journal of Public Health found that female characters who have bigger bodies were few and far between on TV at the turn of the last decade. When they did appear, they were less likely to have romantic partners and "less likely to considered attractive."

Things have improved in recent years but only slightly. And popular reality shows like, "The Biggest Loser" continue to sell the idea that weight loss is the ticket to feeling attractive.

It raises the question: Would we feel differently about our bodies if we didn't watch so much TV? Or if we saw more positive portrayals of people with bigger bodies on the air?

It's really hard to study this because there aren't a lot of places left in the world that don't have access to Western media.

entertainment, studies, American media, global affects

Even most dogs have access to American TV these days.

Image via Pixabay.

In order to get good data, you need to talk to people who not only rarely or never watch TV and movies, but who are hardly even exposed to them and the culture they help generate.

American TV and movies — and locally-produced TV and movies that draw inspiration from our TV and movies — are pretty much everywhere by now.

But there are some. And that's where the researchers went.

Country, TV access, body image, women

A map representing Nicaragua in South America.

Image by DaDez/Wikimedia Commons.

Specifically, they went to the east coast of Nicaragua, which is home to a number of remote villages, some of which have no or only partially electricity.

Researchers found a remote village with little TV access and asked participants there to react to various images of women's bodies of different sizes.

pageants, military, culture, BMI

A female Kansas National Guardsman competed in the 2014 Miss America Pageant.

Photo by Staff Sgt. Jessica Barett/Kansas Adjutant General's Department Public Affairs Office.

The subjects were asked to rate each image on a scale of 1 to 5. Their responses were compared with those from an urban area and a similar village that had greater access to broadcast media.

Critically, the two villages chosen were very similar culturally — previous studies have had difficulty separating out media viewing habits from other cultural variables that might account for the difference in how the images were perceived. Standards of beauty vary from culture to culture, including certain cultures that prize fatness (much like the "thin ideal" in the West, this is often similarly harmful to women and girls).

The result? Participants in the village with the least media access preferred bodies with a higher body mass index on average than those in the urban area and more connected village.

There are caveats, of course.

Using BMI to measure normal versus abnormal weight has become increasingly controversial recently. It's also impossible to draw big, sweeping conclusions from a single study.

But it's real data. And it does suggest that perhaps we're not hardwired to find smaller bodies attractive.

scientific data, psychology, university studies, media

Science!

Photo by Amitchell125/Wikimedia Commons.

"Our data strongly suggests that access to televisual media is itself a risk factor for holding thin body ideals, at least for female body shape, in a population who are only just gaining access to television," said Dr. Lynda Boothroyd, senior lecturer in psychology at Durham University and co-leader of the study.

In other words, the more TV we watch, the more we're likely to be attracted to lower-weight bodies. The less TV we watch, the more we're likely to look favorably upon higher-weight bodies.

Most importantly, it's evidence that there's nothing inherently attractive about weighing less, and nothing inherently unattractive about weighing more.

It's just something we made up.

theme parks, globalization, studios, China

A sunny day captured at Hong Kong Disneyland.

Photo (cropped) by PoonKaMing/Wikimedia Commons.

 But the good news is that we can un-make it up.How do we do that? Here's one idea: Let's get more people with more bodies of more shapes and sizes we can get on TV, in movies, and in glossy magazines — giving them real lives, real flaws, real romances, and presenting them, at least every so often, as attractive. Like, you know. Real people.This article originally appeared on 02.26.16

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Someone asked 'What's the single best episode of TV you've seen?' Here are the top 20 responses.

What's the best TV episode you've ever seen?

via Marques Kaspbrak /Unsplash

A TV set on the Disney+ streaming channel

It’s often said that we live in the "Golden Age of Television," also known as “Peak TV” or “Prestige TV.” Although some say this era goes back to the turn of the millennium, since 2010, we have had the joy of watching shows such as “Game of Thrones,” “Girls,” Better Call Saul," “Ted Lasso,” “Orange is the New Black” and “Stranger Things,” just to name a few.

Over the past decade, there has been so much good TV that people’s biggest complaint is that they don’t have enough time to get to it all.

A viral Reddit thread started by a user named Head_Hauncho may give you some ideas to choose the next show you’d like to binge. He asked the online forum, “What is the single best episode of television you’ve ever seen?” There were responses from shows as old as the ‘80s, but most of the responses were from the past 20 years.

What criteria does one use to choose the best TV series episode? It gets complicated when one considers how much television is produced yearly. A record 599 original scripted drama, comedy, and limited TV shows were aired in 2022 and Americans have produced regular content for broadcast television shows since 1939.

How do we choose one episode of one show?

To rank the responses on the Reddit post, I looked at the number of upvotes each suggestion received on the Reddit thread and then ranked them in order. It’s not the most scientific way of doing things, but it gives us a pretty good idea about who people think should make it to the monument.

Here are the top 20 most popular responses to the burning question: “What is the single best episode of television you’ve ever seen?”

1. Chernobyl - “Vichnaya Pamyat” (Memory Eternal)

“When the truth offends, we lie and lie until we can no longer remember it is even there, but it is still there. Every lie we tell incurs a debt to the truth. Sooner or later, that debt is paid. That is how an RBMK reactor core explodes. Lies.” — KinmdaQuixotic

2. Band Of Brothers — "Bastogne"

"It came out the weekend before 9/11. I had never been looking forward to a TV series like that. There was football (the Saints beat the Bills), then Band of Brothers, then high school the next day, and all the guys hyped over BoB. Then 9/11 on Tuesday... and I remember watching the rest of the episodes but it wasn't really the same." — TheresA_LobsterLoose

3. The Simpsons — "You Only Move Twice"

"You Only Move Twice had the best Simpson one-off, Hank Scorpio." — Graehaus

4. The IT Crowd — "The Work Outing"

"When Jen turns around to Moss. I know it's coming every time and it breaks me." — Bi_gone_era

5. Doctor Who — "Blink"

"I'm not a fan of the series, I haven't watched all episodes, I've seen this very episode accidentally, years ago and it is stuck in my head ever since. It is based on one of the most creative, original, and disturbing ideas I have ever seen in my life." — Canred

6. Haunting of Hill House — "The Bent-Neck Lady"

"This absolutely gets my vote. It’s an example I use all the time when talking about excellent television. No explosions, no action, no insane stakes…Just a family sitting in a room confronting their trauma. The tail end of that episode had me in tears." — Vengeance2All

7. Community — "Remedial Chaos Theory"

"ROOOOOXXAAAANNNEEE." — Nathan Collier14

8. Arrested Development — "Top Banana"

"First non-pilot episode nails so many of the characters down and introduces an inside joke I repeat in nearly every scene." — Stuebbins

9. Scrubs — "My Lunch"

"Bill Lawrence said something that really stuck with me and that's that the guiding principle of the show was that everything could be goofy aside from the medical side. Made for a show that could do some great tone shifts on a dime." — Patrickwithtraffic

10. The Sopranos — "Pine Barrens"

"Mayonnaise! MAYONNAISE!" — PrincessBucketFeet

11. The Simpsons — "Marge vs. The Monorail"

"It’s probably been almost 20 years since I saw it last, but I can still remember the entire 'See My Vest' song." — Racer_24_4evr

12. Star Trek: Deep Space 9 — "In the Pale Moonlight"

"I can live with it... I can live with it." — Coffeehousebum

13. Firefly — "Out of Gas"

"Some of the love for Firefly on Reddit is a little overblown, but this episode, in particular, was spectacular television." — whitedevilwhitedevil

14. BoJack Horseman — "The View from Halfway Down"

"BoJack Horseman is, I can confidently say, the only cartoon about talking animals that can make me absolutely inconsolable. Seriously, seriously amazing show." — Poopiverse

15. Severance — "The We We Are"

"Unbelievably suspenseful the entire duration. So good." — the_pain_train24

16. M*A*S*H* — "Goodbye, Farewell and Amen"

"Honestly this show ended almost a decade before I was even born and yet it’s single-handedly the best show I’ve ever watched." — rebelxghost

17. WKRP in Cincinnati — "Turkeys Away"

"As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly." — Silent-Revolution105

18. Mindhunter — "The Lone Wolf"

"That Ed Kemper hug scene." — westzod

"The beauty of that scene is that Kemper hadn't really shown himself. Sure, he talked about his crimes. He was crazy. He performed theatrics. They knew his history. But, in that moment, Kemper was making him aware of the Pantheon and his sister wives. He was showing how incredibly, batshit crazy he was. He was being intimate the only way he knew how." — Canterbury Terrier

19. Buffy the Vampire Slayer — "The Body"

"'But I don't understand! I don't understand how this all happens, how we go through this. I mean, I knew her, and then she's...There's just a body, and I don't understand why she just can't get back in it and not be dead anymore." — Campmoore

20. House — "Three Stories"

"It’s so good...I love when they delve into the who/why of House, it really helps make him more than pill-popping Sherlock with a doctorate." — Deathsblade2002

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The new Doctor Who says of course her character can still be a role model for boys.

She's got a good point.

When "Doctor Who" announced the casting of Jodie Whittaker in the title role, some people kind of freaked out.

The series, which debuted in 1963, follows a time-traveling alien around the galaxy to solve crimes and right wrongs. Up until now, the titular character has been portrayed by multiple actors, all of whom were men. Whittaker made her debut as the Doctor at the end of the December 2017 season finale. The controversial casting decision was met with a mixed reaction among fans, which prompted the BBC to go on the record with its official ruling: The Doctor is an alien from the planet Gallifrey and yes, can switch gender.

Pretty silly, isn't it?

Jodie Whittaker attends Comic Con 2018. Photo by Dia Dipasupil/Getty Images.

During her San Diego Comic Con debut, a questioner asked if Whittaker had a message for young boys who are fans of the show.

Just last year, Peter Davison, who played the Doctor between 1981 and 1984, expressed his uneasiness with the casting of Whittaker, or any other woman in the role, saying, "If I feel any doubts [about Whittaker's casting], it’s the loss of a role model for boys, who I think Doctor Who is vitally important for. So I feel a bit sad about that, but I understand the argument that you need to open it up."

Now, of course, there's no shortage of male role models for little boys to look up to. That aside, who's to say that boys can't find inspiration in a female Doctor?

When asked about the debate, Whittaker said she doesn't see the issue. "It's OK to look up to women," she said.

Terri Schwartz, Jodie Whittaker, Tosin Cole, and Mandip Gill speak onstage during the Doctor Who panel at the 2018 San Diego Comic Con. Photo by Kevin Winter/Getty Images.

Representation does matter, but there's no reason boys should have to feel put off by a woman playing the Doctor.

Girls are expected to draw their inspiration from male characters without a problem. TV shows, movies, and video games have had a history of centering male protagonists. That's still the case, even today. Boys should be equally capable of drawing inspiration from girls and women.

Of course there's a need to be able to see yourself in the entertainment you consume, but boys aren't going to be finding themselves without heroes who look like them anytime soon.

In all, it's actually the perfect time for a woman to take on the role of Doctor. After 50-some odd years, you've got to keep changing things up to keep the show fresh, right?

Watch the brand new trailer for the upcoming season of "Doctor Who" below.

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