"Wheel of Fortune" Has a Case of Bad Timing

[catcul]

First, a quick timeline.

October 4, 2013 - Wheel of Fortune tapes an episode with the puzzle "The Fast and the Furious."

November 30, 2013 - Paul Walker, an actor in the Fast and the Furious movie franchise, was killed in an automobile accident.

December 2, 2013 - The Wheel of Fortune episode airs in the United States.

A lot of fans are blasting Wheel of Fortune for airing that episode despite the producers showing a message explaining the situation. I really don't see what the problem is. The producers and hosts were not being insensitive to Paul Walker's death.

[HYHYBT]

With the most recent version of Hollywood Squares, Florence Griffith Joyner was a guest on the week that aired when she died. The episodes had already been sent out to the stations, and MOST people are sane enough to understand that such things are recorded well in advance. Wheel of Fortune is in a bit worse a position: HS could have reshuffled their weeks and used that one a few months later, given more time and more need, but Wheel's current episodes are seasonal and would stick out run anytime other than December. It would be sheer idiocy to expect them to throw away an episode over something like this, and anything they did to fill the hole (using another December episode twice, putting in a rerun from last year, etc.) would make it worse by drawing attention to the unfortunate coincidence.

(Something similar happened with a rerun of The Price is Right offering a trip to New Orleans immediately after Katrina, but that was a matter of not thinking to check until it was actually on the air. I believe they swapped in a different episode for the west coast.)

[mikoyan29]

People need to get a clue.

[HYHYBT]

Sadly (?) that feature didn't make it past the first pilot

[Jetfire]

I don't see what the issue is really. Now if the category was something like "Actor and movie" and the answer was "Paul Walker in the Fast and the Furious" that might seem a bit crass. But just the movie title? Who cares. It's just a movie title.

I may just be misremembering something I heard once, but I believe most game shows have a clause that they only award the prize if the episode is aired. So if this ep got shelved and I was a contestant on it, I'd be pissed. (hell if I was a contestant and the ep got shelved, I'd still be pissed at having my 15 minutes of fame clipped)

TPIR awarding a trip to New Orleans after Katrina, or the Amazing Race running through the South East Asia after the Tsunami would be more worth getting annoyed about; but even then, I wouldn't bat an eye about it.

Then again, I also recognize that most televised programs are filmed months in advance, and none of them are prognastic enough to realize "Ok we were going to run this leg of the Race through China, but there's going to be an Earthquake between when we run and when it airs, so we'll run it elsewhere."