“Wheel of Fortune” had one of its most viral moments this week after three contestants failed to solve the painfully-obvious puzzle of “Another Feather in Your Cap.” One Twitter video of the group’s epic fail has earned over 3.3 million views and counting since being uploaded March 1. One of the contestants, Christopher Coleman, spoke to TMZ in the aftermath of the show’s airing to tell off the many social media trolls who are humiliating him for not solving the puzzle.
i have never wanted to scream this loudly in my life pic.twitter.com/XNqe3R1UAj
— philip lewis (@Phil_Lewis_) March 2, 2022
“This idiom [‘Another feather in your cap,’] is something I learned when I was six or seven years old. But I haven’t heard it in over 30 years and so it has been a while for me,” Coleman said. “You are also under a lot of scrutiny and pressure when you’re in production. A lot of people are sitting at home on the comfort of their own couch, yelling and screaming at the TV, when we [the contestants] are the ones in the moment and in real time, trying to guess and figure out what this puzzle is.”
Coleman said social media trolls are widely mocking him and his fellow contestants, but he shared the following message to the haters: “You go up there. Half of you don’t even have public speaking skills. You go on ‘Wheel of Fortune’ and go into the shoes of where we were standing. And then it will be a whole another conversation when they are trending and making donkeys of themselves.”
“Just go easy on me and the other contestants because we are very educated people and we don’t want to be put in a situation where we are being cackled and publicly humiliated on a show that was a lifelong dream,” Coleman concluded, adding that people “should have more empathy and a little more grace and understanding.”
The vitriol against the “Wheel of Fortune” contestants got so out of hand this week that host Pat Sajak took to Twitter to defend the players. Sajak wrote, “It always pains me when nice people come on our show to play a game and win some money and maybe fulfill a lifelong dream, and are then subject to online ridicule when they make a mistake or something goes awry. Sitting at home, it seems incredible that they couldn’t solve it, but I knew in real time what was happening.”
“I’ve been praised online for ‘keeping it together’ and not making fun of the players,” Sajak added. “Truth is, all I want to do is help to get them through it and convince them that those things happen even to very bright people.”
Read Sajak’s full statement on this week’s “Wheel of Fortune” viral moment in the Twitter thread below.
It always pains me when nice people come on our show to play a game and win some money and maybe fulfill a lifelong dream, and are then subject to online ridicule when they make a mistake or something goes awry.
— Pat Sajak (@PatOnWheel) March 2, 2022
