Happy retirement Grant Loud

[Robert K S]

Jeopardy! segment producer Grant Loud retired as of two days ago, according to a public post he made on LinkedIn, after a 25-year career with the show.

Hailing from Oregon but relocating to Southern California, Grant was musically inclined, and YouTube has a performance of his and his brother's from a high school band from 1971. Grant's early family life, with his siblings and parents, was chronicled in the 1973 reality TV series An American Family, from which this performance is excerpted. According to the blurb in IMDb, "The show was a weekly documentary which followed the real life travails of the Loud family, a mixed up cluster of suburbanites. The show picked up lots of interesting footage, including an on-camera divorce demand from wife Pat to her husband, and the coming-out of one of the children who was gay." SNL spoofed the Loud family in 1978. A decade after An American Family premiered, HBO made a 1-hour follow-up film, American Family Revisited: The Louds 10 Years Later.

A go at an acting career followed for Grant. In 1981, Grant had a background role as rock singer in the horror film Graduation Day. A number of short films and bit roles followed, including TV appearances as a border guard in Scarecrow and Mrs. King (1985) and as a limo driver in the TV movie The Betty Ford Story (1987). In 1991, he co-wrote and acted in Shakespeare's Plan 12 from Outer Space, a feature re-imagining of Twelfth Night.

He was first credited on Jeopardy! around 1997 as a co-contestant coordinator, along with Glenn Kagan, and then as a contestant coordinator along with Glenn and Maggie Speak. According to the LinkedIn post, he started as a temp, photocopying audition invitations, and used his Macintosh SE30 that he brought in from home to start the first contestant database, something that would later be used to ensure more balanced representation of the sexes among the player ranks. Executive producer Harry Friedman invited him to work on the show full-time, something that apparently involved abandoning his performance career and symbolically tearing up his SAG card. He married Michele Silverman, who was a writer for Jeopardy! and Rock & Roll Jeopardy!, and previously researcher for Jeopardy! (today, Michele Loud is the co-head writer with Billy Wisse). Grant's contestant coordinator duties extended also to the music-centered spinoff.

In 2001 he became one of two (later, in 2006, one of three) promotion managers, then in 2007 was the senior promotions manager, and, in 2014, the promotions director. Around 2018 he became the segment producer. In these roles, he traveled with the Clue Crew members to produce clues from remote locations. In 2020 he became one of two credited segment producers along with Sarah Whitcomb Foss. Last year, in 2021, he became the sole credited segment producer again when Sarah was promoted to producer.

[BobF]

When I worked on an army base, we had to keep track of the various projects each person put hours towards. One of the projects was “Family of Loudspeakers” which always reminded me of the SNL skit.

Hope Grant enjoys his retirement!

[SwanShadow]

I met Grant when we did Battle of the Bay Area Brains in 1998; he was one of the contestant coordinators at that time. When I asked him if he was "that" Grant Loud from An American Family, he was surprised that I remembered the series. To which I replied something on the order of, "Dude... this is Jeopardy!"

Best wishes to him for a well-earned retirement.

[alietr]

Welcome aboard the land of the retired, Grant!

I remember watching An American Family. It was reality TV before there was reality TV. My memory of it is that it was kind of disturbing watching other people's troubles.

[MrBluebird]

Happy retirement, Grant! I also remember the documentary series, and I am pleased to see that Grant had a career in entertainment and the media after the glare of that show was over.

Mike

[Bamaman]

Familiar with the show but never seen it. Congratulations on his retirement.

Sad to read about his brother.