Don't force it

Rambling through the game show Interwebs, I came across this interestingly named thread on Buy a Vowel, the WoF board.

Forced Bonus Round Losses. As the original poster points out, the title shouldn't be taken literally. We're not going back to the bad old days of rigged game shows. Unfortunately, the o.p. goes on to quote a supposed story about Harry Friedman, Wheel's current showrunner. Except a later poster shows that the story was "borrowed" from a previously published book, and it referred to George Vosburgh, not Harry.

The thread wanders though a lot of other twists and turns, including some difficult personal experiences from a poster who I think I've seen on Game Show Paradise. A number of posters give examples of bonus rounds that weren't actually forced losses but were still very difficult for even the best contestant to solve. I dunno, all the puzzles are pretty tough for me, but I don't claim to be a Wheel wizard.

The bottom line seems to be, well, the bottom line. Not even Wheel of Fortune has an unlimited prize budget, so they have to keep the bonus round fairly difficult. As for the details in the thread about how the puzzles have supposedly changed over the years, I'm not enough of a Wheel expert to evaluate the claims.