Savannah Guthrie is joining the rarefied ranks of women game show hosts.
The “Today” show host, who has been with the NBC morning news program for the last 15 years, announced on Monday that she will host a new game show, to air on the same network, based on the wildly popular New York Times game Wordle.
“We’ve been holding this secret between us for a long time now,” Guthrie said, according to People. She made the announcement alongside Jimmy Fallon, who will be an executive producer on the new show. “I love a game and a show that you can watch with kids and you feel like they’re learning some things,” she added.
Game shows are an area of television still mostly dominated by men. Other high-profile women to sit in the host seat have included Meredith Vieira, who took over for Regis Philbin on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? Her time on the show nabbed her an Emmy, the first woman game show host to win in 22 years since Betty White took home an award for her 1983 game show, Just Men!
Mayim Bialik, who was best known for her starring role in the 1990s sitcom Blossom, became a host of Jeopardy! in 2021, but she eventually left the show a couple of years later.
The Wordle show will challenge players to “solve five-letter word puzzles in a supersized battle of smarts, speed and fun,” according to USA Today, and it will place contestants in “squads” to engage in a war of words for a cash prize.
Filming for the pilot was supposed to start in March, but it was delayed by the disappearance of Guthrie’s mother, who has been missing from her home in Tucson, Arizona, since January 31. Shooting starts in the summer and the show will air sometime in 2027.
“When everything happened with me and my family, [the producers] just stopped everything and said, ‘We’ll wait for you,’” Guthrie said, according to People.
