Just a rapid five years after everyone couldn’t stop talking about daily word game Wordle, the big red button in TV land has been smashed down and a televised game show based on the five-letter guessing game is coming to our screens. And who better to executive produce than everyone’s favorite late night host, Jimmy Fallon?! Yup, he got his wish. Another one. Because the universe hates you.
Quite how it’s taken half a decade for this incredibly obvious idea to come together is anyone’s guess, but we first heard that Fallon was pitching a primetime game show based on the New York Times-owned puzzle in October last year. It seems (via Polygon) that concept has been picked up pretty much how Fallon and co put it down, with Today show presenter Savannah Guthrie as host, and Jimmy Fallon’s Electric Hot Dog (wacky!) production company creating it.
Bizarrely, despite coming from a New York-based production company, hosted by the New York-based Guthrie, and due to be aired in the U.S., filming for the Wordle show is going to take place in Manchester, England. NBC delayed confirmation of the show’s pickup and filming after Savannah Guthrie’s 84-year-old mother went missing in February this year, but despite her whereabouts still remaining a mystery, Guthrie returned to Today last month, and will now go ahead with the UK filming of Wordle.
A Wordle in your ear
Some have asked how five-minute word game can be expanded into (what will presumably be) an hour-long TV show, but it’s pretty notable that before Josh Wardle released the game on his own site in 2021, there had been one. For years! Starting as early as 1987 and reappearing in 1998 and then 2023, it aired in various versions in the U.S., Canada, the UK and Holland. Called Lingo, the exact-same conceit was a core part of the quiz show. Heck, RuPaul hosted a version of it for CBS in 2023! The UK has aired 170 episodes of it since 2021. Canada ran it for three years with an extraordinary 439 episodes!
So yeah, it’s kind of weird that there’s even room for a branded reworking by NBC and Fallon, given how ubiquitous Lingo has become since its post-Wordle revival.
We wish the best of luck to everyone who might have to work directly with Fallon during the production.