Lifestyle
Pat Sajak departs 'Wheel of Fortune' as TV's last old-school game show host
Pat Sajak on the Wheel of Fortune set.
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Carol Kaelson/CBS Media Ventures
It was the game show answer that nearly broke the Internet: Tavaris Williams, eager to solve one of the word puzzles on Wheel of Fortune, gave an answer that wasn’t quite ready for prime time. The board looked like this: _ _ _ _ I _ T _ E B _ _ T!
His guess for the correct phrase? “Right in the butt.”
But while some in the audience gasped – and one of Williams’ competitors said, incredulously, “Whaaat!?” – host Pat Sajak simply answered “no,” smoothly moving on to the next contestant, who figured out the correct answer. (The solution was, for the record, “This is the best!”)
That incident aired on the show less than two weeks ago, going viral on social media and giving Williams enough visibility to land on Jimmy Kimmel Live, where he complimented Sajak for making him feel better and joking about it all, despite such an embarrassing flub.
But that’s been Sajak’s secret weapon over 41 seasons and more than 8,000 shows hosting the TV version of a Hangman-style wordgame. He leverages an easygoing, affable nature that helps move the show easily past any rough spots — whether it’s a contestant who loses thousands of dollars after mispronouncing an answer or a competitor who knows the show so well, he solves the puzzle and grabs his reward with no prompting from the host. (Sajak quipped, “There’s really no need for me at all.”)
On Friday, Sajak appears in his last new Wheel of Fortune episode, retiring from a job he began in 1981, as the longest-running host of a single game show in modern TV history. He told daughter Maggie in an interview also featured on Good Morning America that he could probably still keep hosting awhile, but “I’d rather leave a couple of years too early than a couple of years too late.”
While it’s true that Sajak’s departure is the end of an era for Wheel of Fortune, it’s also a pivotal moment for TV game shows in general.
Because Sajak is the last of TV’s old-school game show hosts.
Pat Sajak and Vanna White prepare to tour cities across the country in 1987 aboard the Wheel of Fortune Express.
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Judy Sloan/AP
The rise of the traditional game show host
Game show fans with short memories might not remember decades ago when hosts like Sajak filled the TV dial. Jeopardy‘s Alex Trebek. The Price is Right‘s Bob Barker. Let’s Make a Deal host and co-creator Monty Hall. Original Wheel of Fortune host Chuck Woolery. The Hollywood Squares‘ Peter Marshall. Tic-Tac-Dough’s Wink Martindale.
They were of a type. Generally middle-aged white men with the kind of telegenic, affable charisma found in local TV anchors – it’s no surprise Sajak was a weatherman at KNBC in Los Angeles before Wheel of Fortune creator Merv Griffin called – these hosts were studiously inoffensive and positioned for appeal to viewers in middle America.
Many of them were former radio hosts or fledgling actors. But their primary fame came from leading viewers through amusing contests on television.
“There was this sense of an almost lab-created broadcaster, whose job was to direct [the show’s] traffic in a sense,” says Robert Thompson, director of the Bleier Center for Television and Popular Culture at Syracuse University. “The contestants were really the show’s rotating cast … The hosts came from what I like to call the Wink Martindale School of Broadcasting.”
On paper, the job was simple. Introduce the contestants, explain the game, make a little small talk to turn the participants into characters viewers might invest in, and handle the occasional moment when an errant guest might say something bizarre or, um, explicit.
But watching the cavalcade of celebrities guest host Jeopardy in 2021 after Trebek’s death – names like quarterback Aaron Rodgers, talk show personality Mehmet Oz and broadcaster Joe Buck – it’s obvious there’s a secret sauce to leading such shows successfully.
Hosts must be knowledgeable without looking like know-it-alls; empathetic without looking too invested in any one player. They must explain the game in ways the players and the TV audience can follow, while also being fun and funny.
And they have to handle the reactions of average civilians under pressure – calming down the folks who get over-excited and pumping up people so intimidated they might shut down on camera.
For viewers of a certain age, old-style game show hosts like Sajak were comforting buddies – fun personalities to make you feel better while sitting at home sick from school or puttering around the house, watching daytime TV. Or, in the case of shows like Wheel and Jeopardy, which often air on TV stations after the network evening newscasts, their hosts are a relaxed presence easing you into the night.
Sajak channeled that inoffensive style well – even when news broke in 2019, amid the country’s increasing political polarization, that he was named chairman of the board of trustees for Hillsdale College, the private, conservative Christian school.
When he was paired with actress and model Vanna White in 1982, the two had chemistry like a charismatic couple leading a game among friends.
So, what are we losing, now that the last of the old school game show hosts is leaving the job?
New hosts with celebrity cachet
These days, thanks to network TV’s shrinking appetite for scripted TV series, there are more game shows than ever – from revivals of classic formats like Family Feud and Password to new inventions like Beat Shazam and The 1% Club. But the old school hosts have retired and/or died, like Trebek on Jeopardy, Barker from The Price is Right and Richard Dawson from Family Feud.
In their place are leaders who have already earned fame as performers elsewhere, bringing their fame, fanbase and persona to the screen. Consider Glee alum Jane Lynch on Weakest Link, actor/standup comic/musician Jamie Foxx on Beat Shazam or The West Wing alum Rob Lowe on The Floor. Even new Jeopardy host Ken Jennings was a champion on the program before he began hosting it.
Stand-up comics and improvisational performers accustomed to thinking on their feet have done well here, including Drew Carey, who succeeded Barker on The Price is Right, Let’s Make a Deal’s Wayne Brady and Family Feud’s Steve Harvey, who Syracuse University’s Thompson says is the king of game show hosts now – for his ability to inject personality and humor without derailing the game.
Old-school hosts were never expected to be an audience draw and even Wheel of Fortune‘s success has seemed a bit of a happy accident. Paired with Jeopardy in many TV markets, the two shows have become ratings juggernauts together, with the tough, intellectually challenging questions of Jeopardy balanced by the easy wordplay on Wheel of Fortune.
And who can resist solving a good word puzzle?
Given all that, it makes a certain kind of sense that Sajak’s replacement would be the closest modern equivalent of an old-school game show host: radio personality and American Idol host Ryan Seacrest, who has amassed his own endless list of hosting gigs.
Thompson expects the show’s popularity to keep chugging along when Seacrest takes over the show alongside Vanna White in September.
“If Barker and Trebek can be replaced… then Sajak can,” he adds. “I think the formats on these shows have become the star now. All the hosts have to do is stay out of the way and keep things moving along.”
Sunday Puzzle
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On-air challenge
Today’s theme is “hot.” Every answer is a familiar two-word phrase in which the first word starts HO- and the second word starts with T-.
Ex. Rowdy bar with country music, in slang –> HONKY TONK
1. Guided walkthrough of a property
2. Any member of the N.H.L.
3. Lone Star State metropolis that’s the fourth-largest city in the U.S.
4. Like an animal with its four legs bound (hyph.)
5. Instruction manual (hyph.)
6. A little pompous and arrogant, informally (hyph.)
7. Punny greeting from a magician
8. Someone who steals animals from a stable
9. Congestion that drivers encounter around July 4th, say
10. Acquisition of a company against its will.
11. Exclamation for “wow!” on TV’s “Batman”
Last week’s challenge
Last week’s challenge comes from Evan Kalish, of Bayside, N.Y. Take the name of a nocturnal creature, in two words. The first word is a spooky sound. Move the last letter of the first word to the start of the second word and you’ll get another spooky, nocturnal sound. What is the creature and what are the sounds?
Answer: Screech owl –> howl
Winner
Dan Sadoff of St. Paul, Minnesota
This week’s challenge
This week’s challenge comes from Rawson Sheinberg. of Plymouth, Mich. Think of a U.S. city with a two-word name. Add a letter to the first word, without rearranging letters, to name a country. Then, without adding a letter, rearrange the letters of the second word to name another country. What places are these?
If you know the answer to the challenge, submit it here by Thursday, July 2 at 3 p.m. ET. Listeners whose answers are selected win a chance to play the on-air puzzle. Important: include a phone number where we can reach you.
If you’re struggling to use up leftovers like a half-eaten rotisserie chicken, turn the assignment into a creative exercise, says chef Margaret Li. It’ll make the cooking process more fun and less guilt-driven.
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On a recent weeknight, I opened up my fridge and found an assortment of half-eaten or ignored food.
That included takeout that I didn’t find appetizing enough to eat for lunch. A rotisserie chicken with most of the meat picked off. A couple of raw vegetables from the farmers market that were starting to wilt.
“There’s nothing to eat,” I told myself. Yet even I knew that was ridiculous. There was plenty of food in my fridge. I just didn’t feel inspired to cook with it.
So I asked some chefs for guidance. How could I more consistently use leftovers and the other ingredients I tend to overlook?
Start with a mindset shift, says Margaret Li, chef and co-author of the cookbook Perfectly Good Food: A Totally Achievable Zero Waste Approach to Home Cooking. Think about cooking with leftovers as a creative, experimental exercise, not a guilt-driven one.
“It ends up being this fun game where you are creating something from what seems like nothing and solving this puzzle, and then you get to eat it,” she says.
There are other good reasons to use up your food scraps. Nationally, about a quarter of food products go to waste, according to the nonprofit ReFED. In my own household, where we spend about $200 a week on groceries, that means I might be throwing out the equivalent of $50 of food — an unnecessary burden on my wallet, not to mention the environment.
The chefs I spoke to had some practical tips about using up more of the food we buy. Here are a few that I put to the test.
Find your “hero recipes”
Build up an arsenal of go-to recipes that are flexible enough to use up just about any ingredient. Li calls them “hero recipes.”
I tried one of these from her cookbook, called “Make-It-Your-Own Stir-Fry.” (Scroll down for the recipe.) It includes loose ingredients like “1 pound crisp-crunchy vegetables” or “4 cups leafy greens.”
In the spirit of the recipe, I pulled vegetables out of my fridge at random and did not measure them out. The sauce was a simple mixture of soy sauce, vinegar, sugar and water. By the time I topped my bowl with chopped scallions, the dish looked like a gourmet meal, not an afterthought.
Other ideas: “You could put anything in a frittata, and it’ll be great,” says Tamar Adler, chef and author of The Everlasting Meal Cookbook: Leftovers A-Z.
Or, if you have day-old rice on hand, cook it alongside other ingredients to make fried rice. “Saute some aromatics — ginger, garlic, onion — in oil,” Adler says. Then add your rice and whatever leftover bits you have, like the rotisserie chicken and older produce I had in my fridge.
“Just take the approach of making it more flavorful and crispy and then spicy, and then usually adding a squeeze of lemon,” Adler says.
Label your leftovers
Keep a permanent marker and painter’s tape in your kitchen to label and date your leftovers, Li says. “That is a classic chef’s method for knowing what something is and when it was made. That saves you the guessing game.”
Adler takes the concept a step further and labels her leftovers with their intended use. Leftover blueberries are labeled “muffins-to-be on Tuesday,” she says. “I really like doing that — assigning the destiny of the food.”
So after a night of Ethiopian takeout, when we ended up with an entire container of leftover injera, I followed Adler’s advice and thought about what it might become in the future.
I imagined scrambling the spongy, tangy bread with eggs, akin to scrambling matzo into matzo brei. “Injera for eggs,” I wrote on the container. Sure enough, their destiny was fulfilled the following morning.
Li keeps a dedicated bag in her freezer just for scraps from which to make chicken or vegetable stock. That bag houses carrot peels, the ends of onions, extra garlic cloves and chicken bones.
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Don’t forget your odds and ends
Adler encouraged me to never, ever throw away the stems of herbs. Stems don’t get as much glory as tender, pretty leaves, but they still have the same herby taste.
“I’m going to chop these herbs up or stick them in a blender with a clove of garlic,” she says. Then add olive oil. “And then it’s just gonna be my base sauce for everything.”
So I foraged a few varieties of half-cut herbs from my refrigerator drawers, most of them sad looking and unidentifiable.
I threw out the stems that had turned brown and gooey and put the rest in a blender. I added garlic on Adler’s instructions, nuts and kale for bulk, and plenty of olive oil and salt. Then, on a whim, I added a splash of olive juice for brightness.
The result was somewhere between a pesto and a chimichurri, and it elevated that night’s otherwise routine dinner. And Adler was right: Once the stems were blended, it tasted exactly the same as the leaves. (The same idea applies for broccoli stems in a cheesy broccoli soup, Li says.)
Li likes to keep her odds and ends organized with an “Eat Me First” box in her fridge. That’s where she keeps half-used lemons, leftover coconut milk or produce that’s starting to get wrinkly. “You kind of have an idea for, OK, here’s where you look first,” she says.
Don’t strive for perfection
Cooking these meals did feel like a game, as Li had suggested. It brought me unexpected joy to use up as many existing ingredients as possible — to the point where I often spent much longer in the kitchen because I kept thinking of new ideas: If I turn these wrinkly sweet potatoes into a soup, then I can caramelize this half-cut onion for a topping, and then I can use the leftover soup as a sauce tomorrow …
Did I cook more often, though? Probably not. My cooking energy burned brighter but fizzled out after a few nights, at which point I ordered takeout.
So I was glad to hear Li’s take: If you’re too hard on yourself, you’re not going to enjoy it at all. “ I try not to be too obsessive about eating absolutely everything,” she says. If my takeout was truly terrible, I’m allowed to toss it or, better yet, compost it.
If you really want to use up everything, you can always chuck ingredients into the freezer. Li has dedicated freezer bags for different dishes, like vegetable scraps for soups or fruit discards for smoothies. (She labels them, of course.)
And how does that smoothie taste? It’s “delicious,” she says, “even if it’s made up of all the things that have been rejected in the past,” she says.
Recipe: Make-It-Your-Own Stir-Fry
Excerpted from Perfectly Good Food: A Totally Achievable Zero Waste Approach to Home Cooking. Copyright ©2023 by Irene Li and Margaret Li. Used with permission of the publisher, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. All rights reserved.
Sauce
- 1 tablespoon soy sauce
- 1 tablespoon water
- 1 teaspoon sugar
- 1 teaspoon black vinegar, rice vinegar, lime juice, or other acid
- 1 tablespoon neutral oil, or enough to lightly coat the bottom of your wok or skillet
- 1 garlic clove, thinly sliced or minced, or more as desired
- ½-inch piece fresh ginger, minced or grated (optional)
- Pinch chili flakes or 1 small chile pepper, diced (optional)
- 4 cups leafy greens, torn into bite-size pieces, or 1 pound crisp-crunchy vegetables, cut into chunks
- Kosher salt
Stir the sauce ingredients together in a small bowl and set by the stove.
Heat a wok or large skillet over high heat until just smoking, then add the neutral oil and tilt to coat the bottom of the pan.
Add the garlic, ginger (if using), and chili flakes (if using) and stir-fry for 10 seconds. Add the greens and/or vegetables, in stages as necessary, and toss in the garlicky oil, then add the sauce and cook to your liking, stirring frequently.
Vegetable chunks may need 4 to 7 minutes — if you want to speed up the process, cover the pot so the vegetables steam for a minute or two, then uncover and toss again. Sturdy greens may need 3 to 5 minutes to get tender (we like to let them sit for a bit and char for extra texture).
Lighter leaves will need less than a minute to wilt down. Stir in a spoonful of any additional sauce you like, season with salt to taste, then sprinkle with your favorite garnishes and a generous drizzle of sesame oil.
A sprinkle of crunch is a great way to finish a stir-fry. Our favorites include crushed cashews or peanuts, toasted sesame seeds, thinly sliced scallions, and fried onions or shallots.
Your turn: What are your favorite go-to leftover recipes?
We’d love to hear from you! Share your recipe with us at lifekit@npr.org with your full name. We may publish it on NPR.org.
The story was edited by Malaka Gharib. The visual editor is CJ Riculan. We’d love to hear from you. Leave us a voicemail at 202-216-9823, or email us at LifeKit@npr.org.
Listen to Life Kit on Apple Podcasts and Spotify, and sign up for our newsletter. Follow us on Instagram: @nprlifekit.
Stephen Malkmus & the Jicks perform onstage during day two of the Boston Calling Music Festival at Boston City Hall Plaza on September 26, 2015 in Boston, Massachusetts. (Photo by Mike Lawrie/Getty Images)
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