Three months after returning to NBC’s TODAY after her leave to be with family after her mother’s disappearance, Savannah Guthrie is taking another break – for a much more exciting reason.
The TV anchor, 54, was previously announced as the host of NBC’s new game show adaptation of the popular New York Times game Wordle, which will be executive produced by Jimmy Fallon.
On the July 16 installment of the morning show, Savannah shared that she’ll be taking a few weeks off from her regular job to fly out to film the show’s entire first season.
“I’m headed over to shoot Wordle over the next few weeks,” she told her co-anchors Craig Melvin, Carson Daly, Jenna Bush Hager, Sheinelle Jones and Al Roker during the Pop Start segment. “We’re going to shoot the whole season, and we’re super excited. Cannot wait for everyone to see it.”
The mom-of-two also explained that it’ll likely be airing in the new year, with Sheinelle recalling the time that the Wordle phenomenon hit the TODAY group chat, and they quickly grew “obsessed,” dubbing Savannah’s journey to the game show’s host a “full circle” moment.
The half-hour game show will be produced by The New York Times, which has owned the game since 2022 and began releasing it as part of their Games app. During the announcement on the show back in May, the Tonight Show host explained that the project had apparently been two and a half years in the making.
© Getty ImagesThey filmed a pilot for it last year, and the main show will begin filming in Manchester, England. Savannah even noted back then that filming was actually supposed to start earlier, but due to her mother Nancy Guthrie’s disappearance, the production team helped push it back to suit her schedule.
She said on the air then: “I have to say, we’ve been working on this for a really long time, and actually we just found out in February that we got picked up and we were supposed to shoot in March.”
“I just want to say a quick thank you to NBC and to Jimmy and his production company and The New York Times and the studio, Universal. Because when everything happened with me and my family, they just stopped everything and said, ‘We’ll wait for you’,” she poignantly continued.
© Getty Images“And Hollywood is a really tough business, as you know, and I didn’t expect that and I just want to say thank you, it means so much to me.”
“Everything is strange right now,” Savannah noted to The NYT separately. “It’s strange to get up and do the ‘Today’ show every day, and it’s strange to say that I’m going to do a game show when your heart is broken.”
© Getty Images“Nothing about that has changed, and it’s not easy, but I’m determined to put one foot in front of the other,” she defiantly added. “And this is a joyous thing.”
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