In a move that sounds custom-made to tick every box of your parents’ SEO, Jimmy Fallon is producing a Wordle game show. Is that not just Wheel of Fortune, you ask? I mean, yeah, kinda.
If you somehow haven’t heard of Wordle, it started as a browser-based word game in 2021, which blew up so fast that The New York Times‘ games section acquired it in 2022. Now it’s the centerpiece of the Times’ much more high-profile gaming offerings, and it has inspired hundreds of copycat games. The premise is simple: the player has to guess a five-letter word in up to six attempts, with correct letters being marked green or yellow, depending on if they’re in the right spot or not. It’s a simple brain teaser that is easy to pick up and put down every day, so its virality is easy to understand. The question is: How will Fallon and company expand this into a full-blown game show?
Deadline reports that the series, if picked up, will air on NBC, and would give Fallon yet another gig on the network to go along with his hosting of The Tonight Show, the reality series On Brand, and the musical game program That’s My Jam. Today anchor Savannah Guthrie is signed on to host the Wordle pilot. The show is filming in the UK thanks to Fallon’s Electric Hot Dog production company, and that’s about all we know right now. Is it just going to be guests solving five-letter word puzzles like those in the existing game? That doesn’t sound like quite enough for a full-fledged game show, so I expect there will be more to it than that. Will the players who end up on the show spell out the words “Authoritarian Regime”? Probably not on Fallon’s watch. That’s also too many letters for a game of Wordle.
