Savannah Guthrie lands new job with NBC amid her mother Nancy's disappearance
NEW YORK CITY, NEW YORK: As Savannah Guthrie continues to endure the emotional turmoil surrounding the disappearance of her mother, Nancy Guthrie, the 'Today' host has finally been met with a rare piece of uplifting news.
On Monday’s episode of the 'Today' show, the TV personality announced that she is all set to present a TV game show based on the New York Times’ hit word game Wordle.
“We’ve been holding in a secret between us for a long time now,” the 54-year-old anchor gushed, as she announced the news alongside Jimmy Fallon, who will produce the show through his Electric Hot Dog company.
The newspaper and the TV network’s Universal Television Alternative Studio (UTAS) are to act as co-producers.
Savannah Guthrie says she 'didn’t expect' the role
The duo announced that they filmed a pilot for the show last year, and the rest of the half-hour-long episodes were filmed in Manchester, England, beginning in June.
The show is set to be aired on prime time in the US in 2027.
Guthrie revealed that she is an “avid” fan of the massively popular viral word game Wordle, which was created by Reddit engineer Josh Wardle in 2021 before being acquired by The New York Times the following year in a deal reportedly worth seven figures.
“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,” she told viewers on Monday.
“When everything happened with my family and me. They just stopped everything and said, ‘We’ll wait for you.’ Hollywood is, like, a really tough business, and I didn’t expect that. And I just want to say thank you, it means so much to me,” she further explained.
To which Fallon insisted that cast and crew alike agreed they “couldn’t do the show” without the “fantastic” host.
Savannah Guthrie says, 'Things are not easy'
At one point in the episode, Guthrie went on to share mixed feelings about the “joyous” news, saying, “Everything is strange right now.”
“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. Nothing about that has changed, and it’s not easy, but I’m determined to put one foot in front of the other.”
The host has been dealing with the absence of her mother, Nancy Guthrie, with the 84-year-old 84-year-old missing since the night of January 31.
Investigators believe that she was abducted from her Tucson home during the early morning hours of February 1.
Nancy’s baffling disappearance sparked a wave of prayers and desperate pleas for answers as people across the world became consumed by the mystery surrounding her fate.
The investigation, led by roughly two dozen detectives from the Pima County Sheriff’s Department and the FBI, has also focused on a string of blackmail messages sent to Nancy’s family and various media outlets, demanding Bitcoin payments in exchange for her return.
But they are yet to find any concrete evidence leading to Nancy.
