The Story of Pat Sajak & Wheel of Fortune

Notes:

If I could change anything about this video, I would dial down the praise toward the very end. It's very hyperbolic, which I'm choosing to attribute to the loss of my mind amid peak 2020 quarantine.

My voice is noticeably weak here, and this is the revised version! I re-recorded and inserted over 80 bits of the narration into an already-edited video to get rid of voice cracks and other improprieties from the original take. Vocal fatigue is a real thing. I don't know how audiobook narrators do it.

I know that my decision to omit Pat's politics skews his likability to a certain degree. He is a staunch conservative, and he has been vocal about his beliefs (quite smugly, at times) on Twitter. Photos have surfaced of him with Marjorie Taylor Greene and a Newsmax anchor. He is a trustee for an outwardly conservative college. These values are at odds with my own, and I don't want my appreciation for his career to be mistaken for approval of his politics. I thought it was worth ignoring politics for the sake of this story, but that's a decision I've grown less comfortable with over time. It's a complex situation, and it feels weird to use the phrase "separate the art from the artist" when the "art" in question is just a game show and an interesting story that accompanies it. But his show was important to me, and I enjoyed watching him do his thing. Make of that what you will. 

Corrections:

• Although it is definite that a salary dispute led to Chuck Woolery's termination, I am not 100% confident in the exact figures I use here. It seems like no one can agree on what the exact details of the dispute were.

• It's not known for certain whether the developmental tape for Wheel of Fortune (11:01) came before the original Shopper's Bazaar pilot was taped. I think it's most plausible that it did, but there is some level of uncertainty there.

• At 36:06, the onscreen caption says that The Late Late Show is syndicated. It's not. It airs on CBS. Just a goof. (I did away with those captions in subsequent videos mainly because they were too annoying to deal with and didn't offer significant value for the hassle. And things like this can slip through the cracks.)

  • • Also, speaking of The Late Late Show, commenter Justin Flickner brought to my attention that the framed photo of Pat Sajak on The Late Late Show's mantle was actually a gift to the show from Neil Patrick Harris, which can be viewed in this interview. It's a neat little moment that shows Pat's good humor about the failure of his show.

• Commenter Rob H provided a correction about the situation surrounding David Letterman's morning talk show. To reproduce his comment: Letterman being cut to 60 minutes was not the reason Wheel was saved. While correct that the decision to cancel Wheel of Fortune was reversed, Hollywood Squares ended up becoming the third casualty to make room for Letterman on the schedule. High Rollers, Chain Reaction and Squares aired their final episodes on June 20, 1980. Once Letterman was cut to 60 minutes (and Another World cut from 90 minutes to 60), the schedule was shifted and a new hourlong soap opera called "Texas" premiered in the mid-afternoon.

• I made the projection that Pat wouldn't renew his contract beyond what he already had at the time this video was made. I was wrong. He renewed an additional time, and he only retired in 2024. I imagine his decision to renew was influenced, to some degree, by Alex Trebek's death in November of 2020. For what it's worth, I think Ryan Seacrest is doing okay.