NBC pilots Wordle TV series with Guthrie hosting and Fallon as EP

NBC is piloting a television adaptation of Wordle, the New York Times’ daily five-letter puzzle, with Today anchor Savannah Guthrie set to host and Jimmy Fallon serving as an executive producer. The pilot is filming in the United Kingdom and is being produced by Fallon’s Electric Hot Dog company alongside Universal Television Alternative Studio, with the New York Times as a production partner. A representative for NBC declined to comment.

The proposed show would translate the online brain teaser that asks players to guess a five-letter word in six attempts, with colored tiles indicating correct letters and placement, into a studio game format. Wordle was created by software engineer Josh Wardle in 2021 and was acquired by the New York Times in 2022 for a reported seven-figure sum. The puzzle registered 5.3 billion plays in 2024, underscoring its sustained popularity since the early 2020s.

Producers face a central programming challenge in converting a single daily puzzle into a multi-contestant television game. Online, the same word is released to all players each day and is solved privately, with sharing mechanisms that show only colored tile patterns rather than letters....