When Pat Sajak announced he’d be retiring from Wheel of Fortune after the show’s 41st season, which premieres in September, he included a perfectly diva-ish swipe in his farewell message. “It’s been a wonderful ride, and I’ll have more to say in the coming months,” Sajak wrote. “If nothing else, it’ll keep the clickbait sites busy!”
What was he talking about, exactly? Well, according to the tabloids that cover syndicated television like it’s Capitol Hill, Sajak’s behavior on Wheel of Fortune has grown increasingly erratic as he’s blown past the guardrails of retirement age: The longtime host, 76, was putting contestants into chokeholds and imploring celebrity guests to show off their abs. He tugged on a man’s beard, called him “Santa,” and later apologized. Whether this is the result of game-show-host senioritis or septuagenarian social derangement, the rags love a Sajak moment. And it kind of says it all that Sajak—who has spent decades directing people to spin a wheel and has recently been making a reported $15 million a year for the privilege—took the bittersweet moment of his retirement as an opportunity to air a bit of grievance. Over the years, that became his brand, and it helps explain why the announcement that he’s leaving (and the swift beknighting of Ryan Seacrest as his replacement) has landed with such a thud.
Sajak leaving is the end of an era, in the sense that Wheel of Fortune is the last of the canonical game shows that have, more or less, broadcast with the same format and the same host since the golden age of syndication. Bob Barker left The Price Is Right more than a decade ago, handing over the reins to a gloriously sundowning and checked-out Drew Carey. Alex Trebek, Sajak’s eternal cohort, stayed on to the bitter end, recording his closing shows mere days before his death. Other, more transient programs came and went, and while Deal or No Deal gave way to a hallucinogenic Howie Mandel mid-’00s renaissance, its unimaginative rule set never left quite the same mark on America. So when Sajak hangs up his microphone, a decadeslong game show tradition will depart with him. He is the last of the old-time showmen, and the only contemporaneous connection to the dearly departed Trebek left on air. Losing him is like losing the last Beatle (of shows you watched with your grandma). So why doesn’t it feel like a bigger deal?
Because, of course, Sajak is not beloved—or at least not in the way that men are supposed to become beloved after 40 years of screen time. The archetypical game show host is warm, convivial, and an advocate for the contestants, someone who has fully internalized the agony of a bad buzzer and the ecstasy of a savvy play. Sajak, meanwhile, consistently cut the silhouette of a man who stumbled into the easiest gig on television but never seemed to appreciate his good fortune. He was, and is, technically gifted and mechanically sound, more than capable of repeating the alphabet in precise transatlantic English. Sajak was originally a radio DJ, and he orbited through a number of journeyman announcing gigs before, in his early 30s, landing as a Los Angeles weatherman. (You can still sense that local-news timbre in his airless disposition today.) Merv Griffin offered him the Wheel podium in 1981, and Sajak approached the job without ever mollifying the stiff, smug, and vaguely menacing temperament that—through inertia alone—made him an enduring star.
Most of the time, Sajak is barely able to muster a flicker of celebratory joy for the victors who leave his set with $25,000 and a trip to Barbados, and he recites those mandated get-to-know-ya contestant interviews in the same way you or I might read aloud a grant proposal. (This is in stark contrast to Trebek, who managed to find a kernel of sentiment for every librarian and professor he interfaced with.) To be more generous, you could say that Sajak’s lifelong laconic attitude might be rooted in a selfless belief that a host ought to be a minor part of a game show’s framework—that the deductive wordplay is the real star here, not a handful of bad one-liners or the increasingly wooden intrigue between him and Vanna White. But Sajak still works only 48 days a year for that reported $15 million annual salary, and he always seems as if he’d rather be anywhere else while making the hay. He won the lottery and remains forever aggrieved. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised, considering how that tends to be the default position of the wealthy American conservative.
Yes, perhaps the reason Sajak has maintained such a curdled persona is his long-standing status as one of Hollywood’s most public Republicans—and, like many men in their 70s, he’s careered into more whackadoodle territory during the twilight of his life. Sajak’s Twitter feed is a trove of your typical conservative death-cult stuff—most of the highlights are from around 2014 or so, and all of them provide an eerily prescient snapshot of where political discourse was headed. (A choice quote from the Sajak files: “I now believe global warming alarmists are unpatriotic racists knowingly misleading for their own ends.” Not quite sure what that means!) Sajak also flirted with some early anti-woke ideation, once remarking that the next big “cause du jour” will be “Plants Rights”—a joke that mirrors the exact sort of fraught boomer memes that bloomed out of the fetid Facebook swamp and are currently destabilizing our democracy.
Sajak has pumped the brakes a bit on his MAGA hectoring in the years since, which I’d imagine is rooted in a self-preservation instinct. But he has still made time to bemoan COVID-19 lockdowns and the “politics of casting.” Sajak’s other rightward initiatives are more businesslike and blue-blooded: He is currently on the board of Hillsdale College, the conservative Michigan incubator with 1,400 undergraduates that churns out a variety of D.C. think-tank creatures and defense-industry parasites. He also helped support Eagle Publishing, the parent company of Regnery Publishing, an imprint with a catalog of upcoming books titled Tearing Us Apart: How Abortion Harms Everything and Solves Nothing and The Babylon Bee Guide to Gender. Like so many other magnificently wealthy activists, Sajak has learned to put his weight on the system and let it speak for him.
But I also get the sense that Sajak has enjoyed his status as a pickled Republican outsider in Hollywood, if only because it provides righteous context to his chilly demeanor. (Consider also Kelsey Grammer, wonderful comedian, notorious crank, and vindictive Trump supporter.) It takes a certain type of person to seem totally unawed and vainglorious about the unconscionable capital gains they’re reaping from the sweatless labor of hosting Wheel of Fortune, and Sajak—with his National Review bylines and bootstraps mindset—perfectly fits the bill.
Now, I have to hope that Sajak will loosen up during this coronating run to the finish line. It has been ages since I was an avid Wheel watcher, but the show will forever live large in my and millions of others’ minds. Will I learn to miss him? It’s certainly possible, no matter how unimaginable that might be right now. I’ve lately been able to muster a few flashes of nostalgia for Jay Leno’s Tonight Show run—which is objectively the most anodyne stint anyone has ever had on a legacy network institution—leaving me wondering if I’ll ever be able to untangle good taste from good memories. It’s so easy to drape wistfulness over anything we remember in our youth, especially when it intersects with an era of pop culture in terminal decline. Years from now, when we watch a Wheel of Fortune hosted by Seacrest (shudder), it will be clear that Sajak, and the whole broadcasting tradition he represented, is dead and gone. That, my friends, is something worth mourning.
