Every time I ran into Alex, I would say to him, ' Celebrity Jeopardy!, Alex! Let’s do a Celebrity Jeopardy!' For years, he told me, 'Well, we never want to compromise the questions for the show. The one thing I hope I was able to do was just be myself.ĮSQ: What was your relationship with Alex like? I had to just relax and not concern myself so much with the mechanics, because Alex had decades to perfect the way he made it look so effortless. I think at the end of the day, what I needed to do was just be myself. With Jeopardy!, the pressure is, “Am I doing everything that I need to be doing?” There's such an expectation, or at least an expectation that I put on myself, to do Alex's memory proud-to bring the same standard for excellence that I apply in every other aspect of my life to these five shows.

You're going to have a safe landing or you’re not. Oddly enough, when you’re jumping out of an airplane, you're either going to be successful at it or you're not. This was still the scariest thing I’ve ever done.ĮSQ: Scarier than jumping out of an airplane? LB: I've done a lot of things to test myself, like jumping out of an airplane and walking on hot coals with Tony Robbins. CBS Photo ArchiveĮSQ: What about it surprised you, or was different from what you expected? Jeopardy! is definitely a bright spot in the nation's consciousness.īurton, guest hosting on ’CBS This Morning’ earlier this year. The things that I’ve done in terms of using the medium of television to do more than simply entertain-bringing a little more to the table to educate, inform, enlighten, uplift… Jeopardy! does those things too. We take that nightly quiz and test ourselves against those champions, and we play the game as a nation every night. The idea of education being a value or a principle, and that education should be available to everyone. We watch every night.Įverything that I’m about is in the same vein as Jeopardy!. I think we all have a vested stake in what happens with the show next because we're all invested.

We all feel that it's very personal, our relationship with the show or our relationship with Alex. I feel like America has a relationship with this show. LeVar Burton: I've watched the show with my family all of my life. Evidently Burton is a busy man, but less than a week before his Jeopardy! episodes were set to air, he made time to speak with Esquire about his enduring love of storytelling, his commitment to honoring Alex Trebek's legacy, and his conviction that he's the right host for the permanent job at Jeopardy!.Įsquire: In September 2020, you tweeted that you feel like you’ve spent your whole life preparing to stand behind the Jeopardy! podium. Set in 2019, Aftermath is an eerily prescient dystopian story about a United States recovering from civil war, famine, and disease, all of it resulting from the assassination of the first Black president-elect by a white supremacist.

When he wasn't highlighting works of fiction by other writers, Burton was revisiting his own fiction: Aftermath, his 1997 speculative fiction novel, re-released this summer as an audiobook. Meanwhile, Burton's popular podcast about short fiction, LeVar Burton Reads, has entered its ninth season. The course is characteristic Burton: brimming with wit, wisdom, and empathy, Burton instructs MasterClass members in everything from public speaking to the value of storytelling as it relates to representation.

It's been a busy year for Burton, who has partnered with MasterClass to teach 'The Power of Storytelling,' a digital course breaking down his approach to communication, imagination, and the shared language of humanity. 'If I don't get it, I'll be fine,' Burton told Esquire. But if he doesn't get the gig, don't worry about him. Burton, the public intellectual who cultivated a love of reading and knowledge in an entire generation of Americans through the Peabody Award-winning series Reading Rainbow, seems an obvious successor to Trebek. Now, Burton is stepping up to the plate as a Jeopardy! Season 37 guest host, while an announcement about the permanent host looms.

'Jeopardy!' Fans React to Robin Roberts Hosting.

'Jeopardy!' Fans Are Mad About a 'Too Easy' Clue.

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