‘Wheel of Fortune’: Vanna White Teases First ‘Celebrity’ Specials

Wheel of Fortune returns to primetime this week thanks to a new celebrity edition to the beloved game show. Celebrities will compete for their favorite charities in the new specials, which begin airing on Thursday at 8 p.m. ET on ABC. In a recent interview, co-host Vanna White previewed the specials and gave two important words of advice for celebrities, “Buy vowels.”

“It’s exciting, it’s fun and the celebrities are winning tons of money for their favorite charities,” White said of the new show. White said there will be no difference as far as how the game is played. “We play the game the same way,” she told TV Insider in December. However, there are no prizes on the wheel, so celebrity contestants can only win cash. In other words, if they are hoping to win an all-inclusive stay at a tropical resort, they will have to look elsewhere. Instead, there will be four $1 million wedges on the wheel, so the “stakes are higher.”

Later on in the interview, White offered her advice for celebrities, reminding them that they should buy vowels. “It’s only $250!” White said. She agreed that it was a good investment for celebrities looking to win millions for their charities.

The Celebrity Wheel of Fortune specials are part of ABC’s new primetime line-up featuring gameshows, with Sara Haines also hosting The Chase and Craig Ferguson helming The Hustler. Co-host Pat Sajak told Zap2It that the success of last year’s Jeopardy! Greatest of All Time tournament likely inspired ABC to bring Wheel to primetime. Since the regular syndicated Wheel of Fortune is also airing simultaneously as the celebrity one, Sajak believes a primetime Wheel would only be good for a limited time.

“It’s a tricky business,” Sajak explained. “The one thing you don’t want to start doing is to overexpose the show. In some markets, you’ll have a half-hour of (the syndicated) Wheel of Fortune followed by an hour of (the ABC) Wheel of Fortune, and I don’t think you can do that too often without watering it down. But for a limited run like this, I think it’s fine.”

Celebrity Wheel of Fortune is debuting while the syndicated version is in its 38th season. ABC picked up the new show in November. “It is a happy place,” White told PopCulture recently about the Wheel atmosphere. “Anybody that tunes in, you can tune out anything that has been going on in your life for that week or that month and have 30 minutes of family fun. You see people win, you see people happy, you solve the puzzles [at home], and you’re a part of the show. It’s just a great half-hour of escape and family time.”