Actor and beloved former Reading Rainbow host LeVar Burton has never really gone away, but it would probably be pretty fair to say that he’s been having a bit of a career resurgence over the past couple of years. Not only can he currently be seen helping Patrick Stewart finish Star Trek: Picard in Season 3 (along with many returning Next Generation vets), but he’s also appearing in Season 2 of Blindspotting and working on hosting the upcoming Trivial Pursuit game show. But, it’s his lost opportunity to host Jeopardy that he recently opened up about, and he now calls that loss “perfect” despite how it felt at the time.
What Does LeVar Burton Say Now About Losing Out On The Jeopardy Hosting Gig?
Obviously, fans of the long-running game show were devastated to lose 35-year host Alex Trebek in November 2020, but so many were willing and ready for the show to go on with the Geordi La Forge actor behind the podium that a petition was started to try and convince those behind the program that he was the correct choice. Burton was also eager to take on the Jeopardy gig (and did guest host while the replacement search was on), but ultimately ended up not being the producers' pick. In a recent chat with People, the star was able to reflect on the loss positively, and said:
Your failures are more important than your successes because you learn more from them. Everything happens for a reason, and it's all purposeful and perfect. So where's the perfection in 'I didn't get what I wanted'? I discovered that [it] wasn't supposed to be mine, but the process that I went through led me to exactly where I needed to be.
We all know that it’s hard to miss out on something that you really want, especially if you feel like it will be a natural progression for you (as the Roots star did with potentially hosting the game show), but he’s been nothing but a class act in the aftermath, despite admitting in the summer of 2022 that finding out he wouldn’t get the gig left him “not just disappointed, but wrecked.”
Aside from him not being the type of person to raise public hell over such a thing, it turns out that part of why he pretty quickly came to be OK with what happened is his ability to be appropriately rational about it. He wanted to host Jeopardy, didn’t get the job, and that hurt, but he realized that it would leave him open to other opportunities, whatever they may be.
Luckily, Burton not nabbing the chance to become the new face of the game show allowed him enough time to do something that he and many fans have wanted for a long time: revisit his time in Trek by appearing on Picard. The enduring star said that he’s in “absolute bliss” at being able to work with his TNG friends again, which turned out to be “effortless — like the old days,” so it seems that he’s correct in believing that his big loss actually led to the thing that was really meant for him.
