The start of the 2025 TV schedule marks the first full year of Ryan Seacrest serving as the host of Wheel of Fortune, following his high-rated first few weeks starting back in September 2024. He seems well past any early-bird worries by this point, with dozens of episodes under his belt, and it sounds like he’s also grown quite comfortable working alongside game show icon Vanna White. It appears she’s quite fond of him as well, as evidenced by her practical gift-giving.
Despite having pulled a musical Christmas prank on White that resulted in her unwittingly listening to her own holiday album during a work meeting — she did eventually catch on, of course — Seacrest shared a sweet story about his co-host’s benevolent nature that also absolutely sounds like something a mom would do. Speaking with People, the American Idol frontman said:
She's so super generous and sweet and kind. She even brought me — because I was saying, I drink very strong black coffee and my teeth, sometimes you can see it — she brought me white strips. She brought me white strips. She went to the store the next day. She brought me white strips.
Though it's not exactly the most luxurious present to receive as a Hollywood mainstay, Vanna White’s gift to Ryan Seacrest is both extremely sweet and indicative of how much she cares. While the initial context of Seacrest sharing concern for how coffee affects his teeth is not entirely clear, it’s presumed he didn’t sent out a studio-wide memo begging for help, and that it was more conversational than anything, which makes White seem all the more benevolent for her next-day surprise.
It’s also something of a mom-like offering in the way that presents from parents often go hard on practicality over style or pizzazz. Moms are the ones who usually wrap up socks and underwear for Christmas because they know their kids have holes in everything. It’s a similar mindset that factors into buying someone teeth-whitening strips, since the gift itself points to a perceived problem the recipient has.
Of course, that situation might not have come across in the same way had Vanna White just shown up with whitening strips for Ryan Seacrest’s teeth out of the blue without him ever having said anything about the effect that black coffee has. Still helpful, surely, but perhaps not so inherently nice an implication.
Since his earliest days on the set of Wheel of Fortune, Seacrest has only shared positivity about working with White, whose hands and smiles have been lighting up TVs since the early 1980s. And that was no different in this particular interview, with this statement being a perfect summation:
She's everything you think Vanna White will be when you meet her!
Fans will soon see Vanna White paired back up with former host Pat Sajak for the fifth season of Celebrity Wheel of Fortune, which he was already locked in for outside of his retirement news. It's been reported that filming the celebrity-fueled season, which released a holiday episode in early December, sparked Pat Sajak’s intention to return as host in some capacity, but we'll have to wait to learn whether or not there's any value to those rumors.
