NBC Sports' newest on-air talent breaks silence on never-aired game show he produced

Steve Kornacki, who recently left his post as MSNBC’s data guru and election-night talking head, recently joined NBC News and NBC Sports as a contributor.

The Los Angeles Times was first to report this month that Kornacki, 45, "will continue to be NBC’s go-to expert for statistical analysis of polls and election results and during major sporting events, including Triple Crown horse racing, the Olympics the NFL."

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Perhaps the only thing Kornacki loves more than data visualizations is game shows — a genre to which he tried contributing as a producer.

Kornacki spoke to Puck's John Ourand on The Varsity podcast about a venture he tried to launch in his favorite genre.

"What gets me into game shows is, I am unironically into the competition within the game show. I don't like the game shows that are talk shows disguised as game shows, that are comedy shows disguised as game shows, where there's this witty host with all the quips who wants to banter with the contestants, and here's the celebrities, let's make jokes. I want none of that.

"What interest me in game shows is the parallel to sports: it's the speed, it's the competition. Trivia as sport — that's kind of my view of it."

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Kornacki's spin on a game show never got off the ground, though not for lack of trying.

"We went down ... a couple different roads on that," he told Ourand. "Just didn't get to the point where they were going to put it on the air. We did pilots. I learned a ton. It's a process I had never really done before. That's one of those ... with the ability to do outside stuff, I think there's a world where that's not been fully explored."

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