Will Ferrell Delivers a Gentler, Kinder Alex Trebek Impression in Hulu’s ‘Quiz Lady’

Quiz Lady director Jessica Yu snapped when she cast Will Ferrell as Terry McTeer, the host of a fictional game show in this new Hulu comedy. Not only is Ferrell the perfect choice to play a mild-mannered, goofy father figure, but it’s also a fun callback to Ferrell’s Saturday Night Live days. And more than that, it highlights how much the public perception of Ferrell—and the man he’s been impersonating for over 25 years—has changed.

Quiz Lady, which began streaming today, stars Awkwafina as a 30-something woman obsessed with a fictional trivia game show called “Can’t Stop the Quiz.” It doesn’t take a pop culture excerpt to know which real-life trivia game show inspired screenwriter Jen D’Angelo. The game play isn’t a one-to-one copy of Jeopardy!, but the parallels are clear: the three-contestant set-up, the smarmy “returning champion” played by Jason Schwartzman, and, of course, the polite, benevolent game show host.

There’s no question that Ferrell—who also produced the film—is doing a version of late Jeopardy! host Alex Trebek in Quiz Lady. It’s in the way he says “Correct!” and in the gentle dad jokes he makes about where the contestants are from. Terry McTeer’s signature look is a Bill Nye-esque bowtie, rather than a silk tie, but years of “Celebrity Jeopardy” sketches have trained audiences to think of Trebek when they see Ferrell holding those note cards. In an interview for the Quiz Lady press notes, Ferrell himself said Terry McTeer “is an homage to Al. I only met him once, but I feel like this is the way he would handle himself, which was very judicious with every contestant and very, very sweet to everyone because in that universe he’s a god.”

Yet this version of the host couldn’t be further from the famously exasperated Alex Trebek impression that Ferrell did on SNL in the late ’90s and early ’00s. That Trebek, burdened with dealing with excessively pea-brained celebrities, never once smiled under his mustache. He glowered as Sean Connery (Darrell Hammond) made cracks about his mom and told him to “suck it.” He sighed in annoyance at the antics of Burt Reynolds (Norm Macdonald), and informed the audience, “I hate my job.” It was hilarious, because Ferrell was exaggerating on a fairly universally agreed-upon public perception of Trebek at the time: That he was a tortured, fed-up crank.

But that perception was no longer there when Trebek got his cancer diagnosis, and ultimately died at the age of 80 in November 2020. For a generation who had grown up watching Trebek on TV—much like Awkwafina’s character in Quiz Lady—he wasn’t an ornery asshole. Instead, he was a kindly father figure. Maybe Trebek mellowed with age, or maybe he was always a sweetheart, and the public just didn’t see it. For whatever reason, the narrative shifted, and now Ferrell’s Trebek impression has shifted with it.

Terry McTeer is not literally an Alex Trebek impersonation of course, though Ferrell did say in the Quiz Lady press notes that McTeer is “a slight tip of the cap” to his SNL character, even if he’s different in some ways.

“I think Terry is the same [as Trebek, in that he is], very levelheaded, and very sweet,” Ferrell said. “But the great thing about Terry is that he loves to express himself. Alex Trebek, I don’t think he would editorialize as much as Terry does. But Terry often talks about how much he loves these contestants and knowledge, and he learns something new every day.”

Certainly, it’s hard to imagine Ferrell’s “Celebrity Jeopardy” Alex Trebek softly comforting a crying contestant in a hallway full of bowties, as he does in Quiz Lady. But it’s not so hard, in the wake of his death, to imagine the real Trebek doing that now. Perhaps it’s only fitting that that’s how he should be remembered. No one would dare to tell this Trebrek to “suck it.”