Media: February 2026 • Norville: Back in the Game
Deborah Norville
Deborah Norville was a journalist for 40 years and is now a game show host (The Perfect Line, on WCIU-TV), but she got her career start right here in Chicago at Channel 5.
“My five years in Chicago was really when I grew up,” she remembers. “I was 23 when I came here, and coming from Georgia in January, with a southern accent and blonde hair, everybody just assumed I was dumb as a brick. I just really had to work super hard to prove myself to everybody else and probably prove myself to me, too. Chicago was regarded as one of the toughest news markets in the country. If you could make it here, you could make it anywhere.”
And they didn’t take it easy on her. She immediately covered some pretty hairy stories.
“I remember being told that there were certain colors that you shouldn’t wear, and I said, ‘Why don’t they look good on camera?’ And the person said, No, because they’re the colors of a certain gang, and you’ll get shot if you wear them. We didn’t have gangs in the South. Latin Kings, what are those? Like the kings of Ecuador and Peru? I just did not know what any of this was. They started when we would go to a place like Cabrini Green or the projects down on the south side. They would give us an off-duty cop who came with us, because it was just not safe for the crew to be there without somebody being an extra pair of eyes.”
She loved her time here, except for one little thing.
“What I didn’t love was the cold,” she admits. “The one thing I realized pretty early on was your pens don’t work when you’re outside reporting. I had to keep pencils in my pack, in my pocketbook, because your ballpoint pen freezes unless you had one of those expensive pens that they said the astronauts use, which I don’t believe for a second. I had to use pencils to write my notes. It was that cold. I would do my stand-ups. And, you know, you’ve got multiple layers of gloves and all that sort of stuff. But I would pull off my ugly hat right before I would do the stand-up on camera, because who wants to see that ugly hat on TV? But then I would get letters from ladies saying, ” Little girl, put your hat on, or you’ll catch your death of cold.”
After leaving Chicago, Deborah went to the Today Show and suddenly found herself interviewing world leaders.
“There was an interview I did in 1991 with Margaret Thatcher. She was the Prime Minister of Great Britain at the time, and I was the first interview she was doing on the eve of the UN General Assembly. And in the commercial break beforehand, she asked how much time she would have. I said, It’s live TV, four minutes, maybe four and a half if we’re lucky. And she said, ‘Oh, so you’d like my answers, Snappy?’ And she then, very snappily, proceeded to tell me that over dinner the night before, she and President Bush had decided a resolution from the UN authorizing the invasion of Iraq would be nice, but they didn’t consider it necessary. And you know, as a journalist, the soundbite bell goes off in your head, and you’re thinking, major news was just made. And indeed, the soundbite bell on the wire machines around the world went off, and it wasn’t just what she said, which was monumental. It was the way she said it with such certitude and such strength. It was just, it was a very sobering moment.”
Her 40+ years of TV journalism (here in Chicago, the Today Show, Inside Edition) make her uniquely qualified to identify the greats in the business in her eyes. Who is on her TV journalism Mt. Rushmore?
“Mike Wallace, Diane Sawyer, Dan Rather, and Brian Ross.”
Last year, Norville took a career turn that nobody saw coming. She’s now a game show host.
“I’m completely different,” she agrees. “It’s one of the reasons this appealed to me. It was something I had never done before. I’ve been a contestant on game shows, but it’s a totally different thing to be the host of it. I’ve got a metronome in my head. I can now sort of feel this is taking too long. For me, the challenge was doing the math, like trying to add up the scores quickly in the back of your head while you’re trying to talk to the people. And the other thing was, we have four contestants, and on most episodes, we do have a moment where we get to do a quick little debrief of that person. And so the challenge is, how can I make that person feel comfortable enough that they’re not scared to death talking to me on TV, and draw out of them something that’s interesting and fun. And I have like, 25 seconds to do that, and keep it snappy.”
And what other game show hosts did she study?
“Alex Trebek. Bob Barker. Jim Lange from the Dating Game. Bill Cullen, who was the host of Concentration. Oh, I forgot Monty Hall. Darn. I’d need to get a bigger mountain for that Mt. Rushmore.”
The Perfect Line airs weeknights at 7:30 pm on WCIU in Chicago.
– Rick Kaempfer
