Travis Kelce has played games on TV his whole professional career, and now he's gearing up to join a whole new type of play.
For his first TV series gig, the Kansas City Chiefs tight end will host game show "Are You Smarter Than a Celebrity?" for Amazon Prime Video, a spinoff of the Fox game show "Are You Smarter Than a 5th Grader?"
The 20-episode project will feature Kelce leading a classroom of his fellow industry folks to try to help an adult contestant answer 11 questions from an elementary-level curriculum. But the celebrities aren't the contestant's competition; they're the player's lifeline — and possibly a person they can "cheat" off of, a press release announcing the show said.
The final question comes from the 6th-grade level, and a correct answer will get the contestant a $100,000 prize.
"I grew up loving game shows, and I'm excited to be following in the footsteps of so many TV icons by hosting my very first one with 'Are You Smarter Than a Celebrity?'" Kelce said in a statement, per Prime. "I'm just happy to be on the hosting side of the equation here and excited to see how these famous faces keep up."
The series will be produced by MGM Alternative, a division of Amazon MGM Studios, and will stream in more than 240 countries and territories.
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And it'll have some pretty big shoes to fill. The original series — co-created by MGM Alternative's general manager Barry Poznick — premiered to a record-breaking 27 million viewers in 2007 and still holds the title for No. 1 game-show premiere in broadcast TV history, per Prime. In total, its run garnered more than 800 million viewers during 3,000 globally distributed episodes, which wrapped in 2011.
"Replacing the kids with celebrities gives us more laughs and surprises, like a roast, as contestants cheat off their famous classmates," Poznick said in a statement. "And now, with the ultimate class clown, Travis Kelce, hosting, viewers should expect the unexpected!"
Previous leads for the show include Jeff Foxworthy as the original Fox host and for its one-season revival in 2015. John Cena also hosted a single season for a 2019 reboot on Nickelodeon.
But Kelce isn't going into hosting or TV blind. The three-time Super Bowl champion co-hosts a top-charting podcast with his brother, recently retired Philadelphia Eagles center Jason Kelce, and has "Saturday Night Live" hosting experience under his belt. Plus in 2016, he starred in a reality dating series, "Catching Kelce."
He's also been widening his resume with other non-football ventures recently, like a music festival called "Kelce Jam" that the Chiefs' star is putting on April 28 in Kansas City. Plus, he's producing an upcoming documentary about artist Jean-Michel Basquiat called "King Pleasure."
