The Tuesday, September 22, 2026, episode of “Wheel of Fortune” ran its prize puzzle twice and dropped the Crossword round entirely in a number of markets, leaving viewers to wonder whether their televisions or the broadcast itself had gone wrong.
The syndicated game show’s scrambled feed came down to an editing error, and it did not reach everyone. Plenty of other fans reported a completely normal episode, start to finish. Those who did see the duplicate went to social media and Reddit to compare notes.
The puzzle that aired twice was the prize puzzle, solved as “Glinda and Elphaba.” Carmine Lucidi, an Eagle Scout from Long Island, New York, solved it first and won a trip to Finland for it.
The round that went missing was the Crossword round, category “The Piano.” Pam Edwards, a contestant from Cypress, Texas, solved it with only four letters guessed: “Ivory, Key, Ebony, Strings.” One account described the solve as a small clinic in puzzle-solving.
The Crossword round also carries an at-home hook: viewers can enter a keyword for a chance at a prize. In the feeds that skipped the round, that segment never happened. The cost to viewers came to a keyword they could not enter and a prize puzzle they watched twice.
Where the Problem Showed Up
Commenters on one Reddit thread pinned the trouble to the Detroit, Michigan, area. Boston, Massachusetts, and St. Paul, Minnesota, turned up next: Users in both cities described the same scrambled broadcast. Minnesota also lost the Words with Friends puzzle, according to a fan there who said it never aired.
Confusion built in a Reddit discussion about the episode as viewers compared notes and found they had not imagined it. Fans called the repeat wild, joked that it felt like time travel and wondered what had happened to the broadcast.
“Um, did the show just screw up and play the same puzzle twice?” one fan asked in the discussion.
Some of the frustration aimed higher than the show itself. “Clearly there is something going on at Sony or CBS that is causing these broadcasts to be botched,” one thread said.
A Second Scrambled Broadcast
The duplicated puzzle was not the first jumbled feed of the young season. Returning champion Matthew Riggle was set to defend his streak on the “Jeopardy!” Season 43 premiere on September 14, and fans tuned in for it. Some markets came back from commercial to find a different game already in progress, and viewers reported seeing a champion named Jonathan rather than Matthew.
A Reddit user laid out the timeline of the switch and asked whether anyone else had experienced it, and many Detroit users said they had. WDIV in Detroit re-aired the correct episode overnight at 2 a.m. that Wednesday.
Both series come from Sony Pictures Television, and CBS Media Ventures handles the syndication for each of them — a link fans were quick to seize on as the second scrambled broadcast of the young season made the rounds. Complaints about both shows kept naming Detroit, and that overlap pushed fan suspicion toward the broadcasts themselves rather than the taped episodes.
Outcomes Stand for Contestants
The show, hosted by Ryan Seacrest, is now in Season 44. It tweaked its format again one week into the season, a change that drew a reaction from fans, and the duplicated puzzle and missing round arrived on top of that.
Nothing changed for the contestants. Lucidi’s Finland trip stands, and Edwards’ four-letter Crossword solve stands with it.
“Wheel of Fortune” airs weekdays in syndication, with local stations setting the time. Episodes stream the next day on Hulu and Peacock, where the full episode is available.
