LeVar Burton’s Quest to Succeed Alex Trebek - The New York Times:

Bear in mind that this might be paywalled when you try for it, but I love LeVar Burton too much to skip over it as I’d normally do with sites that are likely to block content.

If the right person catches the right project at the right time, the culture will always hold that person close. Do it three times, as LeVar Burton has done, and our relationship becomes something even deeper. Through his performances as Kunta Kinte in the landmark 1977 television mini-series “Roots,” as Lt. Cmdr. Geordi La Forge on “Star Trek: The Next Generation,” which aired in syndication from 1987 to 1994 and is the greatest of all “Star Trek” iterations (I’ll brook no arguments to the contrary) and as host of the beautifully ambling PBS children’s educational series “Reading Rainbow” during its run from 1983 to 2006, Burton established himself as an icon of grace and humanism, an enduring part of the fabric of American culture. Which might explain why, this past spring, there was an organic social media groundswell to get Burton, who is 64, the shot he wanted at replacing another beloved figure, the late Alex Trebek, as host of “Jeopardy!”