The best game show hosts personify their programs. Regis Philbin, on “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire,” was the loud, flashy host of a loud, flashy giveaway. Alex Trebek, on “Jeopardy,” ran his half-hour seminar like a cool, exacting Professor of Television.

And Pat Sajak, who announced on Monday that he would retire as the host of “Wheel of Fortune” after next season? Pat Sajak was … just there.

I don’t mean that as an insult. Being there is the deceptively overwhelming challenge of hosting, TV’s toughest easy job. There is a skill to running a show without being the show, to maintaining a vibe and a pace while letting a story play out around you. It is the art, to wax yogic, of being present and holding space. There is nothing on Earth so still as the center of a spinning wheel.

For over four decades, since taking over from Chuck Woolery, Sajak has been at that spot, joshing with Vanna White, heaving the wheel on final spins, wincing at Bankrupts and tethering exuberant winners. He’s easy listening: jokey but not too edgy, sympathetic but not too dramatic, enthusiastic but not too excitable.

And this, more than any singular quirk of personality, was what helped him help “Wheel” remain one of America’s top syndicated TV shows for decades. He was the median host for America’s median game show.

The two poles of big American game shows are “Jeopardy,” the high-stakes egghead showdown that rewards book learning, and “The Price Is Right,” the giddy guessing game that tests everyday consumer skills like knowing what to pay for a box of Hamburger Helper. “Wheel of Fortune” has always lived in the Goldilocks zone between the two.

It’s a contest of language skill, but with training wheels. (You buy vowels; you get starting letters in the final bonus round.) There’s a healthy element of luck — just look at the title. It’s play-along-able, like a crossword puzzle that gradually fills itself in for you.

Early on, “Wheel” had a delightfully dizzy shopping-spree segment, which sent players to blow their winnings on furniture and water skis. That was phased out, but the rewards remained modest, not counting twists like the Million-Dollar Wedge. As a brand, “Wheel” was neither too nerdy nor too down-market.

That more or less describes Sajak’s on-air persona. He’s not even the most distinctive presence on his own show. That would be his co-host, White, who transformed the revealing of letters into a civic ritual and could provide material for an entire Ph.D. dissertation on women as subject and object in daytime TV. Sajak is just Sajak — figurine-like and amiably showbizzy. He’s simple in his banter, his manner, even his name, all of whose vowels you could buy for $250.

But he’s comfortable, and comfort breeds TV habits. In one of his most memorable “Saturday Night Live” creations, Martin Short played Ed Grimley, a socially awkward “Wheel of Fortune” auditioner with a fantasy of impressing and befriending Sajak. “It seems to me that he would be a pretty decent guy,” Grimley says, grimacing with delight. Sajak, represented by a black-and-white headshot, smiles blankly.

America’s easy parasocial relationship with Sajak is part of what made his late-career turn to being a conservative columnist and social-media opinionator so jarring. It wasn’t just his posing with the far-right Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene or his climate-change denialism — he once tweeted that “global warming alarmists are unpatriotic racists knowingly misleading for their own ends.” It was the discordant idea that Pat Sajak had impassioned feelings about anything.

This is also why it’s hard to imagine the search for Sajak’s replacement becoming the kind of heated offscreen soap that unfolded when “Jeopardy” hunted for Trebek’s successors. Sure, there will be candidates and fan favorites and speculation — Sajak tweeted, upon his announcement, that “it’ll keep the clickbait sites busy.”

But the “Jeopardy” succession drama, beyond a performance contest, became a kind of stand-in for a portfolio of cultural values. The arguments over the celebrity candidates and their qualifications was a proxy fight over the cultural value of knowledge, especially at a time of social battles over science, education and actual vs. alternative facts.

That kind of heated investment is the opposite of the low-key spirit of “Wheel of Fortune.” Sajak will not be its hub forever, but the whole point of the big wheel is to spin and spin and spin while staying in place.