Jonesboro, AR – Jonesboro Right Now – A Jonesboro couple will test their luck on a 40-foot pegboard in front of a national television audience next week, bringing a deeply personal story of community and charity to a popular game show.

It started the way most Hollywood stories don’t: in a tanning bed.

In January 2024, Ellie Stafford Smith noticed a missed call and checked her voicemail transcript. It read, “Hi, this is Natalie with NBC’s The Wall.” Assuming it was a spam caller, she almost dismissed it. Then, reality set in.

“I turned that tanning bed off so fast and jumped in my car and went home so that I could call her back with Nick [Smith],” Ellie laughed.

The frantic callback ultimately landed Ellie and Nick a spot on the 100th episode of The Wall, the NBC game show produced by LeBron James known for its massive 40-foot pegboard and life-changing stakes.

But network producers weren’t calling by chance; they were calling to showcase a legacy built on 600 homemade strawberry pies.

JRN sat down with Ellie to talk about what led to the couple appearing on the show and their experience.

A Recipe for Philanthropy

Smith’s philanthropic journey began in the second grade, an effort that eventually evolved into her Miss Arkansas platform, “Live to Give.”

When Ellie’s grandfather, C.P. Stafford, grew severely ill in late 2017, her fundraising took on a deeply personal direction. Just weeks before he passed away, Ellie convinced him to share his famous strawberry pie recipe, a treat he had always baked for her. He sat in his kitchen with her and “coached” her first pie making effort. After he passed, she posted on Facebook to see if anyone would buy a pie to raise money for the Make-A-Wish Foundation.

“I ended up getting a plethora of comments, and by that February, I was doing a fundraiser,” Ellie joked. “I baked over 200 pies in one weekend, so I think the whole family was ready to kill me.”

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To survive the volume of requests, the project became a massive family effort.

“I had pie crust in the oven down in the basement, pie crust in the oven upstairs… I figured out I couldn’t do it all by myself,” Smith recalled. “I ended up having kind of a little army. My grandparents were washing and cutting strawberries, I was handling the mixture, my mom and even my aunt at times were handling the pie crust. We had an assembly line so that I wasn’t trying to do it all on my own.”

Ultimately, Ellie baked over 600 pies in total, raising more than $20,000 for Make-A-Wish and the Children’s Miracle Network.

Facing the 40-Foot Drop

That overwhelming support caught NBC’s eye. After months of interviews and mock game show Zoom practice, the couple was flown to Los Angeles for a VIP filming experience. Stepping onto the actual set, however, brought a different kind of reality.

“It’s intimidating, and it’s so different watching it on TV than it is being in person. You feel like a little ant,” she said regarding standing beneath the four-story wall.

Despite the scale of the game, Ellie noted that host Chris Hardwick helped calm their nerves. She appreciated his genuine investment in their backstory, ensuring their experience was authentic rather than twisted for television drama.

However, the game’s mechanics—which isolate the couple, with one playing trivia behind the wall and the other managing the drops in front—left them completely in the dark about how the other performed. According to Ellie, the unpredictable nature of the game quickly threw their initial strategies out the window.

“You can make an agreement before you go in saying, ‘We are going to sign the contract, we are going to rip it up no matter what,'” she said, acknowledging the temptation to play it safe. But because Nick was isolated behind the wall answering questions, she had no way of knowing how confident he felt, and Nick had no idea how the board was treating their bank out front.

“It’s really hard to go in with a game plan until you know what batch of questions you’ve got.”

A Hometown Watch Party

As the milestone 100th episode prepares to air next Monday, the couple is experiencing the anxiety of national television exposure. Because of the game’s isolated setup, Ellie said neither of them knows exactly what the other said or did during filming.

“If we’re embarrassed, [we’ll] hide in a hole by ourselves. So, I think we’re just going to have family and close friends together,” Ellie joked.

Regardless of how the game unfolds on screen, Ellie views the broadcast as a victory for the people of Jonesboro who supported her from the very beginning.

“We just feel so loved and supported by this community. They’re so loyal, they’re so helpful,” she said. “I sold 200 pies because people bought 200 pies. They were literally dying to buy them because they loved them so much. So, to get to have that support and love, and so many people who now know my Papaw’s story… is just really special.”

Ellie and Nick’s episode of The Wall will air at 9 p.m. Aug. 24 on KAIT-NBC.

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