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By H. Alan Scott
Senior Editor
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The View just hit a milestone almost no daytime talk show reaches: 30 seasons on the air. The new season kicked off with everything you’d expect, surprises, giveaways and, yes, breaking news. But halfway through the premiere, one question wouldn’t stop nagging at me: what is wrong with The View?
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The answer is the hosts. One in particular. Thirty years is a big deal, and for nearly 20 of those years there’s been one person in the moderator’s chair: Whoopi Goldberg. She was always an unconventional pick, handpicked by creator Barbara Walters, and for a long stretch she was the right one. She brought her singular wit to that table, a perspective on politics and parenting and everything in-between that nobody else in daytime could touch. But watch Goldberg lately, and you’d be forgiven for thinking she’d rather be anywhere else.
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She’s lifeless. “Phoning it in” doesn’t begin to cover whatever it is she’s doing on the show these days. And for someone who has loved The View since the beginning (I skipped school for the debut 30 years ago), it’s sad to watch and even sadder to see where Goldberg’s legacy has landed. She looks bothered to be there, seemingly annoyed by her co-hosts’ banter, checked out the second she’s forced to read off the teleprompter. When a celebrity guest stops by, her go-to sign-off, “come back anytime,” lands less like an invitation and more like a distress signal, like she’s begging them to stay so she doesn’t have to do the show with co-hosts she apparently doesn’t want to be around.
And this is seriously hard to write, because Goldberg is undeniably a legend. Only the second Black woman to win an acting Academy Award, Goldberg has achieved EGOT status over the course of her illustrious career. She’s broken barriers for countless generations to follow her and is without doubt a singular talent. That’s what makes this painful to write. Do we expect her to be “on” every second of the day? No. She’s human. But do we expect her to even pretend to enjoy being there? Yes, and that’s not a lot to ask.
But maybe that’s it. Maybe hosting The View was always beneath Goldberg’s talents, and we’ve just taken her for granted. Can we blame her when she should really be on a film set somewhere doing the work she’s known for in films like The Color Purple and Sister Act, or her Tony-winning work on Broadway? In fact, she’s taking a few weeks off from The View to make some of the movies this writer has been waiting for. We need more of this.
“Oh, I’ve thought about leaving all the time, all the time,” Goldberg recently told People exclusively. She told the magazine that she accepted the position in 2007 because “I needed a job desperately.”
Goldberg recently sat down with Keke Palmer on her podcast, Baby, This Is Keke Palmer. When Palmer asked what her favorite part of being on the show was, Goldberg said, “I love the check.” That might sound refreshingly honest, but at this point whatever Goldberg is doing on The View, it’s not worth what they’re paying her. She’s telling us, in her own words, that she doesn’t want to be there. And frankly, it’s making the show hard to watch.
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