After brilliantly firing two-thirds of their hosts right before they were scheduled for a week of prerecorded episodes/vacation, the producers of ABC’s The View allowed Sherri Shepherd and Jenny McCarthy to lie Monday morning. It was awkward if you were Jenny, full of tears if you were Sherri and totally chill as usual if you were Whoopi.
Jenny decided to start things off with a bang by psyching out the audience: she announced that the rumors were not true and that she and Sherri were staying with the show. Jigga what? She then allowed the audience to applaud for her for almost 20 seconds before backtracking and admitting that yes, actually, she was moving on to greener pastures. “After much consideration I’ve taken a new job that will allow me to do what I do best, which is to talk without having to interrupt anyone,” she said about her as-of-yet-unannounced gig. And this woman considers herself funny?
Sherri Shepherd acted as if it had always been in the cards that she was planning on leaving the show after this season, indicating that she didn’t want to “distract” from the Barbara Walters retirement parade by announcing it earlier. “A lot of the people close to me and some of the producers here, they’ve known since the spring that I did not intend to return to the show once my contract ended in August,” she said, before reeling off a list of people she wanted to thank, including, bizarrely, Whoopi Goldberg for supporting her “even when I didn’t appreciate it.”
So far, Walters has not really said much about the hosts being fired except that the show will “continue,” though whether it will with her co-producer Bill Geddie is unclear.