“I don’t.”
With that, Rosie walked away, to turn her attention on the other women.
“It was fucking crazy,” Cupp said. “It was bananas. She’s not a stable person.”
* * *
With all the various factions vying for control of The View, nobody wanted to get his or her hands on the show more than Ben Sherwood. It wasn’t just about exerting his power as he prepared to take over one of the biggest jobs in entertainment: overseeing ABC and the other Disney-owned networks. Sherwood had resented ABC’s daytime programming because of, as one colleague put it, “NBC envy.” Throughout Sherwood’s career, working on GMA, he had wanted to add a third hour to his morning show to better compete with the four hours of Today. But he had an obstacle that he couldn’t get around. Once GMA ended at 9:00 a.m., ABC stations aired Live, and Kelly Ripa had inserted a clause in her contract that guaranteed her that time slot. There was always a chance, though, that if Sherwood controlled The View, he could slowly morph the 11:00 a.m. hour into another, later edition of GMA, using the same crew and lesser-known ABC News correspondents such as Paula Faris and Sara Haines.
Sweeney’s hire of Rosie had been the best defense to prevent the GMA-ification of The View. Even as a lame-duck executive, she refused to surrender the talk show. Besides, no love was lost between Sherwood and Sweeney, since he had pushed her out.
Sherwood had a dubious reputation at ABC. Growing up in a wealthy family in Beverly Hills, he was the subject of mockery as a graduate student in a 1988 Spy magazine article by Andrew Sullivan. The piece painted Sherwood as an insufferable Rhodes Scholar who had stuffed his résumé with summer internships, while annoying the hell out of his classmates at Harvard. “Machiavelli, who is widely misunderstood, said that in the long run it’s not very important to be popular, because popularity is fleeting, but respect is permanent,” Sherwood told the Los Angeles Times in an interview after winning the Rhodes.
When Sherwood returned from Oxford, he worked his way up the ladder as a producer at ABC, getting in the good graces of Diane Sawyer. In 2003, after leaving another job at NBC Nightly News, he intensely lobbied Sawyer to let him take over GMA, convincing her to let him replace her trusted executive producer, Shelley Ross. “Ben had been emailing Diane and sort of in a veiled way, leading her to believe that he was consulting for Today,” Ross recalled. In the fall of 2003, Sawyer set up a lunch with Sherwood, which Ross attended. “Diane was asking him what’s important now. And I remember Ben saying, ‘Cruise ships!’” That year, stories about the outbreak of the norovirus virus had led to a viewership jump, but Ross didn’t think it was practical—or possible—to send her anchors out to sea.
“There was a conga line of people who wanted my job,” Ross said. “I didn’t give much thought to any of them. I knew the job I was doing. I was increasing ratings and revenue.” But GMA was still losing to Today, and Sherwood’s pitch to Sawyer was that he would move them to number one. In the spring of 2004, he was appointed the next executive producer of GMA. Ross was moved, against her wishes, to oversee Primetime Live.
But it soon became clear Sherwood couldn’t deliver, despite some elaborate plans. For example, in May 2006, Sherwood went to great lengths to prevent the cast of the hot summer movie The Da Vinci Code from appearing on Today. He thought he had an edge because his wife, Karen Kehela, the co-chairwoman of Imagine Entertainment, had shepherded the blockbuster. But Today bookers still snatched up director Ron Howard and the cast for a week of interviews in Europe with Matt Lauer. With millions of dollars at stake, Columbia Pictures didn’t want to settle for a program with fewer viewers.
ABC News veterans told me that Sherwood never deciphered GMA’s secret formula of hard and soft stories. “I really think he was ill equipped,” Ross said. “On morning shows, you’re rated every single minute. And I don’t think he’s a real producer. Or a leader. People who work for Ben often will tell you that you’re not working on the show, but you’re working to advance Ben Sherwood’s career.”
Sawyer eventually lost patience with Sherwood, and they stopped talking. After she made it clear that she wanted to get rid of him, he moved to Los Angeles to “be closer to his family.” He researched a 2009 book called The Survivors Club: The Secrets and Science That Could Save Your Life. Yet, after a few years away from the news business, he was able to sweet-talk Sweeney into allowing him to return to ABC. This time, he was rewarded with a bigger office as the president of the news division.
“I fancy myself a writer,” Sherwood once told me. He often recited this line to his staff, which made his colleagues roll their eyes. When one of his employees made a crack to a friend of Sherwood’s at the company that Sherwood wasn’t actually a writer, word got back to him. “Ben made it his mission to make the employee’s life as miserable as possible, forcing him to leave,” recalled a former executive.
Back at ABC in 2010, he was determined to grow GMA’s audience. He started telling staff how unimpressed he was with coanchors Robin Roberts and George Stephanopoulos. “They are so boring together,” Sherwood griped, as he plotted to replace one of them. He brought in Josh Elliott, a sports anchor from ESPN, and celebrity correspondent Lara Spencer to pad the GMA team. But Sherwood soon got on Elliott’s nerves by starting to dress like him, asking for the brands of his suits. (Elliott left the show in 2014.) It’s still up for debate if Sherwood and his team actually improved GMA or if they were the beneficiaries of luck. During his tenure, Today made the stupid decision to fire Ann Curry, and GMA galloped ahead because of the backlash. Suddenly, Sherwood stopped complaining about George and Robin.
Sherwood had his sights set on Sweeney’s job. Even though he didn’t program daytime, he helped broker a deal with Katie Couric to host a talk show following her poorly received five years at the CBS Evening News. It required some heavy lifting. After Oprah retired, some speculated that The View might take over her time slot in the afternoon. But that idea was quickly shot down because the owned and operated stations didn’t want to replace Oprah with another talk show. They would rather program that slot with an hour of local news, which would be cheaper for them than a pricey syndication deal.
Sherwood spoke to Iger, and they made a backroom deal. They agreed to give up an hour by promising to cancel something soon (they later axed 2012’s The Revolution, a lifestyle show with fashion expert Tim Gunn). As a result, the stations would still get their extra hour for news, and ABC would now have Katie, a daytime talk show that they billed as the next Oprah.
When Couric pitched her show to ABC in 2011, Sweeney asked her for her vision.
“Oh, Anne,” said Couric with a whiff of condescension. “Don’t you worry about that, dear. We’ll take care of it.”
Sweeney’s blood went cold. Either Couric had been having side conversations, or she had a strange way of trying to sell a talk show. In the end, Sherwood took credit for bringing Couric to ABC. He was working overtime to undermine Sweeney, urging some of his powerful producing friends to sing his praises to Iger while taking a knock at his boss. Eventually, his campaign succeeded. Iger offered Sherwood Sweeney’s job, and in March 2014 she announced she was leaving to pursue a new career—she decided at the last minute—as a TV director.
It didn’t matter for Sherwood that Katie turned out to be a disaster, the Gigli of daytime TV. Since Couric was collecting a $16 million paycheck, she had to deliver a monster hit. Couric had the chops to handle hard and soft news on Today, but she was no Oprah. Her tenure at CBS had turned her into a news snob. According to staffers, she saw herself as such a serious journalist that she needed to intellectualize every story they pitched to her. That was fine for an evening broadcast. But in daytime, she had to steer softball conversations with Jessica Simpson (Couric’s first interview in the fall of 2012) while plugging gift card giveaways from TJ Maxx. When she interviewed Joan Rivers, Couric insulted her by asking about her plastic surgery. Rivers ripped Couric in half, and the show had to cut out some of those excha
nges from the final broadcast because they got so ugly. “What the hell is she doing?” muttered a producer backstage, taking Rivers’s side.
Since Katie wasn’t broadcast live, Couric had some room for error, since things could be reshot. But she went overboard, routinely filming ninety minutes of content for a single hour of TV. This wasn’t just a nightmare for her editors, but also for her guests. Rachel Maddow was particularly annoyed to be kept waiting backstage as Couric kept slowly taping her segments.
Couric had enlisted an old NBC friend, Today’s Jeff Zucker, to be her executive producer. She also relied on a familiar hand from CBS, an executive named Abra Potkin, who came to ABC Daytime to help with some of the staffing. That led to two competing teams, as Potkin had Sherwood’s ear as part of his circle. According to the producers I talked to, Zucker didn’t have any faith in the daytime hands, who were inexperienced in news interviews. That made sense because Couric wanted her show to be newsier. The network was worried about that approach, but Zucker didn’t want their input. When an ABC executive came to observe the show, Zucker locked her out of the control room.
All hopes that Katie could succeed were dashed after Zucker bolted from the show after four months to run CNN in January 2013. One staffer recalled a meeting where Potkin, as the boss, lay with her back on the floor. “If we can’t get the ratings up, we’re all going to be out of jobs!” she wailed. Couric didn’t seem to care. She was ready to ditch daytime.
* * *
When Katie was canceled after two miserable seasons, The View inherited her fancier studio in time for Season 18. The show was now officially part of ABC News, in both location and management. Even though Potkin had been part of Couric’s failed outing, she was able to position herself to consult on The View, along with everybody else. Rosie was happy that ABC was moving the View set because she had so many bad memories from the other building. And she couldn’t go back there because of her anxiety over using the communal toilets.
As the president of Disney/ABC Television Group, Sherwood would soon alienate some of his most valuable talent. He tried to give notes to Shonda Rhimes, telling her that the pilot for her series How to Get Away with Murder didn’t make sense. When she left for a lucrative Netflix deal in 2017, many ABC staffers thought that it was Ben’s fault for acting as if he were her creative equal. Sherwood was responsible for not telling Kelly Ripa that he was stealing her Live cohost Michael Strahan for GMA in April 2016, which prompted her to stop coming to work for a few days and to deliver a stunning soliloquy on TV about respect in the workplace. But before all this happened, Sherwood was determined to make The View his first fix-it project.
By bringing on Wolff to head The View, Sherwood thought that he had hired a useful ally. But Sherwood hadn’t anticipated the difficulties in managing all the strong women on The View, which Geddie had done without a lot of noise. At MSNBC, Wolff had worked with one host, Maddow, who ran a tight ship and produced her own scripts. “On his first day, in he walks in a suit and tie, and he was a sweaty, hot mess,” recalled one staffer. “He was a nice guy, but every other word out of his mouth was fuck. He sounded like the coach of a Little League team: ‘This is going to be fucking great. We are going to be fucking awesome again.’”
Wolff told his employees that he was going to have an open-door policy. “His door was never open after that,” said one staffer. Wolff was overwhelmed by the constant flurry of questions. He never had the answers and he’d always say that he’d need to consult with someone else. When one of his employees brought up Elisabeth and Rosie’s fight, Wolff confessed that he had no idea what she was talking about—that’s how little he knew about The View. “The news people wanted a puppet,” said an insider. “They wanted someone they could control. Here’s Bill Wolff.”
Regardless of who was in charge, ABC still had a dilemma: Who had won the View audition? The executives were underwhelmed by everyone. Hostin, who had been the favorite, fell out of the running because of her association with the Cupp fight, where she couldn’t get a word in. Hackner was grasping at straws for names to brainstorm that weren’t even viable choices. She wanted to know if they could hire Carrie Underwood at a moment’s notice, even though the country star lived in Nashville, didn’t talk politics, and would have been ridiculously expensive. Sherwood liked Wallace, who had been the White House communications director for George W. Bush, and he eventually made her an offer.
His only instruction to her was to dye her hair blond from brown. “Ben Sherwood called me and said, ‘You’re going to be my modern blond mom,’” Nicolle recalled. “He had told me to learn faster than George Stephanopoulos did—that you need to share your personal life with viewers. George had learned pretty quickly, and George wasn’t on The View. So I thought that was a weird thing to say to me.”
For the last seat, Wolff suggested someone who wasn’t part of the test group. Two weeks before The View began, he called Rosie Perez, the star of such films as 1989’s Do the Right Thing and 1992’s White Men Can’t Jump, who had been a guest on Maddow to talk about politics. Wolff asked her to come to ABC for a meeting. “We talked boxing for the first ten minutes of the interview,” Perez told me about their conversation. They were both avid sports fans, although boxing hadn’t traditionally been a topic that drove The View. ABC made Perez an offer on the spot because it had no backup plan. Two warning signs that this wouldn’t be a good fit were that Perez wasn’t a morning person, and she had already committed to a Broadway play that winter, Larry David’s Fish in the Dark.
Rosie O’Donnell was a fan of Perez’s life and work but was surprised to hear she was becoming her colleague. “I love Rosie Perez,” she told me. “I didn’t even know she was being considered.”
Because everything for the new season of The View had been a discombobulated mess, Wolff was at the studio around the clock before the show went live, trying to cobble together the new set. The four cohosts practiced together only once. When Rosie saw the reconfigured Hot Topics table, Wolff had already lost her confidence. It was too small to hold all of them.
* * *
A familiar face returned to The View on September 15, 2014. No, not just Rosie O’Donnell. On top of everything else, Barbara Walters had decided that she’d had enough of retirement after only four months. She demanded that she come back on TV to bless the new cast of The View. ABC executives, wary of what might unfold if they let Barbara loose in front of an audience, wouldn’t allow her a spot on the live show.
But out of respect, they cooked up a skit, since she loved doing those so much, in which she’d dress up like a queen. Once Barbara had arrived at the Barbara Walters Building, where The View now taped, it was as if she’d entered a bad dream. She noticed that the new set resembled an IKEA store. The green sofa where the ladies used to huddle had been changed to beige lounge chairs, which kept them all apart. Barbara didn’t get one of those comfortable cushions. Instead, she was directed to the corner of the stage, where producers had set up a stiff red throne with golden armrests.
Barbara had dressed up for the occasion in a white blouse and a ruby-red belt, as if Margaret Thatcher had been given a cameo in The Wizard of Oz. Barbara took her seat, ready to remind viewers that she had invented the show. Unlike Bill Geddie, who always kept close tabs on the cohosts, Wolff kept a distance backstage. He walked into the greenroom (actually painted a lime green, thanks to a designer with a sense of humor) and spotted some of his friends who had played hooky to root him on. “Jesus Christ,” Wolff whispered under his breath. “I feel like it’s my bar mitzvah.”
Before the audience was let in, the cameras rolled on a scene that was out of King Lear. Barbara was ready to parcel out her empire. She blessed all the new cohosts, who kneeled before her throne.
“And by the way, I was told I would have a crown,” Barbara said. That was the cue for the prop guy to hand over a sparkling tiara. “Fits perfectly!” she said as she placed it over her head. Then Barbara had to vacate the set with thirty
minutes left before airtime. She took a seat backstage, crossing paths with a group of journalists who had been invited to cover the new season of The View.
“Who are these people?” she muttered.
The studio, packed with VIPs, looked like a homecoming game, with two teams divided up. The ABC Daytime executives—Lisa Hackner and Randy Barone—were there, to keep up appearances that the show was still officially part of their portfolio. With them sat Abra Potkin. Closer to the stage were the real MVPs. Sherwood had brought along his team, a trio of ABC News veterans that operated like a three-headed cyclops, with their loyalty pledged to Sherwood. They were James Goldston, who would run ABC News after Sherwood got promoted, and his lieutenants, Tom Cibrowski and Barbara Fedida.
At 11:00 a.m., the new View was ready to roll. As the cohosts wandered out to Taylor Swift’s “Shake It Off,” they didn’t exactly embody the song’s carefree attitude. “Are we even on?” Rosie mouthed to Whoopi, who shook her head. Wolff had changed their entrance to a different door at the last minute, without realizing that he’d thrown off all their cues. Luckily, on TV, you couldn’t see their confusion.
“Welcome to the newer View,” Whoopi said. “Hey, this is a lot of brand-new stuff.” She introduced the rest of the cast. Rosie O’Donnell charmed her way through her introduction, but both Nicolle and the other Rosie struggled to keep the conversation breezy. “Oh,” stuttered Perez, when asked to talk about herself. “I’m sitting here with three fabulous women. I’m loving life. Wow.”
The show felt disjointed. To settle her nerves, Rosie O’Donnell got up at every commercial break, armed with an impromptu stand-up set. Whoopi looked annoyed that Rosie was putting on her own show within the real show. This had never happened under Barbara, as she made the cohosts use the commercial breaks to look over their notes. When one member of the audience asked Rosie if they were adding a fifth cohost, she scoffed in mock outrage, “Get the fuck out. The show is thirty-eight minutes. Four is enough.”
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