So Rosie O'Donnell is getting that NBC variety show, even though it seemed impossible that this woman is still a ratings draw.
Starting next Wednesday, Rosie Live will air at 8 p.m., and is sure to include some fun guests. Not, though, any ladies of The View, who took their turns sharpening their claws against their former coworker today.
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Thomas Beatie, the "pregnant man" who gave birth to a daughter earlier this year, revealed he is already in his first trimester of Round Two. He will be appearing on Barbara Walters tomorrow to give the first interview since giving birth to his daughter. Beatie is a transgendered female-to-male who made the talk show rounds last spring with his beard and 8-month pregnant belly.
That's kind of amazing, when you think about. With some many women trying and failing to get pregnant these days, and Beatie being able to do it not once but twice despite the massive quantities of male hormones he'd been taking, is sort of a good reason to convince your infertile aunt Linda that it's time she grew her mustache out.
Before Sarah Palin can continue her crazy career with a lucrative talk show deal, she'll have to prove that she can hold her own in front of other sympathetic hosts. So right now, she's getting courted by everyone from Babs to Oprah to suspender-wearing Larry King.
So far though, she's only accepted one offer, and the most obvious one to boot, Greta van Susteren over at the "sympathetic" Fox News.
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Within minutes of hearing the news that Barack Obama would be the next President of the United States, my mind went to a dark place: "Take that, Elisabeth Hasselbeck!" I couldn't wait to turn on The View this morning and watch the show's resident crazy cry in shame and weep for the state of our nation. Unfortunately, she threw us for a loop and acted like a classy, intelligent human being. Who knew?
Bonus footage includes Sherri Shepherd crying tears of joy in response to last night's election results. It's quite sweet, actually.
Full video after the jump.
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According to Mother Earth Whoopi Goldberg, the blond bitch Hasselbek gets more death threats than anyone else on The View. But they don't all hate her, as the Chicago Sun-Times implied! "Politically we could not be more opposite, but I respect her tremendously. Truth is, we could not have a dialogue without Elizabeth."
Right. Because then someone else on the show would have to become the ridiculous scapegoat, and Sherri Shepherd already wrote it in to her contract that she doesn't want to be "the most dumbest one."
The View was awesome yet again this morning, thanks partly to Elisabeth waking up on the wrong side of the bed and also because of Whoopi's absence. Poor Barbara Walters had to mediate between Joy and Elisabeth, which was ineffective and led to one of the more intense shouting matches we've seen as of late:
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On Friday you and your friends were all gearing up for a 20/20-watching party to see Christie Brinkley's ex Peter Cook talk to Barbara Walters, weren't you? Don't worry, we all had that party, and we were all disappointed (actually, I only caught the last segment about why teenage hippy ravers are too stupid to vote, which was also disappointing, albeit in a totally different way).
However, the whole episode can be summarized in this one clip, which you and your friends watched over and over because you are turned on by Babs saying the word masturbation.
Does it strike anyone else as a bit odd that the most spirited political discussion these days is coming for those five overly percolated women on The View? Sure, Bab's show has always been fun to watch, in that "what would Sex and the City be like if they were all old and didn't like each other and not everyone was white" sort of way, but never before this election show actually contained something resembling a serious political discourse that is being as closely monitered in the papes and blogs as, oh say, an Olbermann/Matthews feud.
We're on Day Three of resident Republican and stereotypical blond Elizabeth Hasselbeck's futile promotion of John McCain and the Republican party. Once again, the usually ditzy Sherri Shepherd is on the attack, playing off yesterday's feud, and now she has Joy to back her up again, and threatening to flash everybody.
This is a Joy Behar nation folks, we just live in it:
Sherri Shepherd, bless her heart, reared her slightly empty head today on The View to stand up to resident crazy Elisabeth Hasselbeck. The ladies' Friday show was pretaped, so today they threw in extra chirping about Thursday night's debate. Can you guess who Elisabeth thought did the best job? She tried to convince the other women, which is when Sherri "I haven't thought about whether the earth is flat or round" Shepherd got riled up and spewed some semi-coherent thoughts for the first time in her life. We never thought we'd say this, but: Good for you, Sherri!
Howard Stern married long-time girlfriend Beth Ostrosky this weekend, leading to the biggest washed-up celebrity clusterfuck of the century. Let's see, the guest list included John Stamos, Jimmy Kimmel, Joan Rivers, Billy Joel, Donald Trump, Chevy Chase, Artie Lang, and Barbara Walters. Not to mention the ceremony was presided over by Kelly Ripa's wife husband, former soap star Mark Consuelos.
Do you think that some of these B+ listers phoned the paparazzi to let them know they'd be showing up to Stern's NY bash at Le Cirque, or did the photogs receive a formal invitation from the happy couple?
This, ladies and gentlemen, is why I watch The View morning after morning in hopes of witnessing something amazing. Elisabeth Hasselbeck, the moron who gives Republicans everywhere a bad name, had a minor meltdown during the show's first segment today. She was so beyond help that not even Barbara Walters came to her rescue. The topic, of course, was the idiocy of Sarah Palin, which turned into another session of Elisabeth spouting off nonsensical remarks to defend her beloved McCain/Palin ticket. After Barbara correctly likened Palin's preparation for the debate to a high school student cramming for an exam, Elisabeth became extremely angry, which is when this happened (inciting a round of boos from the audience):
Former prez and frequent misspeaker Bill Clinton appeared on The View yesterday to talk about politics and shiznit. Billary is trying to repair his image after several "testy" interviews with the press; the fact that the politically conscious ladies (including self-proclaimed "fundit" Joy Behar) handed John McCain's ass back to him when the senator appeared on the program probably didn't hurt either, insists Jacques Steinberg.
We say: Billary was just hoping that Barbara would call him "sexy" like she did to Barack, and maybe convince that little Hasselbeck tease to come over and play ball for his team ifyouknowwhatimean.
The latest ruckus caused by Sherri Shepherd has nothing to do with the shape of the earth — this time, the View co-host is admitting that she’s “had more abortions than [she] would like to count.” Scandalous! Except that didn’t bother us as much as this quote from Shepherd:
Picture it, the women on The View are discussing the dreaded n-word. Whoopi Goldberg is explaining why black comedians use it and why they should be allowed to — she’s very frustrated. Elisabeth Hasselbeck doesn’t understand. She starts to cry and seems to make the argument that we can’t move forward in race relations if black entertainers keep using the word. I roll my eyes. Barbara is uncomfortable and interrupts. If you can’t picture it, check out the video after the jump.
If you want to listen to the abridged audio version of Barbara Walters' over-hyped memoir, you can forget about hearing one thing in particular: moaning coming from the upstairs bedroom. That's because the five-disc, six-hour spoken edition of Audition cuts out the most talked about talking points: "None of her romantic relationships outside of her three marriages — not even the most-publicized revelation from the book, her secret romance with former Massachusetts Senator (and then married) Edward Brooke — are anywhere to be found." Some readers (listeners?) might view this as the publisher cheating consumers out of the most interesting, raunchy details of the TV vet's life, but don't go crying to them; they're standing by their "abridged means edited" excuse. And Cindi Berger, Walter's publicist, says that her client "approved the abridged version of the book," but just didn't feel the love stuff was important enough to include. "The focus was just to be about her work," Berger explains. "The men in her life was not her priority." Somebody should have told her endless publicity tour that.
Yes, according to conservative media group and underground revolutionary army-sounding The Resistance. Barbara "has now sunk to the very level of other attention-starved celebrities such as Paris Hilton or even Steve-O from Jackass," because of a 30-year old affair she admits to in her new book Audition. As you'll remember from the countless media reports and Larry King interviews, she was sleeping with then-Massachusetts senator Edward W. Brooke, who was married at the time, while seeing Alan Greenberg, the future chairman of Bear Stearns.
And then, after breaking up with Brooke, she dated Alan Greenberg and Alan Greenspan (how husband to NBC News' Andrea Mitchell) at the same time. And oh, the hijinks that ensued because of their similar names! CONTINUED »
As part of promoting her book Audition, Barbara Walters, whose wrinkles you may count to find the age of the the TV biz, is throwing everyone under the bus. First it was ex-beau Sen. Edward Brooke, and now Star Jones, who tried reinventing herself as a skinny Court TV host and, well, found little success.
In her memoir, Walters claims Jones forced Walters and the crew to lie on the show about her gastric bypass surgery, which she's only recently come clean about. So how does bitter Star Jones, who's saying goodbye to maybe-gay husband Al Reynolds, feel about Barbara's treatment? CONTINUED »
Is it fair to expect the press to snap up gossipy tidbits about your publishing house's high-profile new book and then ask them to keep proper reviews under embargo? No!, says Galley Cat's Emily Gould.
Barbara Walter's memoir Audition, from Knopf, has been splashed all over this website and elsewhere for the revelation that she bedded a married Massachusetts senator (and a black one at that!). That news bite was revealed on Oprah by Walters herself as part of a publicity tour. But what about the rest of the book's material? Knopf wanted today to be the first day any reviews would be published, since today is the official on-sale date. But the New York Times ran its review yesterday, flouting the request, which is essentially an invitation for a paper as influential as the Times to break the rules. Because it can.
Why didn't Barbara Walters published her very personal memoir Audition, of which Knopf is printing 625,000 copies, before now? Because that would've involved revealing she has a developmentally disabled older sister, her estrangement from her nightclub impresario father, her on-and-off-again relationship with her daughter, the details of three broken marriages, numerous other romantic relationships (including that one), and the fact that when she left Today, there were no going away parties of the kind Katie Couric saw. CONTINUED »
In Barbara Walters, we see a woman who refuses to imagine what the end of her career might look like. Which is why she felt perfectly comfortable hitting up Oprah, to plug her book Audition: A Memoir, to reveal she carried on an affair with Massachusetts' married republican senator, Edward W. Brooke, in the 1970s, after meeting in a New York restaurant. She wouldn't want to go out on this note, would she?
The affair ended when Washington Post gossip Maxine Cheshire started running items about the twosome; Walters says that's when she ended the relationship, though that's also when Brooke asked his wife for a divorce. But for the good of their careers, they stopped seeing each other.
"Ed Brooke was simply the most attractive, sexiest, funniest, charming, and impossible man," writes Walters. "I was excited, fascinated, intrigued, and infatuated."
Every reporter's attempt to get comment from Brooke, who is now 88, have failed, which, uh, might suggest he has no interest in discussing his decades-old tryst. Kudos to Walters, then, for throwing him under the bus to move copies of the book.
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