Rosie O’Donnell, resident loose cannon on ABC’s The View is set to leave the show by June, according to Reuters, because the network and the star failed to come to an agreement about her contract. O’Donnell, who has a large family and a partner, didn’t want to commit to the three years ABC was requesting. She wanted only a year’s commitment. They balked and now she’s leaving. She has also announced that she will return to the show for segments and as a guest host, but she won’t be a regular.
Count this viewer among those who will be sad to see her go. Rosie is one of the few women, or celebrities even, who speaks the up and down truth, no matter how ridiculous it makes her sound, no matter how many rolled-eyed looks she gets from her co-hosts, no matter how many trolls on her infamous poetry-inspired blog call her the requisite “fat and ugly.”
That, by the way, is top-of-the-line ammo on the Internet directed towards women. Men can be insulted in so many different ways, but for women, the bottom drops out at “fat and ugly.” O’Donnell has been called those two words for years, and even publicly by Donald Trump, with whom O’Donnell had a lively and compelling feud. O’Donnell doesn’t really seem to care who calls her what. Maybe she’s crying on the inside, but from where I sit, I see a survivor. One I admire a great deal for many different reasons.
In fact, Trump couldn’t wait to chime in after this most recent news about O’Donnell. Trump said, “Rosie’s a loser, she continues to be a loser and she was fired by ABC. And I’m proud to say that I probably had a part in it.”
Think again, Trump. Read that part again where it said they wanted her for three years. They wanted three more years of O’Donnell nailing your platinum bobbles to a wall, a sight many of us were looking forward to.
Unfortunately, The View was really only worth watching while O’Donnell was on it. She ripped through the very bland daily chatter like wildfire, taking on any subject she felt like, being loud, obnoxious and outspoken, the way women never behave on television.
Recently, O’Donnell was the only person granted an interview with Alec Baldwin after his tape-recorded rant at his young daughter was leaked to the media. O’Donnell sympathized with Baldwin, but their interview seemed to be more of Rosie trying to help Baldwin clear his bad name than anything else. When Baldwin refused to admit he did anything really wrong by yelling at his child, after the commercial break he made a specific point to apologize for having called his daughter a “rude, thoughtless, little pig.”
O’Donnell has long been friends with Baldwin and thus, she used what pull she had with women out there to work some old-fashioned spin. In my opinion, it wasn’t a high point for my Rosie admiration, yet one cannot help but admire how this firecracker was yet again dominating the entertainment news with her Baldwin scoop. How often has that happened with The View? With Rosie aboard, the show finally realized its potential. It is, at best, an opportunity for smart women to speak their minds. Too often, the show has been dominated by simple-minded females who look pretty and know when to shut up. I like my hot sauce, my coffee and my female talk show hosts strong so they won’t be ignored.
