By Lisa de Moraes
Wednesday, September 5, 2007
Shut up, Babs! Knock it off, Joy! Put a sock in it, Elisabeth!
Whoopi Goldberg, the Oscar-winning comedy queen, tried to debut on the syndicated talker "The View" yesterday morning, but she only barely got a word in edgeways, what with evil stepsisters Barbara Walters, Joy Behar and Elisabeth "LookatmeI'mpreggersagain" Hasselbeck hogging the microphone and mugging for the camera.
Whoopi is the new moderator, taking over where Meredith Vieira left off when she abdicated to take over for Katie Couric on NBC's "Today" show. In between Vieira's exit and Whoopi's debut was The Dark Year, when Rosie O'Donnell sat in the moderator chair behind the show's slick new plexiglass desk, haranguing token conservative Elisabeth and turning the fluffy chic-chat show into her bully pulpit to rail against Donald Trump, Kelly Ripa and whatever else had her knickers knotted.
But after just one season, Rosie and the plexiglass desk are gone. Whoopi's in, the comfy pine drop-leaf table is back and the studio is bathed in warm yellow hues.
Only something went wrong right away.
Whoopi kept getting shouted down by the others.
We won't know until later today how many people watched her debut. But if it's anything like the crowd that checked out Rosie's first day on the job, it'll come in somewhere between 4 million and 5 million viewers.
Behar, the alleged in-house comic, started right off yakking about how she was sick for a couple of weeks and, to pass the time, she imagined that her on-air colleagues also were sick. Elisabeth declared she'd never do anything so insensitive; Joy snapped that that she wishes she could get pregnant like Elisabeth, so can it.
Elisabeth went on to discuss her new "bangs-and-boobs" look. Babs interrupted to trump them both.
"I have a message to give to you from, just so happens, from the mayor of this city of New York," she simpered. "It's really to me," she told Whoopi, "but it's about you."
Dear Barbara,
When Rosie left I thought we had an understanding that I was next in line, but the phone never rang. Goldberg -- Bloomberg -- you must have gotten confused and we look so alike.
"He's a good egg. I like him," Whoopi said, at an apparent loss for words.
Joy and Elisabeth began to battle for control of the big screen behind them -- the former torturing viewers with photos of her soon-to-be-married daughter and fiance, the latter with pics of her very young daughter on a pony.
Whoopi told Joy that if she really wants to try to get pregnant, she, Whoopi, has one good egg left, which she keeps "very safe in the fridge. And, man --"
"I have this book that I'm committed to," Babs interrupted in one of the worst segues in television history.
"When I left '20/20,' I thought I would have nothing to do. I thought I would learn Spanish and go to museums and things I haven't done," Walters continued, mistaking us for people who care.
"I committed to writing an autobiography. It will be either so good or so awful. It comes out in May," Babs said, adding that the thing that bothers her is that she never kept a diary.
We think she's fibbing.
Over the next few minutes, all Whoopi managed to get in, as the other three women chew over the whole "diary" thing, was:
I don't know if that's a good idea.
And:
No, please.
Finally, Joy -- the only one who seemed to realize they were maybe being a tad rude to their new cast member -- asked Whoopi, "What did you do all summer, by the way?"
Whoopi, a trouper, turned it back to "The View," saying she spent the summer fending off calls from people wanting information about her joining the show, and wondering how much tickets cost.
"Tickets are free," Joy said.
"That's what I tell people," Whoopi replied.
Done with Whoopi, Joy returned to the "diary" thing, talking about Paula Zahn and how the former CNN anchor allegedly wrote juicy bits about her allegedly torrid affair with some guy, which her husband found, according to news reports.
"When you write something down, you've got to know maybe the potential of somebody finding it is a little risky, exciting," opined Ms. Bangsandboobs.
Babs began to whine about BlackBerries and YouTube and how nothing is sacred or private anymore. This from the woman who made her career prying the most private information from various celebs for prime-time specials.
"There is nothing that you can do that is not on YouTube, MyFace," Babs said in what was the funniest line of the whole show.
"I saw somebody in this audience doing something that they were going to [post] on YouTube. I thought, when we have station breaks and whisper and talk to you in the audience -- no more! No secrets!" Babs complained to her studio audience, sounding about 150 years old. ABC, for whom she works as a journalist when she's not being a daytime celebrity, is definitely going to give her notes on that comment.
An interminable period of time later, they tackled Idaho Sen. Larry Craig's problems -- he should have told his wife about the whole arrest for allegedly trying to pick up a guy in an airport loo, they decided. And Craig, it turns out, was also a victim of all these new technology thinggummies.
"There was a time, before cellphones with cameras, there was a time before all of those little things, when you could be private" in a public loo, Whoopi reminisced. Babs, meanwhile, ripped the cops for spending their time trying to catch unsuspecting, non-YouTube generation senators in stings in public bathrooms.
"Who are they protecting?" Babs sniffed.
"Children or young boys," Joy suggested.
"A public restroom is not a place for people to have sex," added Whoopi, for Babs's benefit.
A hideous amount of time was then spent discussing Leona Helmsley leaving $12 million to her dog, and discussing whether quarterback Michael Vick, who pleaded guilty last week to federal dogfighting charges, could have known better than to torture dogs.
From where he comes from, in the South, dogfighting isn't that unusual, Whoopi maintained. The Atlanta Falcons quarterback grew up in Newport News, Va.
"It's like cockfighting in Puerto Rico," Whoopi added. "There are certain things that are indicative to certain parts of the country."
"How about dog torture and dog murdering?" Joy asked.
For some people, dogs are sport, Goldberg said. Wave goodbye to all the dog-loving viewers of "The View."
Then, it was back to YouTube, this time to discuss the Miss Teen USA meltdown. You know, the video that burned up the Web, in which one of the competitors was asked why one-fifth of Americans can't locate the United States on a world map, and the chick responded:
U.S. Americans are unable to do so because some people out there in our nation don't have maps and . . . our education like such in South Africa and Iraq and such, I believe that they should, our education over here in the U.S. should help the U.S. or should help South Africa, and should help the Asian countries, so we will be able to build up our future.
Of course, during The Dark Rosie days, "The View" would not have dared to show that clip, because Donald Trump is an owner of the Miss Teen USA franchise, and Rosie would have launched into a tirade against Trump, and Trump would have called her a fat pig and then they'd have that whole public-relations mess on their hands . . . again.
Whoopi, on the other hand, had this to say:
Now, you know, this could have been one of two things. She could have just had a bad day. Or this is, in fact, who she is. But no one would have known about this . . . [only now] people are going to walk up and go, 'You're the idiot, really.' Because YouTube put it on there.
Much better!
And then, finally -- Danny DeVito, Whoopi's old pal who appeared on the show for her first day. DeVito famously went on "The View" last November, and appeared completely fractured, which he said at the time was the result of partying late into the night and drinking too many Limoncellos.
During the course of his interview yesterday, all that Whoopi managed to get in over the cacophony of her colleagues was:
I just wanted to know. What is [Limoncello]?
and
It smells like a lemon.
No kidding.
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