"The View": Now in This Viewer's Rearview Mirror (Bye, Ladies!)

 

A momentous week in television. On Dancing with the Stars, Adam Carolla survived the first round, and Priscilla Presley didn’t trip over her face. Britney Spears made a comeback of sorts in a bit part on a sitcom with a popularity buzz quotient lower than the houseguests on Big Brother 9. And I watched my last ever installment of The View.

 

For a decade, I’ve regularly tuned in the 11 a.m. (ET) ABC morning talker. During the Rosie O’Donnell years, it was great stuff--smart, funny, topical and full of entertaining visits from the casts of Broadway shows. Even O’Donnell’s rancorous departure made the show interesting. That final split-screen faceoff with The View’s resident Bush apologist and Fox News-worshipping mole Elisabeth Hasselbeck was one of the most compelling duels on live TV that year.

 

Since then, except for a precious few weeks when Hasselbeck was off on maternity leave, it’s been to hell on a bobsled for Barbara Walters and the ladies. Whoopi Goldberg came in to take Rosie’s old chair on the far left and comedian Sherri Shepherd got the middle seat between Hasselbeck and Joy Behar. Merriment did not ensue.

 

Very soon it became clear that Shepherd was in over her bewigged head in a job that requires not just fast talking but quick thinking. In a discussion of teaching evolution in schools (which she is against), Shepherd expressed confusion over the flat-or-round shape of planet Earth (she’d never thought about it, she said). She stated firmly that Jesus lived before the ancient Greek philosphers (sort of forgetting the entire B.C. era, if she ever knew there was one). Mocked in the mediasphere for being a highly paid idiot, Shepherd fell into the role of The View’s benign babbler, consigned to the “Tell us about your movie” questions with guests and doing stand-up segments about food, makeup and other topics that don’t require more than a ninth-grade education.

 

Goldberg, meanwhile, tried to take the reins and steer the show back to watchability. The 53-year-old Oscar-winning actress knows her politics (like Rosie, she’s a Democrat), history and literature. But like Boss BabaWawa, she’s clueless about pop culture. The Whoopster doesn’t give two hoots about American Idol or Dancing with the Stars and when the show’s opening “hot topics” include mention of those, she has nothing to offer. It’s as though that level of television is beneath her and she can’t believe anyone else would like it.

 

That’s where she fails most in replacing Rosie O’Donnell. Until she went too strident with her political opinions, O’Donnell represented the viewer by proxy. OK, she was a millionaire star with a lesbian “wife,” but she was open about watching hours of junk reality shows and loving them. She was an Idol fanatic, fawning over the contestants like they were her own kids. She was in many ways a typical American woman (except for the millions-having, lesbian-being stuff) with hobbies that included decoupage and making home movies of her kids on her laptop. Fat, funny and fast with the quips, O’Donnell brought a vox populi to The View that it badly needed.

 

That’s all gone. In recent weeks it’s as though Goldberg and Behar (still on top of her game when she gets a chance to speak) have given up. The power player on the panel now is ex-Survivor simp Hasselbeck. She’s grown bold and squawky lately, especially on the topics of Eliot Spitzer’s sex life and on Barack Obama and his speech about race in America. Going back again and again to unsavory comments by Obama’s minister, Jeremiah Wright Jr., she seemed giddy in trying to stir up more controversy. Referring to Obama’s comments about his white grandmother’s admitted fear of some blacks, Hasselbeck said, “He threw her under the bus.”

 

It only got worse. Even when Goldberg, Behar and Shepherd tried to shush her away from repeating the lies about Obama and Wright that the Bill O’Reilly types like to promulgate, she wouldn’t shut up.

 

Even her lip gloss is aggressive.

 

And that’s why I’m quitting The View.

 

It’s no longer a pleasant show to watch over a second cup of coffee. It’s one thing to wince at doddering old Barbara Walters’ increasing lack of control over her own dentures (see this clip for evidence of that), and another to feel my blood pressure soaring because Elisabeth Hasselbeck has launched into another of her nasal diatribes in favor of John McCain, government-sanctioned torture, the “success” of the surge in Iraq or any of the other talking points from Roger Ailes’ morning tip sheet.

 

Balance is all right. Fairness too. But there’s nothing fair or balanced about Hasselbeck’s views as voiced on The View. She’s a robot for the radical Right. She’s a shrike in a sundress. And until she’s gone, The View will not be on view on my TV.

 

Did you know you can hear Adam Carolla’s morning radio show live on the Internet? Right here.