The search is over. Final details are still being worked out but I’ve learned that actress Rosie Perez and political commentator Nicolle Wallace are expected to take the vacant seats on The View when the ABC daytime talk show returns for a new season September 15. They would join Rosie O’Donnell and Whoopi Goldberg. Perez and Wallace would succeed co-hosts Sherri Shepherd and Jenny McCarthy, who exited last month.
It’s as if the producers got together and said, “Is there any way we can possibly make this show more shrill and irritating? Hey-ROSIE PEREZ!”
The real point I’m posting this at all though is the clever trickery of the Nicolle Wallace hire. The View has been forced in recent months to try out some real conservative women (Dana Loesch and Mary Katherine Ham, to name a couple) as guest hosts in what seemed like a sincere effort by producers to reach out to the political half of America usually ignored by television. They get some political cover by going to an old media playbook and hiring a useful idiot Republican who became popular as a pundit largely by bashing other Republicans. The press reports are all dutifully saying that Wallace is a “conservative” so the show’s higher-ups can say, “See, DIVERSITY!” She’s a conservative in the New York Times/Washington Post mold which, again, means being a Republican who will speak ill of other Republicans.
The upside to all of this is that as long as Wallace remains on TV she won’t be yet another losing consultant who is recycled by the party.
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