Updated with details: ABC News this morning said Sarah de la O has been signed to direct The View – the first female director in the show’s history.
Meanwhile, Candace Cameron Bure and Paula Faris are on the fast track to join Whoopi Goldberg, Raven Symone and Michelle Collins as co-hosts next season, replacing Nicolle Wallace and Rosie Perez, who are done at the end of this season. Perez announced recently she’s leaving to pursue acting, and Wallace recently was told she was not going to be brought back next season as a regular co-host, owing to her lack of shrillness and insufficient fluency in pop culture. Instead, the show’s conservative voice will be that of Candace Cameron Bure who’d been on everyone’s list of possible new co-hosts for a while; Variety reported her on-the-verge status news this afternoon. The former Full House star (and Kirk Cameron sister) impressed producers recently when she was on the show and got into a squabble with co-host Raven-Symone, over an Oregon bakery’s refusal to make a wedding cake for a lesbian couple. Bure insisted it was not about gay marriage but an issue of “religious freedoms and the freedom of association.” The argument went viral; The View fell in love.
Also in: Good Morning America co-anchor Paula Faris, who will play the part of The View’s actual journalist on staff. ABC News declined to comment.
De la O, a seven-time Emmy winner, has served as director for ABC’s Bachelor Pad, After The Final Rose and Bachelorette Men Tell All. Her work directing live talk shows and events also includes VH1’s Make A Band Famous, E3 All Access Live for Spike, Crowd Goes Wild With Regis Philbin, Bravo’s Watch What Happens Live, Big Morning Buzz on VH1 and red carpet coverage for the TV Guide Network.
She’s replacing director Ashley S. Gorman, who left the show in June. Gorman had been part of the new producing team brought in last summer for the current 18th season, the first without co-creators/executive producers Barbara Walters and Bill Geddie at the helm. Led by new executive producer Bill Wolff, the team included Brian Balthazar as co-executive producer and Gorman as director. Balthazar left in February to return to HGTV, three months after ABC News took over the program a week before the abrupt departure of co-host Rosie O’Donnell.
Wolff said at the time Gorman would be relocating to the West Coast to be closer to his family but would stay in the Disney ABC TV Group family, and that ABC News’ Jeff Winn would fill in for Gorman until a permanent replacement was found. Gorman likewise had directed thousands of hours of live shows in the UK and the U.S., include Hell’s Kitchen, I’m A Celebrity Get Me Out Of Here…NOW!, The Biggest Loser and This Morning.
To recap: Following last season’s turmoil that saw the exits of on-air talent Barbara Walters, Sherri Shepherd and Jenny McCarthy — here’s how this season’s new crop has worked out: returning Rosie O’Donnell was out after a few months, Rosie Perez announced the other day she’s out at the end of this season.
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