The View (1997)
The View is a 1997 talk series created by Barbara Walters and Bill Geddie. It stars Joy Behar, Barbara Walters and Whoopi Goldberg.
A table, a studio audience, and whatever the country argued about overnight. Barbara Walters created The View for ABC's daytime block in 1997, and the shape of it has held ever since: a multi-generational panel of women works through the day's Hot Topics, sociopolitical stories in one segment, entertainment news in the next.
Hot Topics opens the hour and sets the temperature. The panel then turns to interviews, with a guest list that swings from actors and musicians on a promotional run to sitting politicians, which is how a morning segment ends up quoted on news sites by lunchtime. Whoopi Goldberg moderates the current table alongside Joy Behar, Sunny Hostin, Sara Haines, Alyssa Farah Griffin and Ana Navarro. Rosie O'Donnell held a seat in an earlier era. The chairs turn over, the generational and political spread of the panel is deliberate, and the disagreements stay in the broadcast.
As of 2026 the show sits in its 29th season, one of the longest-running things ABC puts on in the morning. It has never left New York: ABC Television Studio 23 until 2014, the adjacent ABC Broadcast Center until September 2024, and ABC Studio B since. It suits viewers who like the day's news chewed over in company, by people who know each other well enough to interrupt.
Where to watch The View
Stream: ABC, DirecTV On Demand, Disney+, Hulu, fuboTV
Official site
Cast
- Joy Behar as Self - Co-Host
- Barbara Walters as Self - Moderator
- Whoopi Goldberg as Self - Moderator
- Meredith Vieira as Self - Co-Host
- Star Jones as Self - Guest Co-Host
- Sunny Hostin as Self - Co Host
- Elisabeth Hasselbeck as Self - Co-Host
- Sara Haines as Self - Co-Host
- Ana Navarro as Self - Guest Co-Host
- Sherri Shepherd as Self - Guest
- Lisa Ling as Self
- Alyssa Farah Griffin as Self - Co-Host
Similar series
Explore The View guides
A few thoughts on The View
Daytime has its own history, and The Story of Soaps covers the stretch that shares a network and an audience with this one: a 2020 documentary on American soap opera, the genre that built the morning block The View now sits in. For the advice-and-audience register the panel drops into between news segments, O's best advice ever! collects that kind of talk in print, a 2011 book of the life guidance daytime viewers hear every week. In comics, Alison Bechdel's Dykes to Watch Out For runs on the same engine as Hot Topics: a fixed cast of friends working through the week's headlines strip after strip, where the arguing is also the character work.
Daytime shows where a panel of hosts runs the hour
The View runs on friction between people who sit at the same table every morning, with Hot Topics setting the temperature before any guest arrives. These shows share that build: several hosts, an open segment on the day's stories, and a cast whose chemistry carries the hour. Some lean warmer, some argue more, and all of them pass the floor around.
Talk shows that let the interview run long
Barbara Walters came to The View from network news, and the show keeps a real interview inside a daytime hour: a sitting politician one day, an actor on a promotional run the next. These hosts work the same way, giving a guest room to talk at length and following an answer rather than racing to the next segment.
Daytime hosts with their name above the door
The View spreads its hour across a bench of hosts. These shows put one name on the marquee instead and build the format around her: the same daytime slot, the same mix of celebrity guests, audience games and an opening monologue about the morning's stories, with a single presenter setting the tone.
Books and films about life inside the broadcast
The View has held its ABC slot since 1997, long enough to turn into television history on its own. These titles look at that world from outside the studio: how daytime built an audience, how an interviewer works a subject, and what the job asks of the person on camera. They fill in background a live hour never stops to explain.