CBS no longer wants to talk about it.
Following months of rumors of the daytime talk show’s demise, CBS confirmed on Friday that The Talk would only get a shortened 15th season starting this fall and would sign off for good in December following a “celebratory send-off.”
The show, which launched in 2010, is currently hosted by Sheryl Underwood, Natalie Morales, Jerry O’Connell, Akbar Gbajabiamila, and Amanda Kloots. While Underwood has been with The Talk since its second season, the rest of the hosts joined in 2021.
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“‘The Talk’ broke new ground when it launched 14 years ago by returning daytime talk to CBS with a refreshing and award-winning format. Throughout the years, it has been a key program on CBS’ top rated daytime line-up as it brought timely, important and entertaining topics and discussions into living rooms around the globe,” CBS Entertainment president Amy Reisenbach and CBS Studios president David Stapf said in a statement on Friday.
“It goes without saying that hosting and producing a year-round talk show is no easy task, and we express our sincere gratitude to our amazing hosts Akbar Gbajabiamila, Amanda Kloots, Natalie Morales, Jerry O’Connell and Sheryl Underwood, our executive producer/showrunner Rob Crabbe and the hardworking producing team and crew,” the statement continued. “We also want to acknowledge our former show hosts and colleagues who contributed throughout the seasons. We truly appreciate the skill, creativity, and dedication everyone involved brought to the show every day. And of course, we thank the numerous guests who appeared, and the millions of viewers who tuned in daily. For the final season, we plan to celebrate the show and give it the proper sendoff it deserves when it concludes in December 2024.”
Replacing the soap opera As the World Turns in the CBS daytime lineup in 2010, The Talk was created by actress Sara Gilbert as an alternative to ABC’s woman-centric staple The View. Besides Gilbert, the original cast featured Julie Chen Moonves, Sharon Osbourne, Holly Robinson Peete, Leah Remini, and Marissa Janet Winokur. Since then, the show has also featured Eve, Marie Osmond, and Aisha Tyler as hosts.
While the program has won 11 Daytime Emmy Awards since its debut, much of the attention it has received in recent years was due to Osbourne's controversial departure in 2021 following a tense on-air discussion about race between Osbourne and Underwood, who is Black.
Discussing Piers Morgan’s insensitive remarks about Meghan Markle, Osbourne pressed Underwood to “educate” her on how his comments could be construed as racist before scolding her for becoming tearful, exclaiming that “if anyone should be crying, it should be me.”
The network soon put the show on a brief hiatus amid additional revelations of Osbourne’s past inflammatory behavior with her colleagues, as well as Osbourne complaining that she felt she was being “set up” as a “sacrificial lamb” by the network. By the end of March 2021, she was gone from The Talk. “As part of our review, we concluded that Sharon’s behavior toward her co-hosts during the March 10 episode did not align with our values for a respectful workplace,” CBS said at the time.
