When Meghan McCain returned to The View from maternity leave at the beginning of 2021, her co-host openly admitted on-air: “I did not miss you. Zero.” Those feelings don’t seem to have changed now that McCain has been off the show for several months.
On Friday, The View welcomed back another former conservative co-host, Abby Huntsman, who also happens to be close friends with McCain. Almost immediately, Behar asked her: “Did you miss us? And how does it feel to be back here?”
Huntsman, who left the show in 2020 to work on her father’s failed bid to become Utah’s governor, joked, “I miss getting sweet nothings from you, Joy, in the commercial breaks.”
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Turning more serious, she continued: “It’s fun to be back and I do miss so much of the show.” Huntsman went on to say that “the problem with media today is it’s so black and white” while she considers herself a “very nuanced person.”
“My politics are nuanced and my journey on this show wasn’t one extreme or the other,” she said. “There were some tough days and there were executives here at the time and people here at the time that made too many of my days too difficult. And all of them are gone now.”
“Well, I miss some of them,” Behar replied. “I do miss some of them. I mean, I don’t miss—the panel is perfect now.”
That line, which can really only be taken as a shot at her frequent sparring partner McCain, drew a hearty laugh from the rest of the co-hosts. Huntsman herself smiled and said, “I did miss you, Joy.”
Last month, Huntsman opened up about why she really left the show. “I’m never going to write a tell-all book,” she said in a podcast interview, which itself could be seen as a dig at McCain, who put out her own dishy memoir this fall.
Calling out the “executives in charge” for only caring about “money” and tabloids,” Huntsman added, “You would see people act in ways that were not OK, that was very much part of the toxic environment of The View, and here we were going on the air criticizing others for toxic culture.”
