After nearly three decades, it’s hard to imagine The View without Joy Behar. With the exception of a period between 2013 and 2015, the comedian and television personality has been a member of the daytime chat show’s panel of hosts since its very first episode in 1997, and has been on the show longer than any of her current or former co-hosts.
But on the most recent episode of the show’s official Behind the Table podcast, Behar told host and The View executive producer Brian Teta that her agent initially advised her not to take the gig.
“When I got this job — when was it? 1997? — I was sort of on the cusp of getting a sitcom. I had been in a sitcom already, and I’d done a pilot,” Behar, who had been a regular on NBC’s short-lived TV adaptation of the 1987 film Baby Boom in the late ’80s, recalled.
“The call comes for this job to do The View with Barbara Walters,” she continued, referencing the show’s legendary, Emmy-winning co-creator, who died in 2022. “Do you know that my agent told me not to take it?”
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According to Behar, now 82, her agent argued that the show didn’t pay enough.
“I said, ‘It’s in New York City with Barbara Walters. I don’t wanna live in L.A. I wanna live in New York City [and] work with Barbara Walters,’ ” she recalled telling him. “Because I knew that it would be a smart show with her behind it.”
Needless to say, Behar went with her gut rather than following her agent’s advice. Her snarky, no-nonsense point of view on the show even earned her a 2009 Daytime Emmy Award.
But as she told Teta earlier in their conversation, the push-back she’d gotten throughout her early career as a stand-up comic didn’t stop once she joined The View.
“I was just told by executives and network people and agents I was too New York — which I think is code for too Jewish or too ethnic,” she said.
Teta noted that Behar, who was born in Brooklyn to a Catholic family of Italian descent, is not actually Jewish.
“It doesn’t matter,” she shot back. “I think that that was what even somebody even said when I got this show. Somebody I knew in the past told [The View co-creator] Bill Geddie, ‘Oh, she’s too local.’ ”
Teta pointed to Behar’s prominent Brooklyn accent and her “New York sensibility.”
“But it’s part of the country,” Behar said of her hometown. “You can’t have everybody coming from Iowa.”
The View airs weekdays on ABC (check local listings).
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