Journalists told me that a talk show wouldn't work. Some told me I was going to get canceled before my first season was up.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
You do a job; your show gets canceled. You get used to it.
For a long time, my shows were about people walking out or about getting my gigs canceled or having the presenter not wanting to pay me.
Every so often, there is an article saying the old kind of talk show isn't possible now. In the oldest kind of talk show, you only had the choice of that or two other channels!
I didn't know that I could do a talk show. I didn't know that we could bring variety to daytime. I didn't know that people wanted to see singing, and dancing and comedy in the morning.
Having a show get canceled is like, 'Oh, you have caviar between your teeth,' you know what I mean? Because you had a show in the first place.
But as a result of that, there was, once the show ended, there was this talk for sort of four, five months about what was going to happen, and if we were going to move to Showtime, and if we were going to be bought by ABC or whatever.
What I can say that's different in American television... in Britain, they wouldn't cancel something after a couple of episodes. In the States they would. They would just decide it's not working, take it off and put something else in on the fall schedule.
I've been on so many primetime shows that were cancelled - after one episode, after 10 episodes, after just one season. I got used to that. But I found myself choking up a bit at 'OLTL.' It was really hard to say goodbye to those people. It was not the way we wanted to go out.
My goal was always to take a talk show to the network. I never wanted to be on MSNBC.
I didn't have to wait six years to get my show on the air, worry that someone else had a similar idea, or wait around for notes that took my voice out of the show.