Rosie O’Donnell, 64, shared details about her potential return to the small screen—and said it can only happen after her longtime nemesis Donald Trump leaves office.
The former Rosie O’Donnell Show and View host confirmed that her agents are in negotiations for her spot in live television. O’Donnell has teased a return separate from her mid-August stint as a guest host on Jimmy Kimmel Live!, and posted on Instagram earlier this week that she’d be more inclined toward a daytime show.
“It would look a lot like my old show, to tell you the truth,” O’Donnell said on the Tangle podcast. “I think America wants nostalgia. I think what they don’t want is celebrity culture. I think celebrity culture is dead in America.”
“There was a time where, if you could get a big star on your show, the numbers went through the roof,” she continued. “Well, that was before the internet—really, it was before you could literally write a DM to me and I’ll respond,” the actress said. “But, I think the time for celebrity culture has died down.”
Instead of following current conventions of booking Hollywood’s elite, O’Donnell hopes to revert to a former version of the genre. Her show won’t become another stop on celebrity press tours; instead, she said she wants to “bring back an hour of peaceful joy” to viewers anxious over the state of the world.
“We’ve been in the land of gross excess in this country for a long time,” she said. “I’d like to do mostly human interest stories, tell good news, have fun and games with people like we used to, get to have Broadway on—and if a celebrity wants to come on and chat, that’s fantastic, but it wouldn’t be because they had a movie to promote.”
O’Donnell and her agents have determined the best time to launch her show is after Trump leaves office.
“It would be when Trump is no longer in power,” O’Donnell said. “That’s when I’d want it to start, and that’s when the healing must begin.”
Her pitch to potential guests, she said, is simple: “Who wants to come and have fun for 20 minutes?”
