Before last September, Joy Behar was pulling in roughly $7 million a year to yell about how awful Republicans are. Sunny Hostin was making an estimated $1.6 million. Sara Haines, $1.5 million. Whoopi Goldberg, the 70-year-old anchor of ABC's The View, was getting over $8 a year to tell people President Trump is a Nazi.
Not any more. All six of The View's co-hosts have been forced to take paycuts in the last year. And, according to sources, the cuts are going to keep on coming.
Reportedly, the women of The View are most upset about the big slashes ABC is making to their wardrobe budgets. One source said, "They're all mad because they were all wearing really expensive designer clothes, and now it's the same budget of a Wendy Williams-type show versus a marquee daytime show." Ouch.
Alyssa Farah Griffin, 37, the lone conservative on the panel, although she hates President Trump and criticizes the Trump administration's policy choices as often as her liberal coworkers, was reportedly denied a raise this year when she asked for one. She's also reportedly the lowest paid member of the panel.
"They keep downsizing and downsizing and downsizing," another source told reporters. The general mood backstage, per those familiar with the situation: "There are definitely tensions with ABC."
Here's what makes this interesting. The View has been the top-rated network daytime talk show. It's been on the air since 1997 — nearly three decades of hot takes and interrupted sentences. And yet the network that airs it is systematically gutting its budget like it's a local news desk in Omaha.
That math only works one way. Ratings may be high relative to a weak daytime field, but the revenue those ratings generate clearly isn't justifying the multi-millions it costs ABC to produce the show. Advertisers are reportedly fleeing for the greener pastures of the shows competitors. ABC exec's also reportedly downsized the studio the show is filmed in, cut popular episodes that cost more than the average show (like the annual Halloween episode) and are searching for advertisers who want to do in episode product placement advertising to help shore up the emptying coffers.
Good luck.
