Two days after her split-screen throwdown with Elisabeth Hasselbeck, TMZ.com and the AP are reporting that Rosie O’Donnell will not be returning to The View, ending her run on that show three weeks early. TMZ quotes an ABC statement saying, “We had hoped that Rosie would be with us until the end of her contract three weeks from now, but Rosie has informed us that she would like an early leave.”
This follows Rosie’s hint at her own blog (closed to comments today) that she might not return to the show, after the shouting match with Hasselbeck. Rosie had attacked her co-host for not defending her against charges that Rosie implied that U.S. troops were “terrorists” because of Iraqi civilian casualties. (An argument I’ll leave for you to weigh in on for now, because there is some part of my brain that resists adjudicating a foreign-policy debate between the former star of A League of Their Own and an ex-Survivor finalist.)
There will be speculation, I suppose as to whether Rosie is Too Hot for TV now that she’s left The View on a note like that. I doubt it. She may be too hot for The View, whose producer-host Barbara Walters created the show as a place for frank talk among women but gets notoriously uncomfortable when that talk gets too frank. But for TV in general? One suspects, given what she did for The View’s ratings, some studio out there will be willing to take the principled stance of giving a show to a famous woman whom scads of people want to watch on television.
Too controversial for TV? Ask Nancy Grace, or Bill O’Reilly, or even Ann Coulter, how it’s hurt their careers. Or ask Donald Trump–no, on second thought, don’t. He might just have something to say.