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Former The View hosts Raven-Symoné and Candace Cameron Bure say the way they were pitched to appear on the roundtable talk show did not align with their actual experiences once the cameras started rolling.
In the most recent episode of The View: Behind the Table, the ABC News special podcast focusing on the long-running talk show, both former co-hosts opened up about how the show’s political bend complicated their desire to take and keep a seat at the table. When speaking to her own experience, Raven-Symoné likened the process of how she was pitched on what the show would be versus the reality of it being heavy on politics as a “catfishing” situation.
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“I got catfished,” Symoné said. “I feel like I just got catfished. I thought I was going on a show, like Candace, where it was pop culture and fun and exciting and I got catfished, and I learned a good lesson.”
Bure said she was “pitched a completely different direction” than the show actually went, with her hesitations about joining as co-host heavily based on the fact that she’s not a political person. “I said, ‘Politics is not, it’s not my bag. I’ve never spoken publicly about politics. I don’t even come from a political family, meaning I didn’t grow up speaking about politics,'” she explained. “So they had told me, ‘We’re going so much lighter,’ a lot more would be evergreen. We want to talk more about family and sex and life, so I was like, ‘Absolutely, 100 percent, I’m on board.’ And then it all changed when Trump entered the race.”
Bure stated in the past that the extensive coast-to-coast travel required for the show — as she lives with her family in Los Angeles and The View films in New York — as well as her work on other projects like Fuller House were behind her decision to leave. During the podcast, she confirms this but also speaks to the emotional stress of being on the show, which saw her being urged to repeatedly respond to differing opinions, even when she wanted to “back off.”
While she felt like everyone “was respectful for the most part,” it was still something that made her “sick” to her stomach, leading to “so many mornings” where she “would just be crying before the show.” The anxiety around that only increased following the election of Donald Trump, which Bure admitted also played a significant part in her decision to leave.
“As soon as Donald Trump won that election, I was like, this has got to go because I could not — I did not want to be the punching bag for the next four years in that conservative seat,” Bure explained. “I just didn’t want to. And it wasn’t worth it to me. It wasn’t worth my mental health, which was already suffering, so it was a very easy decision.”
As for Symoné, she said her pressure came from being the only LGBTQ member on the panel and having to serve as the single face of that community. “The only reason I really got through a lot of the stuff that I did get through was because of Whoopi [Goldberg] and the producers as well,” she explained. “There is something amazing about behind the scenes of The View that kind of puts the salve over all the BS that’s going on on-camera that made it tolerable to stay as long as we did.”
Symoné joined The View co-hosting team at the end of season 18 while Bure joined at the start of season 19. At that time, a source close to the situation tells THR, new leadership changed the direction of the show as the news cycle shifted with Trump running for office. The same source said that despite those changes, Symoné and Bure made terrific contributions to the table.
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