Whoopi Goldberg is temporarily leaving The View to shoot a Netflix film, a brief absence that spotlights the long, turbulent history of co-hosts walking away from ABC's daytime talk show.
Executive producer Brian Teta broke the news on the Sept. 16 episode of the show's companion podcast, Behind the Table, telling Goldberg directly that the program would lose her "for a couple of days" while she films Women Like Us, a Netflix movie co-starring Jenifer Lewis, Vanessa Williams, and Vivica A. Fox. E! News reported that Goldberg will be gone over the next two weeks but will appear on Mondays during that stretch.
Joy Behar will take over moderating duties in Goldberg's absence. Teta put it simply: "Joy's up for it. She's always excited to moderate." Filling the remaining seat on Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays will be a rotation of former co-hosts, Lisa Ling, Star Jones, Sherri Shepherd, and Debbie Matenopoulos, all returning to a table they once left under circumstances far less tidy than a two-week film shoot.
Goldberg, now 70, joined The View in 2007. In an interview with People ahead of the show's 30th season premiere on Sept. 6, she admitted the longevity surprised even her.
"[It's] a little bit shocking that I'm here as long as I have been."
This is not the first time she has stepped away for outside work. In November 2025, Goldberg was absent from the show to film the Italian soap opera Un Pasto Al Sole. The pattern is familiar: Goldberg treats The View as a home base but continues to pursue film and television roles on the side.
The show itself, however, has rarely been a calm workplace, a fact the returning fill-in hosts know firsthand. The View's nearly three decades on air have produced a roster of departures marked by contract disputes, backstage feuds, on-air confrontations, and at least one leaked audio recording that would make a human-resources director wince.
Meghan McCain, the late Senator John McCain's daughter, served as a permanent co-host for four years starting in 2017. She left after an on-air incident with Behar and later described the show's internal culture in her book Bad Republican:
"For whatever reason, there's a deep level of misogyny about the way The View is covered and written about in the media, where tabloids are always writing about the co-hosts hating each other backstage. It's a self-fulfilling prophecy because the atmosphere of The View breeds drama: producers can't control hosts, manage conflict or control leaking. My take on the show is that working at The View brings out the worst in people."
McCain added that "all the women and the staff are working under conditions where the culture is so f***ed up, it feels like quicksand."
Jenny McCarthy, who lasted one season in 2013, 2014, offered a similar account in the 2019 book Ladies Who Punch: The Explosive Inside Story of The View by Ramin Setoodeh. McCarthy alleged that producers tried to steer her opinions to create conflict with Goldberg.
"I would literally have meetings before the show of them trying to input opinions in me to go against Whoopi. I was going to work crying. I couldn't be myself. Every day I went home and I was miserable. It really was the most miserable I've been on a job in my 25 years of show business."
McCarthy also claimed that Barbara Walters, the show's co-creator, would check what she was wearing and sometimes make her change, and once screamed at her in a dressing room.
Candace Cameron Bure, the Fuller House actress and Hallmark Channel fixture who co-hosted during seasons 19 and 20, described the toll on the Oct. 13 episode of Behind the Table. She said she felt enormous pressure to represent conservatives on a panel that leaned the other way.
"The stress and the anxiety, I actually have a pit in my stomach right now. There was only one type of stress that I've ever felt in my life, that came from that show. And I [have] PTSD, like, I can feel it. It was so difficult, and to manage that emotional stress was very, very hard."
Bure said she walked away in December 2016, citing prior commitments including filming Fuller House for Netflix. But her parting assessment was blunt: "I felt like after walking away, if I can do that, I can do anything." The View, in her telling, was harder than anything else in her career, not because of the topics, but because of the atmosphere. Behar herself has made headlines for her on-air behavior over the years, adding to the show's reputation for unpredictability.
Rosie O'Donnell had two separate stints on The View. Her first ended in 2007 after an on-air debate with Elisabeth Hasselbeck. She told The Oprah Winfrey Show that she left because she "didn't want to argue for a living" and felt producers had set her up by preparing a split-screen graphic in advance of the confrontation.
O'Donnell returned, and lasted just five months before departing again in 2015, during a period in which she suffered a heart attack and announced a split from her wife, Michelle Rounds. In Setoodeh's book, O'Donnell directed her sharpest criticism at Goldberg herself:
"Whoopi Goldberg was as mean as anyone has ever been on television to me, personally, while I was sitting there. Worse than Fox News. The worst experience I've ever had on live television was interacting with her."
Elisabeth Hasselbeck, the former Survivor finalist who spent a decade as the show's conservative voice, nearly quit in 2006 after an on-air clash with Walters over the morning-after pill. Variety published previously unreleased audio in 2019 of Hasselbeck's backstage reaction during a commercial break:
"What the f***! I don't even swear. She has me swearing. This woman is driving me nuts. I'm not going back. I can't do the show like this. She just reprimanded me, and she knew exactly what she was doing. Goodbye! I'm off. Draft about that in the New York f***ing Post!"
Hasselbeck responded on Instagram, saying she was pregnant with her daughter Taylor at the time and that the argument over the value of unborn life had pushed her to her limit. She called it "a battle, but not of the flesh." She eventually stayed until 2013, when she left for Fox and Friends, calling her decade on the show "nothing short of extraordinary."
Star Jones, one of the original co-hosts, blindsided the show's producers in 2006 when she announced on air that she was leaving. Her contract had not been renewed. Jones later described the period as "a bad emotional time" and said she wanted to "go out on my own terms." She returned to The View in 2012.
Sherri Shepherd served seven seasons before her final appearance in August 2014. An unnamed source told The Wrap that Shepherd had declined ABC's final contract offer. On her last day, she was emotional but gracious, telling the audience that Walters had pushed her to take the job in the first place. The View has seen other hosts step away under difficult personal circumstances over the years.
"I tell people, 'Step out of the fear,' because I didn't want to take this job, because I'm not a prosecutor, I don't know anything. I have to say my boss, Barbara Walters, pushed me. I cried in my dressing room for three years saying, 'What am I doing on this table?'"
The four women stepping in during Goldberg's absence each left The View under different circumstances, and each has spoken publicly about what the experience cost them.
Lisa Ling, who co-hosted from 1999 to 2002 after joining at age 26, left to host MSNBC's National Geographic Explorer. Walters had told her from the start that she should stay about three years and then "spread your wings." Ling made a surprise return to The View table in September and said she "learned so much on this show from my mother figures and my co-hosts, who were more experienced than me."
Debbie Matenopoulos, who joined the original cast at 22, still the youngest co-host in the show's history, endured a two-year stint that included being parodied on Saturday Night Live. She went on to host Crown Media's Home & Family. On Behind the Table, she called her time on The View simultaneously "the most stressful time" and "the best experience of my life."
"If you [can do] live television and hold your own with the most renowned journalist in the world, with a comedian who's done it forever, you can do anything."
Jedediah Bila, who held the conservative seat during seasons 20 and 21, departed in September 2017. She struck a notably different tone from most other former hosts, saying on the podcast that "there was not one fight that we had off-set. There was not one close to argument. There was zero." She added that people "were very surprised that I didn't trash the show, because my experience was actually really good."
Other departures were quieter but no less telling. Rosie Perez, who co-hosted for roughly 10 months, left in July 2015 to star in Larry David's Broadway play Fish in the Dark. Raven Symoné departed in October 2016 to move to Los Angeles and film the Disney Channel series Raven's Home. Michelle Collins, a comedian who joined as a guest host in early 2015, was not brought back after one season, a decision the show made, not Collins herself.
Goldberg's departure this time is routine, a film shoot, not a feud. But the decision to fill her chair with four women who each have their own complicated relationship with the show is a reminder of how many people have cycled through that studio and how few have described the experience as entirely positive.
The accounts from former co-hosts paint a consistent picture: a workplace where producers struggled to manage conflict, where ideological minorities felt isolated, and where even seasoned professionals described crying in dressing rooms and dreading the daily broadcast. McCain called it quicksand. McCarthy called it the most miserable job of her career. Cameron Bure said she has PTSD.
Goldberg, for her part, has outlasted them all, 18 years and counting. Whether that says more about her resilience or about a show that chews through co-hosts the way most programs go through interns is a question the returning guests might answer differently depending on the day.
When a workplace produces this many exit interviews that sound like survivor testimonials, the problem is not the people leaving. It is the institution they leave behind.
