Ryan Seacrest won’t be spending his mornings with you or Kelly Ripa anymore. The host will be leaving Live With Kelly and Ryan, he announced on today’s show, nearly six years after he joined Ripa. “She has been an amazing partner, friend, and confidant, and although we will always be a part of each other’s lives, I will miss our mornings together,†Seacrest said in a statement. Ripa’s new co-host will be someone she’s already used to waking up with: her husband, Mark Consuelos. After the Riverdale star filled in for Seacrest a number of times, the show will officially become Live With Kelly and Mark. That means even more oversharing from one of showbiz’s least-filtered couples.
Seacrest will still host American Idol and Dick Clark’s New Year’s Rockin’ Eve for ABC. (Not even sexual-misconduct allegations could get him booted from those gigs.) He joined Live in 2017, replacing Michael Strahan after a yearlong rotation of guest hosts. That came after former NFL star Strahan, who joined in 2012, was controversially bumped up to Good Morning America in 2016; he had been the replacement for the late Regis Philbin, who inaugurated Live back when it was the just-as-simply titled The Morning Show in 1983. Ripa, meanwhile, began co-hosting Live With Regis and Kelly in 2001, making the Seacrest-Consuelos switch the fourth name change the show has undergone since she started (not counting the Live With Kelly stopgaps). Call her the last survivor of daytime TV.