Do you remember the moment it truly sank in for you that, Oh my God, this coronavirus thing is really serious? For me, it was March 11, 2020, when the hosts of The View filmed in front of an empty studio audience with Whoopi Goldberg addressing rows and rows of eerily unfilled chairs. It’s spooky and bone-chilling when The View deviates from its usual “women who want to quite literally kill one another bickering at a table†format because the show is such a constant; this June, it celebrated its 6,000th episode. One of the show’s most constant constants is that it always goes all out on Halloween (with 2020 being an exception for reasons made obvious above). But that ain’t happening this year. On the show’s official Behind the Table podcast, producer Brian Teta told The View’s redheaded stepmother, Joy Behar, “This year because it’s only a few days before the election and we need to be live, the hosts are not going to dress up for Halloween.†His reasoning? It’s just too close to the election, both practically and existentially.
First, the practical: Because the Halloween episodes are “a huge undertaking,†Teta says, they’re typically done on tape: “Part of what our show has become and what it is right now, we can’t be on tape three days before the election.â€
As for the existential, Behar says it’s “too important†an election for them to be goofing around so close to November 5. “I don’t mean to be grandiose, but we do have some influence on people’s thinking,†she says. “We need to use every single minute on this show to inform the public about how dangerous [Trump] is.â€
In the past, The View’s hosts on opposite sides of the political spectrum have incorporated election messaging into their Halloween looks. In 2017, Meghan McCain rode into the studio on a white horse wearing a giant GOP elephant logo cape (she was supposed to be Little Red Riding Hood). Not to be outdone by her sworn natural enemy, Behar was Trump-as-Pinocchio, one of the more haunting visuals I have ever seen, to emphasize Trump’s lies. The following year, she drove into the studio on a motorcycle wearing a leather jacket that read “VOTE OR ELSE†(she was “the MidTerminatorâ€).
But Behar has decided Broadway-caliber costuming alone is not enough to sway undecided voters to choose Kamala Harris. The much more effective rhetorical tool, apparently, is arguing on daytime television with Ana Navarro.
At such a fraught time, the greatest thing The View could have done was urge viewers to vote for Harris while dressed as a Na’vi, or as Miley Cyrus’s tongue, or in a Wizard of Oz group costume featuring Elisabeth Hasselbeck as “the house.â€