Kelly Ripa plans return to daytime talk show Tuesday
Kelly Ripa is returning to her daytime talk show, ending an absence that followed word her co-host, Michael Strahan, will join “Good Morning America.”
Ripa will be back Tuesday on “Live With Kelly and Michael,” she said in an email to the show’s staff that was obtained by the Associated Press.
“I wanted to thank you all for giving me the time to process this new information,” Ripa wrote. “Your kindness, support, and love has overwhelmed me. We are a family and I look forward to seeing you all on Tuesday morning.”
Tuesday’s show will be the first time Ripa and Strahan are reunited on camera since last week’s announcement that the former football star will leave in September to work full time on ABC’s “Good Morning America.”
He’s worked a couple of days a week at “GMA” for the past two years, but he always has to leave midway through to head to the “Live with Kelly and Michael” studio on Manhattan’s upper West Side. “Live” is in the ABC family, produced by parent Walt Disney Co., and it airs after “GMA” in most TV markets.
The former football star, who played with the New York Giants, will be joining the show’s regular cast of Robin Roberts, George Stephanopoulos, Lara Spencer, Amy Robach and Ginger Zee.
Actress Ana Gasteyer was a last-minute replacement for Ripa when she failed to come to work last Wednesday, with Erin Andrews, the co-host of “Dancing With the Stars,” then stepping in. Actress Shay Mitchell of “Pretty Little Liars” was scheduled to co-host Monday.
Ripa’s unexplained absence came amid published reports that she felt blindsided and angered by Strahan’s departure to join “Good Morning America.” She has not commented publicly.
In mentioning his planned departure on “Live” last Wednesday, Strahan noted he’d be an on-air neighbor on “GMA.”
“I was reading some stuff and it sounded like I had died,” he said. “It’s not a eulogy, people.”
Strahan also made a point of thanking Ripa, who welcomed him to the show in 2012 when he replaced Regis Philbin and taught him much about TV.
“Kelly, I thank you, I love you and everyone else here at ‘Live,’” Strahan said.
His planned exit has revived rumors that ABC is considering expanding the two-hour “Good Morning America,” which is first in the ratings but is losing viewers. The competing “Today” show on NBC airs for four hours.
Clooney in Armenia as commemoration of massacre begins
About 15,000 demonstrators in the Armenian capital held a torchlight march Saturday to a hilltop memorial complex dedicated to the 1.5 million Armenians massacred a century ago by Ottoman Turks.
The march came on the eve of official commemorations that are being augmented this year by actor George Clooney’s presentation of a new award.
The killing of more than 200 Armenian intellectuals on April 24, 1915 is regarded as the start of the massacre that is widely viewed by historians as genocide. But modern Turkey, the successor to the Ottoman Empire, vehemently rejects the charge.
Clooney has been a prominent voice in favor of countries recognizing the killings as genocide, which the United States has not done.
“It took a long and hard battle to finally call things by their names,” he said at a forum against genocide on Saturday, according to news reports. “You cannot deny what happened.”
On Sunday he will present the first Aurora Prize, a $100,000 award recognizing an individual’s work to advance humanitarian causes.
Before the march set off Saturday, participants burned a Turkish flag and another of Azerbaijan. About 75 soldiers from Armenia and Azerbaijan were killed this month in fighting over Nagorno-Karabakh, a region of Azerbaijan that is under the control of ethnic Armenian forces.