Don’t believe the rumors that Rosie O’Donnell and Oprah Winfrey have already started an ugly war following the cancellation of "The Rosie Show." Reports that the two former talk show queens are not speaking following Oprah’s decision to pull the plug are simply not true.
“Ro and Oprah had a great conversation over the weekend—there is no bad blood between them in any way whatsoever! They both wish the show could have done better. No drama,” Rosie spokesperson Cindi Berger tells me.
The reason that there is no drama is because both Oprah and Rosie agree this is the best move for both of them. “What you need to remember is both of them originally agreed to this with the best intentions. Rosie has admired Oprah for a long time and still admired her, however this wasn’t the show that was pitched. Rosie wanted to do a New York based daytime talk show and Harpo wanted a Chicago based evening show. It was a problem from day one,” a friend of Rosie’s tells me. “It was impossible to pay for guests and their entourage to fly to Chicago on OWN budgets and it turned out too expensive to move the show to New York.”
OWN has been plagued with programming problems from day one and with no lead-in, and very little original programming, it would be difficult for Rosie's show to succeed no matter what she did.
“Rosie had over 74 different lead-ins during her time on the air—that is crazy,” one network insider tells me. “Oprah has hired a lot of experienced producers but not focused on hiring professionals that know how to program. At this point, without the Oprah specials the network now has nothing original. Trust me Rosie is as happy to be away from OWN as they are to say goodbye to her.”
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