The troubled child actor turned chatshow host faces flak for her toe-curling interview with Kamala Harris. But oversharing is all part of her shtick
An office-style desk was once the key prop on a television chatshow – a standard piece of kit beloved of Johnny Carson and David Letterman, not to mention Britain’s Jonathan Ross. Then the comfy sofa took over and guests began to scooch along, making room for each other. Now, though, under the auspices of Drew Barrymore, host of a daytime show on CBS, it’s the lowly rug that is taking centre stage.
Barrymore, who is still best known internationally for her childhood role as the little girl in ET, likes to interact with her guests on a fluffy rug in the middle of her set in New York’s Broadcast Center. She has prostrated herself upon it more than once in front of her studio audience and prefers it to the show’s pink satin armchairs.
Last week, however, the 49-year-old star found the unconventional informality of her style being debated across America. Barrymore had pulled off a coup and booked the vice president, Kamala Harris, as a guest, and was pretty happy about it. Backstage clips show her shrieking as she urges a game, slightly ambushed-looking Harris to recount the moment she heard she was elected to office, as if it was a juicy detail from a high school prom. More notably, Barrymore had picked up on Harris’s admission that her family nickname is Momala. Sliding up close to the veep on the couch and clasping her hands, the host begged her to be “Momala of the country”.
In the aftermath of this cloying interview, the US media personality Meghan McCain took Barrymore to task for being intimate with so distinguished a guest. “Not everything you do is a therapy session, and some of this stuff is just not appropriate,” McCain said on her podcast, suggesting someone ought to have a word. Former Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly also levelled her sights at the episode, expressing annoyance at how closely the pair were sitting. Most seriously, Barrymore has been accused by some of being complicit with the “nannyfication” of black women by projecting a stereotype on to Harris. Writing in the New York Times, Charles M Blow argued that black women still spend their lives fighting a society “insistent on forcing them to fit broad generalisations” including the role “of the mammy – the caretaker, the bosom in which all can rest, the apron on which we have a right to hang”.
Barrymore’s chatshow, which was launched during Covid, had already been roundly lampooned on Saturday Night Live, the popular sketch show which Barrymore herself has hosted six times (once as a child star of seven). A skit had comedian Chloe Fineman appear as Barrymore sporting a big blouse and a lispy Valley girl voice.
And last year Barrymore was the object of a less playful sort of derision when she was forced to retract a plan to air her chatshow in the middle of a Hollywood talent strike. The incident briefly made her a showbiz pariah, and the taint of strike breaker has yet to be quite dispelled no matter how many on-set love-ins she has staged.
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