NEW YORK — It wouldn’t really feel like the end of summer without a few personnel changes at “The View,” and right on schedule ABC announced Tuesday that former panelist Joy Behar will be returning to the show for its 19th season beginning Sept. 8.
“Full House” star Candace Cameron Bure and ABC News correspondent Paula Faris have also been hired as co-hosts.
Cameron Bure, Faris and Behar will join long-serving moderator Whoopi Goldberg, as well as comedian Michelle Collins and actress Raven-Symone, who officially joined “The View” as co-hosts this summer after months as regular fill-ins.
“Just when I thought I was out, they pulled me back in,” said Behar, who left the show amid a major personnel transition in 2013, in a statement to the media. The comedian, an original panelist on “The View” when it debuted in 1997, said she was “happy to be back home” and was looking forward to weighing in on the day’s hot topics, “especially now that Hillary and the Donald are in the spotlight.”
Best known for her role as D.J. Tanner in the ’80s domestic sitcom “Full House,” Cameron Bure more recently competed on “Dancing With the Stars.” She’s also wrote several books on parenting, wellness and Christianity.
Faris is already familiar to ABC viewers as co-anchor of “Good Morning America Weekend” and as an ABC News correspondent who has covered breaking news, sports and entertainment stories. Notably, she will be the first journalist to co-host “The View” since Barbara Walters’ departure.
ABC executives may be hoping that Behar will help return “The View” to its former glory. When the comedian signed off in August 2013 after 16 seasons as co-host, it appeared that producers were eager to move on from the partisan bickering that had come to define the morning show. Behar, an outspoken liberal, left a few weeks after the abrupt departure of conservative co-host Elisabeth Hasselback.
But since then “The View” has been in a seemingly constant state of reinvention that has done little to help ratings, which now run neck and neck with that of CBS imitator “The Talk.”
Creator Walters retired in May 2014, leaving the show without its leader.
Under new executive producer Bill Wolff, “The View” was relaunched last fall with a shiny new set and the addition of two fresh co-hosts, actress Rosie Perez and Republican strategist Nicolle Wallace.
Former moderator Rosie O’Donnell, who’d driven the show to record ratings during a short but fiery stint as moderator from 2006 to 2007, also returned as a co-host.
But the overhaul was short-lived. O’Donnell was gone again by February amid rumors she clashed with Goldberg. Perez and Wallace soon followed, once again leaving Goldberg as the only panelist to survive the entire season.
Good thing Behar seems to know a thing or two about endurance.
