Barbara Walters is expected to make it official this morning on the “The View” that Elizabeth Hasselbeck, the youngest member of the crew, is leaving the show in a wide-ranging shake-up of the morning coffee klatch.
“All will be addressed on tomorrow’s show,” a spokesman for the show said yesterday in an email.
What seemed like one of TV’s most-stable, well-running shows became a roiling ball of confusion last week when it was revealed, first, that Joy Behar and Hasselbeck were being pushed out.
Then came reports that Walters herself may be stepping down, too at the end of the year.
Only Behar’s departure has been confirmed by ABC so far.
Walters is a 50-percent owner of “The View” along with the network, which would indicate that any wholesale change in personnel could not have happened without her OK — no matter how reluctant.
Walters, now 83, is just coming back from a serious accident last January, when she fainted, fell and sustained a concussion during an inauguration eve party at the British ambassador’s residence in Washington.
The length of time it took her to come back led to speculation that she might be able to come back to work.
Insiders scoffed at the suggestion that she cannot keep up her schedule which includes four or five prime-time specials a year — including one that aired Saturday, though it was recorded long before the accident.
Ratings for “The View” have sagged a bit in recent years from their high-water mark in 2007 when Rosie O’Donnell was on the panel.
Numbers from the just-completed February sweeps show “The View” steady in New York but down nearly 20 percent in LA and 11 percent in Chicago, the nation’s No. 2 and 3 cities.