Meredith Vieira says she originally was not going to be an on-camera presence in “Valerie’s Story — A Meredith Vieira Special,” airing Thursday at 10 p.m. and documenting Valerie Harper’s very public battle with terminal brain cancer.
“Originally I wasn’t going to be in it,” Vieira told me. “We had a woman embedded with [Harper] and as I watched it I didn’t think we needed another voice in this … but sometimes, because of the cancer in the lining of her brain, Valerie’s train of thought sometimes go off and she has trouble getting back. I was almost like her facilitator, helping to get her focused when she needed that little extra bit of help to get focused.”
The veteran actress, 74, who previously battled lung cancer, announced last March that she was diagnosed with a rare, terminal cancer of the fluid surrounding the brain — and was given only three-to-six months to live. But she hasn’t slowed down a bit, and is currently competing on “Dancing With the Stars.”
Harper gave Vieira and her crew full access for Thursday night’s special. “She allowed us to go everywhere with her,” Vieira said. “We’re in the room when she was really losing it — moments where she thinks the end is coming because she starts to get headaches, moments when she’s very vulnerable.
“She wants to remind people that this is not a curable disease,” Vieira said. “It’s terminal. She believes in spontaneous remission, but she’s a realist. The doctors told her that, at some point, the cancer she has will become resistant to the drugs she’s on now.
“But what comes across for me is what a remarkable person she is,” Vieira said. “She is very self-deprecating and so full of life and generous of spirit … She really is a light out there in a world increasingly hard to see or find, handling this with grace and dignity and placing one foot in front of the other each day and being optimistic without being foolhardy. And now Valerie’s doctors are saying that, based on what they’re seeing in her [brain] scans, she should definitely see Christmas — and that’s fantastic news.”
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Column items this time of year pertaining to new talk shows are usually replete with synonyms for “low-rated” or “stinker.” But not this fall — at least not yet. We’ve already seen Arsenio Hall return with solid numbers, and you can now add “The Queen Latifah Show” to that list — at least for its premiere.
Like Hall, “Latifah” marks Queen Latifah’s (above) second go-’round in the land of talk shows. “Latifah” premiered to solid numbers Monday, both locally (9 a.m./Ch. 2) and nationally, where it averaged a 1.7 household rating (in the metered markets) — the second-best premiere for a daytime talk show since the launch of “Dr. Oz” back in 2009. Among women 25-54 — daytime’s core audience — “Latifah” was up a whopping 80 percent from year-ago timeslots nationally, and was up 60 percent here. (“The Doctors” aired at 9 a.m. on Ch. 2 last fall.)