Unorthodox and Sometimes Polarizing, the Incredibly Popular Rosie O'Donnell Will Exit Stage Left

By Jeanine Plant, AlterNet. Posted May 8, 2007.

"I'm fat and I'm gay," Rosie O'Donnell confessed, smiling sardonically at the camera, on a recent broadcast of ABC Daytime's gabfest, "The View." Deliberately thumbing her nose at the manners and morals of mainstream television is workaday for O'Donnell, so presumably her unabashed honesty didn't ruffle any viewer's sense of decorum. Rather, O'Donnell's voice -- unorthodox and uncouth -- has resuscitated the flagging program in its 10th year on the air. Her remarkably blunt disclosures and infamous feuds helped increase the show's viewership by over a half-million a day, according to the Associated Press.

But just last week, she announced that she will be exiting the show in June. Having initially only signed for a year, she didn't agree to the terms of a new contract. According to the New York Times, ABC had wanted her to commit to three more years with the show, but O'Donnell wanted more money than they were willing to pay.

Come September, when the new season starts, viewers will lose one of the most beloved and most progressive television personalities in mainstream media. Now that she will be leaving, it's instructive to take stock: How do we square her intransigent views -- which can be offensive and polarizing to many, and seem out of step with the larger culture -- with her overwhelming popularity?

Certainly O'Donnell's popularity can't be reduced to her politics. Her unapologetic lesbianism probably offends (while also educating) whole swaths of more traditionally-minded viewers, just as her dietary habits, which consist of eating Oreo cookies in bed, Ring Dings, and Dunkin Donuts, are probably frowned upon by upper-middle-class audience members, who pride themselves on their sense of healthful propriety.

Even those who don't find her coarse and agree with many of her political views sometimes recoil at her misinformation and divisiveness. When she trumpeted 9/11 conspiracy theories recently, suggesting it was an inside job, critics, including AlterNet's Joshua Holland, suggested she helped fuel embarrassing right-wing stereotypes about liberals: "that they're extremists, that they're defined by their fringe and led by out-of-touch Hollywood elites."

So what is it about this social misfit that so attracts the public? For starters, she seems to forge genuine connections with her guests -- unlike the more aloof Barbara Walters -- in part because of her discernible imperfections. At the height of the cell-phone tabloid scandal incriminating Alec Baldwin as a bad father, for instance, he requested to speak on "The View" because he had a history with O'Donnell and knew her to be sympathetic to public embarrassment. When Courtney Love, who has been called a negligent mother in the past, was touting her new book last fall, she bypassed the other panelists to give O'Donnell a hug, as if to gird herself against a potentially chilly reception from the other judgmental hosts.

She's also funny, of course, which is an indisputably likeable quality. But sometimes Joy Behar, her fellow comic panelist, is funnier, always quick with a one-liner; and sometimes O'Donnell can, in fact, be a downer. During the Anna Nicole Smith media frenzy, for example, O'Donnell self-righteously brought up the disparity in media coverage between the B-list starlet's death and the deaths of soldiers in Iraq. And she raised the forbidden topic again during the whole Imus debacle, because -- to the dismay of some feminists -- she didn't quite get what all of the commotion was about. It's precisely because of these impieties, which challenge the niceties of vacuous conversation, I'd argue, that she has so many fans.

That O'Donnell consistently raises uncomfortable truths to an ever-growing audience shows just how hungry the public is for a woman willing to tell them. Bill Maher, for instance, is a somewhat similar public figure in that he's equally funny and politically incorrect, but many of his jokes smack of misogyny. Which gets to the heart of O'Donnell's polarizing nature -- that she is a woman who dares to have an opinion.

See more stories tagged with: television, progressives, the view

Jeanine Plant is a New York-based freelance writer.

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