Kelly Ripa: 'People deserve respect in workplace'
The dust has settled — for now — at Disney's Live With Kelly and Michael, and the show's longtime host is explaining her actions following her April 20 walkout.
Ripa already spoke to her own audience about it when she returned to the show six days later, though she joked that there were sharpshooters posted in the audience to keep her on message.
She sat down with People for a cover story, out Friday, about her reaction to finding out co-host Michael Strahan would be moving to Good Morning America full-time, moments before the news broke.
Ripa's return to 'Live!' is all smiles following Strahan strife
"There's a part of me that can say, 'Okay, I understand. This may have been an oversight,'" she says of the lack of notice. Ripa also wondered, if after 26 years with Disney and ABC (first as a soap opera star on All My Children and later as a talk-show host on Live!), her stability and familiarity made her bosses just assume she'd roll with the decision. "Sometimes when you are so comfortable with somebody," she observed, "you may not give them the same consideration as somebody you're not as comfortable with – a certain formality falls away."
That doesn't mean network bosses should take dependable employees for granted, though. "I think that requires a certain amount of empathy on a level." she explained. "When you're dealing with big business, it's easy to forget that you're dealing with people and that people have feelings. It's easy to just look at it like a business unit. Sometimes stability and dependability can be misinterpreted as passive. Like, 'Oh, we don't have to worry about her, she's fine. She's fine.'"
And she is fine, she reassured People, "but I need reassurances that we're all going to be fine."
Strahan's last show is Friday; Jimmy Kimmel will be the first in a cycle of guest hosts, the process by which the show has historically made its casting decisions.