Kathy Griffin once had a chance to be a permanent host on the most popular daytime talk show on television and she turned it down — along with the $1.4 million that would have come with it.
Griffin, 64, shared the story of being offered a spot on The View in the mid-2000s in a video posted to her YouTube channel on Tuesday, June 17.
“So they made me an offer and the offer was for $1.4 [million] and I am just going to be honest, I had to turn it down because at the time between doing My Life on the D-List and touring, I was making about $10 [million] a year,” she said.
She added that to take the role, she would have had to “uproot my whole life,” as she was caring for her parents at the time.
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Though she said no, Griffin knows that The View is one of the most influential shows on daytime TV. It averaged 2.62 million viewers in the first quarter of 2025, up 4 percent from the same quarter last year, according to Nielsen. It was the seventh consecutive quarter that viewership grew compared to that same period the previous year.
“I really respect those women for going on that show day in and day out because they know there’s blowback,” Griffin continued. “And by the way, to this day, The View is one of the most buzzworthy shows on television or anywhere.”
“People still get up in arms online talking about who said what on The View, so it’s always been a high-stakes show,” she added.
Joe Biden joins ‘The View’ Photo by ANDREW CABALLERO-REYNOLDS / AFP
Journalist Barbara Walters created The View in 1997 and served as a cohost until her retirement in 2014. She died in 2022 at age 93. Griffin, who has guest hosted 27 times, recalled that Walters did not like “one bit” that she turned down the job.
Kathy Griffin is feeling lots of “gratitude” to be booked and busy after being “canceled for six-and-a-half years.” “[I] could not get work, no matter what. And it was really, really difficult because I’ve been a happy workaholic my whole adult career and always either doing a comedy special or a reality show or a […]
“I remember when they offered me the job, Barbara Walters said backstage one time before we were about to go out and do the live show, ‘They say we have chemistry, I don’t really see it but they say we do,’” Griffin said. “And I loved that. I said, ‘Of course we do Barbara, people love when I give you s***.’ And then she just rolled her eyes.”
Though Griffin said she was making more money than the show offered at the time, she wanted to make it clear to Walters that she wasn’t too big-time to take the gig.
“I want you to know why I’m going to say no,” she told Walters. “It’s not that I think I’m too good for this show, it’s the opposite: this show is too good for me.”