The past and present co-hosts of The View are remembering the show’s co-creator Bill Geddie, who died on Thursday at age 68.
On Monday’s episode of the ABC talk show, Whoopi Goldberg credited Geddie — who served as the show’s executive producer for 17 seasons — and the late Barbara Walters for trying something new on television.
“He and Barbara met while working at GMA in New York and they were a team for 27 years and then he and Barbara said, ‘You know Bill, let’s go and do something different,’” Goldberg, 67, shared. “And that’s how we all got to the table; because Barbara did something unique. And they call it The View.”
She added that Geddie “could be crabby, but he was fair and he was funny.”The panel was joined by Sherri Shepherd — who co-hosted ABC talk show from 2007 to 2014 — who shared that Geddie “absolutely changed my life because back in 2007, when he asked me to come on, I was a single mother, just divorced. Stand-up comic. Didn’t know a thing about politics. And somehow he believed that people would relate to me.”
She recalled a conversation with Geddie during her early days on the talk show after she had an on-air gaffe and suggested she didn’t know if the Earth was round or flat.
“I said to Bill, ‘Oh, I do know, I need to go back and say.’ And he said, ‘No, this is ratings baby! This is ratings!’ And he was very hard on me, but he would fight for me,” Shepard, 56, remembered. “And every time I made a flub, I would run in his office, and I’d go, ‘Bill, we gotta make a statement. As soon as the show opens, I gotta apologize.’”
She continued: “And he said, ‘Sherri, if we apologize for everything we said, this would be called The Apology Show. It’s not. It’s called The View.’”
Shepherd added that Geddie gave her advice when she got her own talk show Sherri about how to “get these numbers up and to get people watching you.”
“He texted me advice almost weekly and every good thing that happened, I would call him and go, ‘Bill! Bill!’ And he was just a champion for me. And he was a friend. And he helped me find my voice,” she explained.
Goldberg also remembered how Geddie stepped in to support her after two on-air controversies when she defended NFL player Michael Vick for participating in illegal dogfighting in 2007 and when she was suspected from the show for two weeks in 2022 after claiming the Holocaust was “not about race” (for which she later apologized).
“I was asked to stay off for a week or two,” Goldberg said without detailing the incident. “And Bill wrote to me and said, ‘You know, this is the nature of this show, that’s why we brought you in. We’re paying you. We pay you to do this. We pay you to give your opinion.’”
“If you didn’t say your opinion at this table, Bill would call me in the office and go, ‘You just sat there,’” Shepard added.
Sunny Hostin recalled learning after she “barely said anything” during her audition for The View that Geddie expected all the co-hosts to contribute.
“He called me down into his office in the bowels of that old building, and he said, ‘What was that? Were you watching a ping pong match? Were you watching tennis? You were supposed to be on the show, not watching the show. It was really weird,’” Hostin, 54, shared.
Ana Navarro said Geddie had “good leadership,” adding, “He treated everybody with decency. And he built a family that is still together today. So many of the people he hired are still in his life today.”
Hostin added: “He remained active in most of our lives. I texted with him three or four weeks ago. And he said, ‘I saw the show. I told you to lean in, you’re leaning out, what is going on?” And we just had a nice discussion.”
“I couldn’t believe that he still cared enough to provide me guidance. And he was the first person who believed I could be a national television host,” she continued. “I had been told over and over and over again I didn’t have what it took and he said, ‘Who told you that? They’re stupid. Don’t worry about it. You got it. You gotta lean in.’”
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