What Jimmy Kimmel and staff probably expected when they booked Rosie O’Donnell for a week of guest-hosting while Jimmy continued his annual summer vacation was committed tweaking of the most prominent nose in Washington, D.C., delivered by fusillades from a blunderbuss.
What they got was four nights of highly professional, consistently entertaining performances from a star who knew what she was doing every moment onstage.
If they were surprised, they shouldn’t have been. Whatever else has marked O’Donnell’s long career in movies, television, and stand-up comedy—and plenty has—she has stood out most as an engaging, likable host of television talk shows.
And that’s what she was last week, mixing topical monologue jokes—plenty, but not even the majority, Trump-adjacent—with observations about her recent life in Ireland, tales of her rather large family, and various show-biz adventures.
A chunk of the non-Trumpist material was lifted from the one-woman show O’Donnell performed this summer off-Broadway in New York, titled Common Knowledge. That meant it was polished, reliable material, and her willingness to burn it on TV demonstrated how serious she was about making this talk show comeback shine.
It also elevated her host role beyond the standard for Kimmel’s summer lineup. That standard has trended good-to-excellent (the work of Jelly Roll this week has also been peak guest-host); but the contributions of Kimmel’s writers have clearly been significant for the stars and celebs who have stood center stage in Kimmel’s studio and delivered opening jokes for a week.
Those writers did their thing for Rosie as well, though many of their familiar brickbats tossed at Trump carried extra topspin coming from O’Donnell. The decades-long blood feud between those two Long Islanders (Queens and Commack) has been as nasty and personal as any between an entertainer and a politician in recent U.S. media history. (Hard to top the Confederate cartoon depicting Lincoln, foot on the Constitution, signing the Emancipation Proclamation from an inkwell tended by Satan.)
Carson mocked Dan Quayle’s spelling. SNL portrayed George W. Bush as a dolt. Kimmel, Colbert, Stewart, and Meyers have flayed the current officeholder with comments about his hair, his vanity, his marriage, and his taste in decorating, among other defining characteristics.
Trump’s bon mots for Rosie have included “fat pig,” “slob,” “dog” and “disgusting animal.” That’s a different level.
Filling in for Kimmel, O’Donnell directed poisoned Koosh balls at the leader of the free world using names like “President Oompah J Loompah,” “Velveeta Corleone,” and “Mango Mussolini.”
The show’s regular host, that Kimmel gent, has made it a trademark of sorts to throw in at least one such mock-moniker every night. But there’s a certain edge that comes from having “disgusting animal” in your personal history with someone.
The better, edgier Trump jokes last week didn’t rely on name-calling. O’Donnell thanked Trump for elevating her TV profile again: “You brought me back. Just like you did with fascism and the measles.”
The White House proved unimaginative in its response to O’Donnell, calling her “a nasty woman and a total slob.” (O’Donnell reacted on social media by posting a photo of Trump with the hashtag #mirrormirror.)
The dive straight into a physical-appearance insult is a predictable Trump move: “Little Marco,” “Sloppy Chris Christie,” “Piggy” for a White House press corps reporter who dared to ask a pointed question.
But it seemed especially lame this time because O’Donnell, who is 64, appeared to be in good fighting trim. That, combined with how she fared and how she was received—wildly enthusiastic studio audiences, glowing media reviews, the best ratings for any Kimmel co-host this summer—might logically set some television executives to thinking:
“Should we get this lady a show?”
On her final night, O’Donnell laughed that off. “A lot of people have asked me if I decided to guest-host here as some kind of audition to get another talk show.”
She said the real reason was to set herself up as the next Golden Bachelorette.
What viewers saw last week was the Rosie they may remember fondly, the one who hosted a daytime hit that made a serious splash, conferring on her the title of “Queen of Nice.”
Titles like that seldom work out. Unpleasantness is usually around the corner, and so it was with O’Donnell.
But the skills that made her daytime show a hit are clearly still there: the ease with guests, even a truly young (three-year-old) girl about to sing in front of a crowd of strangers; the self-deprecation; the personal details you virtually never hear from late-night hosts, like life with a wildly gifted but challenging 13-year-old with autism.
All of that might work spectacularly (again) as a daytime entry. O’Donnell herself has suggested she’s open to the idea, although the controversies that trailed in O’Donnell’s wake the last time she was a daytime star might scare certain executives away, especially those still trying to wring some income out of the traditional linear television model.
But talk formats are proliferating in the podcast space, especially those with video. Some even feature former talk show hosts and late-night stars, like Conan O’Brien and Amy Poehler.
They are also distinctly less expensive than a traditional television show. Why wouldn’t some streaming company have taken note of O’Donnell’s week on the Kimmel show and said: Video podcast with Rosie? Looks like an audience might be baked in.
If it happens, she will have Jimmy Kimmel to thank. And she already did, saying she wanted to thank him “for inviting me to do this and for reminding everyone that we have the right to free speech in this country, whether Orange Voldemort likes it or not.”
That sure sounded like something someone with “Nice” in their title might say.
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