The co-hosts of ‘The View’ are remembering the show’s co-creator Bill Geddie, whodied on Thursday from a coronary-related illness on July 20, just three days after his 68th birthday.
Geddie and the late Barbara Walters are known for co-creating ABC’s premier daytime show “The View” in 1997 and had Walters, Behar, Meredith Vieira, Star Jones, and Debbie Matenopoulos as panelists. He sometimes makes an appearance as a form of comedy relief.
Asides from his deal in “The View”, Geddie also owns two companies: BarWall Productions (also co-owned with Barbara Walters), which produced special shows like “The Barbara Walters Special” or the “10 Most Fascinating People annual special”, and Bill Geddie Productions.
Bill Geddie won 2 Daytime Emmys and was awarded the Lifetime Achievement Award by the television industry in 2012. His earnings during the course of his career put him at an estimated net worth of about $8 million dollars.
On Monday’s episode, Whoopi Goldberg honored both late producers of the ABC talk show – Geddie and Walters, for trying something new on television.
“He and Barbara met while working atGMAin 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 itThe View.”
Other former hosts were also present. Sherri Shepherd — who co-hosted ABC talk show from 2007 to 2014 recalled when 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 when she had an on-air gaffe and thought it would be best to go back and apologize.
“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 showSherriabout 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 said.
Goldberg also recalled when Geddie intervened to support her when she defended NFL player Michael Vick for taking part in illegal dogfighting in 2007 and when she was suspended 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.
54-year-old Sunny Hostin recalled Geddie’s stance that every co-host must make a contribution after she “barely said anything” during her audition forThe View.
“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 said.
Ana Navarro remembered 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.”
