“The Talk” executive producer Rob Crabbe is getting a little too familiar with TV goodbyes. A year and a half after his previous talker, “The Late Late Show With James Corden,” signed off, he’s now doing the same thing on Friday with “The Talk.”
It’s a different kind of show, and therefore a different kind of goodbye. But still, there are similarities to the sign-off. “The emotional undercurrent of what the shows were trying to accomplish is the same,” Crabbe told Variety. “You’re trying to express joyfulness. You’re trying to make people feel something. And with ‘The Talk,’ we’re giving everybody a little break in their day, the routine of it. This is a respite in your day, where you can come and laugh and watch five people that really like each other have a really good time on television. That emotional currency will be missed for a lot of people in the audience.”
“The Talk” ends its 15-year run on Friday with one final live episode, which Crabbe said will be devoted to celebrating the show’s history and its hosts, past and present. There won’t be any guests on the goodbye, except for one: Howie Mandel, who made regular appearances on “The Talk,” will pop his head in one more time to pay tribute to hosts Akbar Gbajabiamila, Amanda Kloots, Natalie Morales, Jerry O’Connell and Sheryl Underwood.
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“He’s coming on as a long time friend of the show to surprise the hosts with some superlatives that the staff came up with for them,” Crabbe said. “And then, I think it’s important to pay tribute to the staff and the crew that make the show. And so there’ll be some of that in there as well. It’s quite the end of an era for our daytime viewers and for the people that work here. And so if I was a betting man, I think I would take the over on some tears as well.”
The final episode will feature a pre-tape package looking back at Underwood’s tenure on the show, having been there the longest (joining for Season 2 in 2011). “The Talk” has been paying tribute to all of the hosts, one-by-one, every day this week.
“The show has a long history, and 15 seasons is an incredible number to wrap your head around,” Crabbe says. “With this finale week, it’s important to really focus on these hosts. So we’ve been giving each host a full segment where we’re surprising them with a retrospective tape that they haven’t seen, and then having them react to it. We’ve kind of gone in reverse chronological order when they started the show. For the finale day, we’ll finish with Sheryl’s retrospective. She’s the longest tenured host here. And I think those are really nice, because they’re experiencing their journey at the show in almost real time.”
Crabbe plans to give the hosts plenty of time in the finale to reflect on what “The Talk” meant to them, and to say goodbye. “For the finale, I wanted to really be reflective for the hosts,” he says. “I think that they’ll each have something that they want to say about their experience and what it’s been like for them and what it’s meant to them.”
“The Talk” began in 2010 off an idea by Sara Gilbert, who was one of the show’s first hosts, along with Julie Chen Moonves, Sharon Osbourne, Leah Remini, Holly Robinson Peete and Marissa Jaret Winokur. Others who have hosted include Aisha Tyler, Eve, Carrie Ann Inaba, Marie Osmond and Elaine Welteroth. There’s no plan for previous hosts to make cameos in the finale, but they will be seen in clips.
“You’ll see imagery, certainly of other hosts in these highlight packages,” he says. “But we don’t have any plans for any surprise appearances by past hosts. Also a lot of clips feature the former hosts, it was their show as well. And we want to be respectful to the entire run of the show. All the work that’s gone into it and all these past seasons with all those other hosts. So it’ll be a full look back at everything.”
Crabbe says things have been getting increasingly emotional on set, particularly as the audience comes to the realization that this is it for “The Talk.”
“One of the things that impressed me is how much the show means to the viewers and the in studio audience,” he says. “It’s a very loyal group, and the outpouring has just been tremendous. There’s a couple that met in the audience and got married, and we try to feature some of these audience stories as well. A lot of people who credit the show sparking the joy that saved their lives.
“I’m not sure that they were necessarily clocking that the end was coming, but now it’s become very clear, and so we have audience in tears every day in studio,” he adds. “The show means a lot to a lot of people. And so I think it’s going to be missed in this space.”
The show has spent the week discussing their impending departure, and even had some fun with it in a cold open where they teased their versions of iconic series finales like “Seinfeld,” “The Sopranos” and “The Bob Newhart Show.”
“The Talk” will be replaced in the new year by a new soap opera, “Beyond the Gates,” which premieres on Feb. 24.