Sara Haines is looking back on a “failed” experience in her career.
The TV host, 47, recently appeared on Danielle Robay’s “Question Everything” podcast and opened up about hosting “GMA3” with Michael Strahan and Keke Palmer from 2019 until the program was canceled in 2020.
Haines recalled that she was treated differently on the show when she returned to work after her son Caleb’s birth.
“I do not at all feel any bad feelings towards the many women, but it was mostly a female staff, and they were young and they weren’t at that point in their lives yet,” she explained. “So I don’t think they understand how that was received as they pitched it that way. I could still jump out of planes. Now they were like, ‘Oh we can’t have a mom.’ Well guess what, moms do a lot of stuff.”
“I hadn’t changed. Everyone else projected a change,” Haines continued, adding that she “cried every day” on the show.
“Funny enough, there were a lot of great moments,” she explained. “The staff was amazing. I loved Keke and Michael, talk about laughing until you hurt. It wasn’t anyone’s fault, that’s the problem. As it played out, it felt like I was being dragged behind a car. For the first time, I couldn’t wait to leave.”
Haines added: “I was one of those moms who felt better going to work. Now work was not a safe haven. Even though I felt like I clutzed around as a mom, I would rather do that with all my heart than what was happening at work. I just couldn’t do it. That was a really low point.”
After leaving “The View” in 2018, Haines began hosting the third hour of “Good Morning America” with Strahan, 53. The program, initially titled “GMA Day,” was renamed “Strahan & Sara” and then “Strahan, Sara and Keke” with Palmer’s inclusion in 2019.
“Strahan, Sara and Keke” was canceled in March 2020 amidst the COVID-19 pandemic. Haines was rehired by “The View” later that year.
“I think the problem was it was a failed experiment from the beginning,” Haines said about the trio’s show.
“You can’t put a ‘Kelly and Michael’ show at that hour,” she explained. “They needed to keep it branded [to ‘GMA’] to make it that. If it was going to be a standalone, it couldn’t be a replication. I wasn’t the only one thinking it was like a ‘Michael and Kelly.’ I’m sure Michael was thinking that.”
Haines also said that the “pressure” of being on “GMA3” with Strahan and Palmer, 31, “took me back to a really dark place.”
Last year, Haines admitted that she was “depressed” and “wrecked” when “Strahan, Sara and Keke” got canceled.
“The show didn’t really have a chance out of the gates. We fumbled, all of us, through the whole thing,” she shared on “The View” executive producer Brian Teta’s “Behind the Table” podcast.
“I was in mourning,” she explained. “It was the dream I’d always had. Out of the gates, it almost never was that but I was so determined not to fail and not to let go, that I was being dragged behind a car, metaphorically.”
Haines currently co-hosts “The View” alongside Whoopi Goldberg, Joy Behar, Ana Navarro, Sunny Hostin and Alyssa Farah Griffin.
“GMA3,” meanwhile, is now titled “GMA3: What You Need to Know” and is anchored by DeMarco Morgan and Eva Pilgrim.
