Daytime TV Is Shrinking—So Where Does That Leave Black Women Hosts?

When I heard the announcement that The Sherri Shepherd Show was ending, I was shocked. If you haven’t been watching, let me tell you: My girl (in my head) Sherri is good. Damn good.

And that’s what makes this whole thing feel so inevitable and so frustrating at the same time. Like damn, can we ever have (and keep) something good?

Daytime TV is shrinking, we all know this. Black media, also shrinking. Hell… even our democracy is shrinking (*weeps to the knowledge that we have 3 more years of this*). But what’s missing from the conversation is what happens when our voices start to disappear from the mainstream. And it’s Black women’s voices that always disappear first. And even when we do get the opportunity, we’re expected to fail.

Take for example when it was announced in February 2022 that Sherri was getting Wendy Williams’ slot, the think pieces started immediately. Sherri had been >won a Daytime Emmy for it back in 2009. She’d been on 30 Rock, Friends, and The Jamie Foxx Show. She did Broadway and made history as the first Black woman to play the evil stepmother in Cinderella. The receipts were receipting.

The show premiered in September 2022 and Sherri didn’t try to be Wendy 2.0, which was smart because that wouldn’t have worked anyway. She brought her own thing – that warmth, that laugh, the way she makes you feel like you’re sitting in her living room catching up with a friend. And it worked. The show won the NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Talk Series in 2023. Sherri herself won Outstanding Host in 2024, and she racked up multiple Emmy nominations along the way. In November, just a few months ago, she got her star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. After thirty years in entertainment, she was finally getting her flowers.

Then we get to February 2nd of this year and Debmar-Mercury announces the show’s ending after season four. And on the same day, Kelly Clarkson’s show gets canceled too.

The official statement cited ‘the evolving television landscape’ and made it clear this wasn’t about Sherri’s talent or the quality of the show. They said they’d explore other platforms… but will they really?

The Real is gone, Tamron Hall is hanging on, and after Sherri and Kelly wrap, the only thing we’ve got left is Jennifer Hudson and The View. That’s what we’re left with. So where do Black women hosts go when daytime TV doesn’t want us anymore?

When the industry contracts and networks start making cuts, Black women are the most expendable. The Real, which won Daytime Emmys and ran for eight seasons with an all-women-of-color panel, ended in 2022. Queen Latifah’s show got two seasons from 2013 to 2015 despite having Jada and Will Smith as executive producers. At the time of its cancellation, The Sherri Shepherd Show was performing competitively in key daytime demographics, including women 25–54. But we pivot, we figure it out, we build something new from scratch because the institutions don’t make room for us.

Sherri’s already pivoting. She’s touring as a comedian, released a children’s book, and co-hosts a podcast with Kym Whitley called Two Funny Mamas. Building on your own terms means you control the podcast, you negotiate the deals, and you keep what you earn, but you’re also the one funding it and producing it and building the audience from the ground up. A network used to handle all of that, and now the entire operation falls on you.

So where does that leave Black women hosts? It leaves us scattered across podcasts and streaming platforms and social media, building audiences in corners of the internet instead of being on television in the middle of the day where millions of people could actually find us (and where we belong). And that matters more than people want to admit. 

Daytime TV reached people who didn’t know they wanted to watch us yet. Think about how many random viewers tuned in and fell in love just because they had the TV on. You can’t replicate that kind of visibility with a podcast or a YouTube channel. You’re not just reaching your followers anymore, you’re reaching everybody, and that mainstream presence is disappearing. Now we’re being pushed to digital platforms where we have to fight for every single view, where we own more but reach less and where the work is triple and the institutional support is gone. 

Black women are being removed from the spaces where we had the most cultural impact, and we’re supposed to just accept it and rebuild somewhere smaller and call it progress.

The post Daytime TV Is Shrinking—So Where Does That Leave Black Women Hosts? appeared first on Essence.