How Rosie turned one man into a ‘View’ addict

I’ve already replaced the 30 minutes a day I used to spend watching the “Hot Topics” half of “The View” with E!’s new reality series “Sunset Tan.”

“Sunset Tan” is about the ickiest new thing on television and I’m already obsessing over it. It’s about a chain of Los Angeles-based tanning salons and the young to young-ish, blond to blond-ish, sometimes nude and always orange people who work there.

Already I’ve been charmed by a nasty L.A. mom’s insistence on turning her child a darker shade of tangerine for her school pictures; picked sides in an employees-who-are-drunken-sluts-vs-employees-not-yet-fully-invested-in-drunken-slutdom catfight; and nodded my head in understanding as one disgusted witness to the lady-battle observed, “This has nothing to do with tanning.”

And now that Rosie’s gone from “The View,” there’ll be no one around to make sure that that show doesn’t just become all about tanning. I might as well watch a program that’s exactly what it says it is.

Falling for Rosie
Before Rosie stepped into her role as bully pulpit headmistress on “The View,” I never paid much attention to either party. I’d seen her own talk show before, once or twice, and couldn’t figure out what her thing was with Tom Cruise (as a gay man, I’d already clocked her as playing for my team years earlier when she wore that lesbian mullet on VH1), or what her thing was with Broadway. I’d never heard her politics.

“The View,” at the time, seemed to be about… actually I don’t know what it was about. It seemed like it was about nothing unless opinionated and unafraid actor Sandra Bernhard came on to speak some sort of counter-cultural truth or stand-up comic Kathy Griffin was the guest and trash-talked a celebrity who deserved it. Every time that happened, you could see the hosts — not-so-shy Joy Behar included — cringe a little, as though suffering whiplash by mouthing.

I remember hearing about an early Rosie visit to that panel, one that had caused a bit of a dust-up and I thought, “Well, she should replace Star Jones.” And then it happened.

By this point Rosie had taken some flack for her newfound public political voice and I knew that she’d be up against the pill-ish, uptight, right-winger Elisabeth Hasselbeck. A rhubarb just waiting to happen, served to me on a plate five days a week.

I started TiVo-ing and was almost instantly rewarded with a Donald Trump feud, public discussion of Rosie’s depression and how she battles it by hanging upside down from one of those inversion machine thingies, glimpses into her super-rich but simultaneously Wal-Mart-y lifestyle (with occasional peeks at the goofy relationship she has her partner Kelly’s redneck Christian mom), and a very touchy class-war conversation she started one day about Barbara Walters’ own couldn’t-be-further-from-a-lesbian-potluck-fancy-pants-dinner-with-the-Kissingers lifestyle.

But most — and best — of all, she battled political and cultural arch-nemesis Hasselbeck. They’d fight and make up, fight and make up. Barbara would try to calm things down. Joy would go for the joke. Guest host Kellie Pickler would sit in mute, terrified, uncomprehending silence. And then they’d fight some more.

And it wasn’t just the fight for its own sake, although those are always welcome. It made the show finally about something. Rosie swung her opinions like a Viking sword; sometimes it made sense (her constant upbraiding of Bush’s wrongheaded refusal to attend soldier funerals) and sometimes it didn’t (her recent Sept. 11 conspiracy talk). Sometimes she had facts and sometimes she just had feelings, but she always came out swinging.

Suddenly, Eleanor Clift on “The McLaughlin Group” (who only ever uses elegant facts) had competition as my favorite woman speaking from the left on TV.

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