In her effort to sell her new daily talk show – the first since she tried one in Hartford when she was a leading news anchor here, Gayle King was sounding a little raspy.
“I’ve been talking so much guys, I lost my voice,” she told a room of reporters at the TV Critics press tour this week. “I kind of sound like a man, but I certainly am here to answer any questions that you have. I’m not trying to be sexy. This is just me just struggling.”
And she proceeded to describe plans for “The Gayle King Show” which will run weekdays at 10 a.m. on the 10-day old Oprah Winfrey network, OWN, starting Monday.
Growing out of the success of her show on the Oprah radio network on satellite XM radio, the new show will in fact be a televised version of that show – live.
As such it will be the only live show on the new OWN.
“I want to figure out a way to capture the intimacy of what we do on radio and bring it to TV,” says King, who says she loves the live aspect of it.
“There’s something very thrilling about knowing that at any moment, things can go to hell in a handbasket. I like that. I like the edge of knowing that. You have no control over what people are saying.”
King is well known for being Winfrey’s best friend, but she says she wasn’t the first person booked for the new network. “I really wasn’t,” she says. “I’m grateful that radio has given me this opportunity because I didn’t think that I would like radio as much as I do, but, you know, the OWN powers that be saw the radio show is working pretty well. Let’s figure out a way to bring it to TV. And I have to tell you, if we can capture what we do on radio, what we have been doing, if we can bring that to TV, I think we’re going to be all right.”
It will stand apart from other daytime talk show in that it will still be running on XM (and terrestrial) radio simultaneously and won’t include a studio audience, as her long-ago Hartford show did.
“I don’t have a desire to have a talk show with a studio audience and sitting on home base. I think that’s been done for the past 25 years. It’s done as well as it can possibly be done, and so I think it’s great to be able to try something new.”
“The Gayle King Show” starts Monday at 10 a.m. on OWN.