Is Rosie Perez Already Leaving 'The View'?

As a long-running show with an entire panel of female hosts, it's a sad but unsurprising fact that The View is subject to a lot of controversy and, especially, rumors of feuding between the female cohosts. Ever since Rosie O'Donnell joined the panel to fill the hole left behind by the exit of Sherri Sherpherd and Jenny McCarthy, we can't seem to go a week without a new story cropping up that she's in a fight with everyone. O'Donnell was subsequently joined by Nicole Wallace and Rosie Perez for a season of The View that would hopefully hook as many people as the ones before it, but, whether that's true or not thus far, it appears that the show is already about to suffer from another cast shake-up. According to Variety, Perez is leaving The View permanently, but don't worry. At no point does the report claim it's because of backstage infighting.

The host was already taking the month of January off in order to star in the Broadway show Fish in the Dark, but apparently it's "understood" that she won't be returning after the play has run its course. Everything at this point is pure speculation, but allegedly ABC is trying other cohosts in her place to take over on a permanent basis. According to the ever-knowledgeable anonymous source, Perez "never got a hang of the show’s mixture of hard and soft news, and she had trouble reading from a TelePrompter."

If Perez has quickly become your favorite cohost since the start of The View's latest season, I wouldn't worry just yet. According to a representative from ABC, "Rosie Perez is currently in rehearsal for her Broadway play for the month of January. Her status with the show has not changed." And it's not exactly like it would be the first time that rumors of trouble brewing on the set of The View began to fly based on minuscule on-screen "evidence." It seems more likely that Perez is just gone and the show is so boring without her that someone's trying to kick up some kind of talk to keep it buzzing. Then again, I don't know how such a thing could be possible when Naya Rivera is available to claim white people shower too much.

However, the chances that the rumors are true and Perez is about to make a quick exit from the show wouldn't exactly be outlandish. At four months, yes, she would have spent the shortest time as a host, beating O'Donnell's record of seven months from her original stint in September 2006 to May 2007, but the O'Donnell example proves that such a thing would not be unheard of. Sure, O'Donnell's exit was mired in controversy, unlike Perez's exit would be, but there are a great many reasons a cohost would leave The View that have nothing to do with feuding or criticism. Just ask Shepherd and McCarthy.

So while it would certainly be interesting to see, for instance, Rivera use her reduced role on the final season of Glee in order to join The View panel as Perez's replacement host, I'm inclined to believe ABC when they say that this rumor is just a rumor. Perez's stint on the show is just getting started and there's no real reason why she'd want to quit just yet. And even if she does end up being the first to exit in the new season, at least we can say we were warned.

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