For 17 years, and 12 on a national basis, Regis Philbin and Kathie Lee Gifford hosted a morning talk show with a broad spectrum of topics that ultimately became a ratings hit throughout the 1990s and into the year 2000.
And that’s exactly what former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich would like to reproduce with his wife Callista now that he no longer has a TV home with the Fox News Channel after leaving last year to run for president.
In an editorial meeting with The Daily Caller on Friday, Gingrich revealed these plans.
“Callista and I are exploring doing a daily show but doing one that is probably closer to Regis and Kathie Lee than it is to Bill O’Reilly,” Gingrich said. “I don’t know that I want to spend the next five years of my life doing an hour a night on attacking Barack Obama, or attacking the next president if it’s Romney because he wasn’t conservative enough this morning when he had coffee — except he wouldn’t have coffee.”
Gingrich explained they are still in the exploration phase in determining whether or not it would be a type of show that would draw an audience.
“We have very broad interests,” he said. “We have lots of things we like doing. We’re trying to explore whether or not there’s an interesting enough show you can get an audience, because if you can’t get an audience, you can’t do shows.”
Since departing Fox News, Gingrich has had some tough criticism of his former television home for what he perceived to be a pro-Mitt Romney bias during the contest for the Republican nomination. However, Mediaite had quoted an unnamed FNC spokesperson shortly thereafter, saying that Gingrich’s grandstanding was a ploy “for a windfall of a gig at CNN.”
As to whether or not Gingrich’s brainchild would find itself a home on a CNN or another cable network, or somewhere like Lifetime, the former House Speaker said that was still yet to be determined.
“We’re talking about exploring the opportunities in a variety of places,” he said. “We’ve talked to some agents in California to really look at opportunities.”