KEEPIN’ IT REAL
Clarkson may be a star, but she could probably be your best friend, too
LOS ANGELES Kelly Clarkson could not keep it together. The promo script on the teleprompter wasn’t funny, but every time she tried to read it, she broke out laughing. She steadied herself to try again. Five, four, three, two ...
“If you like watching The Kelly Clarkson Show, listen up, y’all,” she said, smiling brightly at the camera. “This station has a re-scan day coming up!” Her voice started to quiver. “If you watch TV using an antenna, you’ll need to re-scan your TV set to make sure you can keep watching this station ...”
Once again, she lost it — and so did her increasingly giddy studio audience. Cut!
“Is this a real thing?” she asked, laughing. “Nobody is going to know what I’m saying! ... Does anybody here know what a re-scan is?”
Finally, the explanation came through: Viewers who use antennas occasionally have to “re-scan” their TVs to keep them connected to certain channels; this promo was for an affiliate in Fort Myers, Fla. (“A huge market for us!” showrunner Alex Duda promised.) Clarkson gathered her composure. When she nailed it, the crowd broke into wild applause.
This is Kelly Clarkson: Grammy-winning pop star, American Idol winner, coach on The Voice. But this is also Kelly Clarkson: the celebrity that you have always been pretty sure that you could be friends with in real life, because she seems ... well, just like you.
She’s a regular person who showed up for a singing audition in an outfit she sewn herself, and then became a famous person because we voted for her on the TV show that became an unexpected phenomenon, and she’s rewarded us by acting exactly the way we hope we would act if the same thing happened to us: like our old selves. She still freaks out when she sees Meryl Streep on a red carpet. She binge-watches Netflix mysteries. She’s candid about her struggles with weight and body image.
As it happens, that kind of regular-person illusion makes someone very well-suited to host a daytime talk show — a competitive arena that requires hosts to be charismatic yet authentic, driven and yet chill enough to remain calm when things go wrong.
If Clarkson is anything, it’s unguarded. “The compliment I’ve got my whole life in the industry, funny enough, isn’t usually, ‘Oh, my God, your voice is amazing.’ It’s always like, ‘Oh, my God, you’re so relatable.’ And part of me is like, ‘I’m working my tail off; can someone mention my voice?’” Clarkson joked. “So I wanted to use that gift as kind of a vessel for the show, and really make sure everyone is represented and everyone is included.”
Duda, previously an executive producer on The Tyra Banks Show, saw daytime potential the moment she met Clarkson last year. Since its première, The Kelly Clarkson Show has averaged 1.9 million viewers — ranked fourth among daytime talk shows, behind Dr. Phil, Live with Kelly and Ryan and The Ellen DeGeneres Show and ahead of Maury, The Wendy Williams Show and Rachael Ray.
“You have to be really authentic and comfortable in your own skin to triumph there,” Duda said. “Kelly’s so self-deprecating. I think that’s part of it, too, because we can see a part of ourselves in her.”
Her set resembles a concert venue: There’s a pit built into the studio floor so she can feed off the energy of her audience. In perhaps the show’s savviest move, she starts every episode with “Kellyoke” — a song chosen by someone in the audience. Clarkson first rocketed into the public consciousness 17 years ago singing covers of beloved pop tunes; now, every day, she churns out a potentially viral clip — belting out Dolly Parton’s 9 to 5, Prince’s Let’s Go Crazy or Katy Perry’s Roar — for the show’s YouTube channel, which has nearly 400,000 subscribers.
In the annals of historic reality TV moments, Clarkson winning American Idol ranks high: She held hands with fellow finalist Justin Guarini in the seconds before Ryan Seacrest and Brian Dunkleman revealed her name. Teary-eyed, the 20-year-old launched into her coronation song, the cheesy yet uplifting A Moment Like This. Her voice broke as she sang the line: I can’t believe it’s happening to me.
Before Idol, she was working odd jobs in Los Angeles as she tried to break into the music industry until an apartment fire forced her to move home to Texas. Then suddenly, she had a recording contract with RCA.
From the outside, Clarkson’s career looked glorious: A Moment Like This hit No. 1, she sold millions of albums, won Grammys and toured the world. There was a string of hit empowerment anthems: Miss Independent, Breakaway, Since U Been Gone, Behind These Hazel Eyes, Because of You — all of which are probably playing over mall speakers at this very moment.
Behind the scenes, Clarkson struggled. She battled then-RCA president Clive Davis over what kind of music she should release. She was compelled by her record label — “blackmailed,” she said — into an unhappy work partnership with producer Dr. Luke. Her Idol contract with RCA ended in 2015, and she signed with Atlantic Records.
In the second week of her new show, Clarkson hosted an American Idol reunion with judges Simon Cowell, Paula Abdul and Randy Jackson, along with Seacrest and Guarini. Cowell credited Clarkson with making Idol work — without her early success, everyone would have written off the show.
Guarini agrees. “She is exactly who she is onstage as she is offstage,” he said. “The same charisma and energy and bubbly personality that made the nation fall in love with her is the same reason people are going to fall in love with her on her show.”
In her own experience of being interviewed, Clarkson’s always resented it when the reporter clearly had no idea what to ask.
“This person wouldn’t know a thing about me, and they didn’t care, and they didn’t want to be there,” Clarkson said. “And I get that: Your editor gave you this piece to write about. But at the same time, it’s like, come on — I don’t want to waste my time if you don’t want to waste yours.”
She has become a bit obsessive about preparing for interviews, hauling home binders filled with research about the next day’s guests. Accustomed to doing all the talking in public appearances, she made a point of sharpening her listening skills. “I thought I was going to struggle with it a lot; I made jokes about it. But it’s actually been very easy because I find people very interesting,” she said.
Clarkson, who made no secret of the fact that Hillary Clinton had her vote in 2016, doesn’t plan on spending much time on politics in 2020. “I find it annoying in both major parties; they try to shove (their ideals) down people’s throats. They’re not informing; they’re more telling,” she said. “So on my show, we’re not going to get super political ... It’s a fun hour, an escape.”
Clarkson wasn’t sure daytime was the place for her, but now she’s growing attached — and despite some early signs of success, trying not to stress out about whether it will work.
“It’s like being on tour: There are going to be shows where I feel like a magical unicorn, and everything went so well and my voice was feeling flawless,” she said. “Then there’s gonna be shows that aren’t. And it doesn’t make you a good or bad performer, or even inconsistent. It just makes you human.” The Washington Post
She is exactly who she is onstage as she is offstage. The same charisma and energy and bubbly personality that made the nation fall in love with her is the same reason people are going to fall in love with her on her show.