Clarkson doing it her way
Pop star stays true to herself on new daytime talk show
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 down 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! Clarkson refused to continue until someone explained: What on earth is a “re-scan day”?
“Is this a real thing?!” she asked, laughing. “Nobody is going to know what I’m saying! I’m so confused. … 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, Florida. (“A huge market for us!” showrunner Alex Duda promised.) Clarkson gathered her composure. When she nailed it, the crowd broke into wild cheers.
It was just one in a series of mild misadventures during a recent taping of “The Kelly Clarkson Show,” which just debuted in September. While singing Lizzo’s “Juice,” the host forgot a lyric and had to retape the entire song. As a guest was sharing an emotional anecdote, Clarkson loudly choked on the piece of wasabi stuck in her throat from the sushi-taco cooking segment. Oh, and before the episode even began, a fire alarm forced the crew to evacuate.
“I heard somebody was vaping in a bathroom or something,” Clarkson recounted in her slight Texas drawl after the taping’s end. “I’m like, ‘Can you not wait until you get home?’ ”
This is Kelly Clarkson: Grammy-winning pop star, the first-ever “American Idol” winner, four-season veteran coach on NBC’s “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 sewed 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 bingewatches 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 wellsuited 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.
“She has no filter, which is great on television,” said Audrey Morrissey, showrunner on NBC’s “The Voice,” which Clarkson joined as a judge/coach in 2017. “If you’ve got a filter and you’re guarded or calculated, or secondguessing everything, it really shows.”
If Clarkson is anything, it’s unguarded. “The compliment I’ve gotten 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 “Steve Harvey” and “The Tyra Banks Show,” saw daytime potential the moment she met Clarkson last year. Since its premiere, “The Kelly Clarkson Show” has averaged an impressive 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, citing DeGeneres, Winfrey and Dr. Phil. “Kelly’s so self-deprecating. I think that’s part of it, too, because we can see a part of ourselves in her.”
Executives at NBCUniversal, which syndicates “The Kelly Clarkson Show” as the lead-in to “Ellen” on more than 200 stations, went to work selling Clarkson on a talk show after seeing her on “The Voice.”
“At first I was like, ‘No, that’s a horrible idea; are you drunk?’ ” Clarkson said. Then she consulted with husband Brandon Blackstock, who is also her manager and now the show’s executive producer, and decided to try to bring some light into our “divided” era. “That’s what we need right now, is just some place to go where it’s fun and musical.”
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.”
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.”