Sara Haines Opens up About Embarrassing Career Setback

The entertainment business is a hard one. There are periods of time where you don’t work, and other periods where your career is thriving. In a recent interview on the Behind the Table podcast, Sara Haines spoke with executive producer Brian Teta about what she considered to be her career low points. 

“I was in a dark place and when you’re depressed, you can’t distinguish reality from your created narratives,” she explained. She said she spent two years not working. During that time, her talk show with Keke Palmer and Michael Stahan was canceled, despite its popularity. And she was also not on The View. 

Haines loved her work on Strahan, Sara and Keke, but amid the COVID-19 pandemic, the show got canceled. She said she was mourning “the dream I’d always had,” noting, “Working with Michael Strahan and eventually Keke Palmer, I miss them all the time,” she explained. “The laughter, the joy, even the staff. But the show didn’t really have a chance out the gates. We fumbled, all of us, through the whole thing.”

Making things more stressful was an unplanned life event. “Meanwhile, I got through finding out I’m pregnant unexpectedly and really dropping into a depression, having major postpartum depression as I tried to race back and save a drowning ship, which was our show, six weeks after having a baby,” she said. 

She still says the show never got its just due. “Out of the gates, it almost never was that but I was so determined not to fail and not to let go, that I was being dragged behind a car, metaphorically.”

An emotional Haines began crying, explaining, “Because I so vividly remember how invisible I felt” and how “what was playing out in front of me and some of the storylines [in the press] weren’t what was happening [behind the scenes].”

“My friends that did my hair and makeup, they remember vividly, I don’t remember many days where I wasn’t crying in my dressing room,” she added. “It was a rough time and again, no shade to any of the people. I worked with some fun, amazing people and we had a lot of fun.”

In July 2020, Page Six reported that the show was canceled. It had been off the air since March when the quarantine shutdown was enacted. Because of the hysteria surrounding the pandemic, the show was initially replaced with Pandemic: What You Need to Know, a daily coronavirus report anchored by Amy Robach, Dr. Jen Ashton and occasionally TJ Holmes. That show was supposed to be a two-week experiment at the height of the mania and uncertainty surrounding the virus. Upon confirmation of its official cancelation, it was replaced by GMA 3.

Luckily for Haines, she was asked to return to The View shortly after. She remains on the round table.