Why Alison Haislip Left 'The Voice'

Alison Haislip served as an on-screen correspondent for 'The Voice' Season 1.

By John Connor Coulston

Longtime fans of The Voice will remember Alison Haislip, a former on-screen correspondent for the NBC singing competition. She was the series' original online/social media correspondent when the show premiered in spring 2011. Alongside host Carson Daly and the coaches (Adam Levine, Christina Aguilera, Blake Shelton and CeeLo Green) she helped guide viewers through the show's inaugural season. However, she was nowhere to be seen when The Voice Season 2 premiered in February 2012. So what happened?

Haislip talked about her exit from the show in a January 2023 interview on the podcast The Derek Duvall Show. The host/actress explained that the Voice gig came as a result of the Comcast-NBCUniversal merger. Haislip was contracted with Comcast's G4TV at the time, regularly appearing on Attack of the Show! and co-hosting American Ninja Warrior. Since G4 was a gaming/tech brand, NBC "plucked" Haislip from her G4 duties to fill the social media correspondent job, a position the network didn't really know what to do with.

The filming for The Voice coincided with Haislip's final year under contract with G4, and when contract negotiations occurred, G4 executives and Haislip presumed she was going to be part of The Voice going forward. As a result, the cable channel opted to not re-sign her. It was unfortunate, but at the time, there was no sign that The Voice wouldn't have her back for Season 2.

"Since NBC was clearly the bigger network, NBC got first dibs on me. So right when I was wrapping up on The Voice was when my contract at G4 was coming up," Haislip explained. "And G4 was like 'We love you, we want to keep you around, but now that NBC gets first dibs on you, we aren't going to be able to use you the way we normally are, so we aren't gonna contract you, but we'll use you in a freelance capacity,' which is what I did at the beginning of my time at G4. And I was like 'That's a bummer, but I totally get it.'"  

However, Haislip soon got some rough news from NBC. She recalled, "Then, almost simultaneously is when NBC went 'Nevermind, we don't want Alison for the The Voice anymore.'"

The Voice opted to fire Haislip. Based on what happened next, it seems NBC wanted to replace her with a high-profile talent: actress/singer Christina Milian. Milian would go on to only fill the correspondent position for Seasons 2-4 before departing the program. Perez Hilton's sources at the time claimed NBC fired her, but Milian claimed to Extra that she stepped away to resume her music career. Daly essentially filled the online correspondent void after Milian's exit.

As for Haislip, the one-two punch of losing her G4 and The Voice gigs was tough: "I went from having two amazing jobs to no jobs, like overnight. And that was devastating. I couldn't imagine how it could have gotten worse."

However, it seems that the double-departure worked out for the best. Within a few weeks, she landed the role of Ali Laurents on the Hulu TV show Battleground. The gig marked her first series regular role in a scripted series. She called her time filming Battleground "amazing" and considered it her favorite experience in the entertainment industry — one that she couldn't have done if she was tied up with G4 and/or The Voice. 

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Around the time of her acting breakthrough, NBCUniversal fired the G4 executives who wanted to work with her on a freelance basis; the network was then totally shut down not long after. It seems like Haislip's misfortune at the time unintentionally set her up for success. She went on to land numerous scripted roles, including appearances on NCIS, 9-1-1: Lone Star, Superstore and Franklin & Bash.

"As long as I've been in this industry, you weirdly always have to trust the timing because, when something seems like it's awful and it's going to break you, there's always a reason it happens," Haislip said. "There's always something that comes along, you just have to trust."

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