Fire Breaks out During ‘The Tamron Hall Show’

Wednesday’s episode of Tamron Hall was abruptly canceled and the set evacuated after a fire broke out onset. Before a rerun of Monday’s special eclipse episode aired, Hall, in a brief live appearance, addressed the audience from her emptied set, explaining that a fire broke out backstage and she and her crew were safe and unharmed.

“Hi everybody, welcome to the show,” she said. “I know this looks a little different around here. I am in fact live in front of a black screen because we have had something happen that’s never happened in the five seasons of the show. We are not able to air the show scheduled for today.”

Hall went on to assure viewers that everyone in studio that day, including staffers and audience members, managed to escape the blaze unharmed. She said that Wednesday’s episode was supposed to open with a discussion of Lenny Kravitz’s viral workout video, but “we had a real smoke show around here.”

“We had a grease fire in our kitchen,” she explained. “Just about an hour and a half ago, the entire staff, we were in place preparing for our live show today. The audience was in the … holding area of the show, preparing to come out here and cheer and have a phenomenal show today. But as my friend Bevy Smith says, ‘Sometimes life be living,’ and that’s what happened today.”

In a statement to Entertainment Weekly, a spokesperson for the Fire Department of New York City said crews responded to the studio around 8:42 a.m. local time and “discovered burnt food on the stove in the building. FDNY handled this call with one engine and one ladder consisting of approximately 12 personnel. No injuries were reported.” The Tamron Hall show said in its own statement “a small grease fire” during “preparations for a segment for the 10 a.m. ET live broadcast” prompted the evacuation,” and “Staff, crew, guests, and audience members were safely evacuated from the area, and no one was harmed.”

Hall commended her team for having “reacted in incredible time” with “extinguishers going off.” She said they “are in the cleanup phase of the show,” promising that she would return with a new live episode on Thursday.

Hall’s show was not the only talk show impacted by the blaze. The ladies of The View also had to evacuate, with Whoopi Goldberg, Ana Navarro, Joy Behar, Sunny Hostin, and Alyssa Farah Griffin later walking out at the top of Wednesday’s show to Billy Joel’s 1989 hit “We Didn’t Start the Fire.” Goldberg told viewers, “this morning we had to evacuate the studio because there was a fire that we did not start.”