The Biz: Meredith Vieira Returns to Daytime
It's hard to say no to Meredith Vieira. While putting together her new daytime show, NBCUniversal executives let the host pick her executive producer, sidekick, band — even the furniture on her set (a tatty, pet-ravaged couch from her Westchester, New York, home). Perhaps the "suits" — as Vieira calls them — are aware that she is one of the rare TV talents who is not afraid to walk away from it all.
After becoming, at age 35 in 1989, the youngest correspondent ever hired by 60 Minutes, she left the prestigious CBS newsmagazine two years later to have her second child when then-executive producer Don Hewitt refused her request to work part-time. Her very public decision sparked a national conversation on the challenges for women who balance motherhood and career. After an Emmy award-winning stint on the ABC newsmagazine Turning Point, she changed course, becoming a founding panelist on the daytime coffee klatch The View in 1997.
