After Strike Delay, ‘Drew Barrymore’ To Return Oct. 16

By Paige Albiniak
( Broadcasting & Cable )
published

CBS Media Ventures daytime talker had planned to debut season 4 on Sept. 18

Drew Barrymore and Ross Matthews co-host CBS Media Ventures' 'The Drew Barrymore Show.'
Drew Barrymore and Ross Matthews co-host CBS Media Ventures' 'The Drew Barrymore Show.' (Image credit: CBS Media Ventures/'The Drew Barrymore Show')

Updated: Wednesday, October 4 at 6:02 pm ET

After having to postpone its premiere due to the writers’ strike, CBS Media Ventures’ The Drew Barrymore Show will debut its fourth season on Monday, October 16, the show posted on Instagram on Wednesday.

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The show will premiere without its three WGA-affiliated writers, a spokeswoman confirmed Wednesday after The Hollywood Reporter  broke the news. The Drew Barrymore Show extended offers to all three -- Chelsea White, Cristina Kinon and Liz Koe -- and all three declined to return. The show is now looking for new writers to replace them and will be in compliance with guild rules once it does,  the spokeswoman said. 

Drew Barrymore will share its premiere date with NBCUniversal’s The Kelly Clarkson Show, also announced this morning. Kelly Clarkson is joining Drew Barrymore in New York this season. Two other daytime shows that delayed their starts due to the strike — Warner Bros. Discovery’s The Jennifer Hudson Show and CBS’s The Talk — have already returned to the air.

Drew Barrymore had planned to debut as planned on Monday, September 18, but those plans were derailed after Barrymore took to Instagram September 15 to apologize for the decision to proceed with production amid the work stoppage. 

“I believe there’s nothing I can do or say in this moment to make it OK,” Barrymore said in the video she posted on the social platform (and later removed). “I wanted to own a decision, so that it wasn’t a PR-protected situation, and I would just take full responsibility for my actions.”

That post received vociferous opposition from actors and writers alike. The apology post was deleted a few hours later. Two days later, Barrymore posted that the show would not premiere until the strike was resolved. The writers strike came to an end on Wednesday, September 27. 

The Drew Barrymore Show has gone through several iterations since premiering in the middle of the pandemic in September 2020, when Barrymore had to launch the show without a studio audience. Since then, it has added a co-host in Ross Matthews, and last season it went to a half-hour, although the show is double run and plays as an hour in many markets. 

Paige Albiniak
Paige Albiniak

Contributing editor Paige Albiniak has been covering the business of television for more than 25 years. She is a longtime contributor to Next TV, Broadcasting + Cable and Multichannel News. She concurrently serves as editorial director for The Global Entertainment Marketing Academy of Arts & Sciences (G.E.M.A.). She has written for such publications as TVNewsCheck, The New York Post, Variety, CBS Watch and more. Albiniak was B+C’s Los Angeles bureau chief from September 2002 to 2004, and an associate editor covering Congress and lobbying for the magazine in Washington, D.C., from January 1997 - September 2002.