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Megyn Kelly’s Colleagues Bash Her Following Blackface Controversy

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A live TV apology couldn’t save Megyn Kelly’s morning show.

Three days after defending blackface Halloween costumes on the air, Megyn Kelly watched her own network dismantle the show built around her. NBC’s “Today” colleagues didn’t wait for a corporate memo to say what they thought — they said it live, on camera, the very next morning. By Friday, the fallout had a verdict: “Megyn Kelly Today” was done.

• On October 23, 2018, Kelly told her panel she didn’t understand why blackface was racist “as long as you’re dressing up as, like, a character,” touching off an immediate backlash inside NBC.
• Al Roker and Craig Melvin publicly rebuked her the following morning on “Today,” with Melvin calling her remarks “indefensible” and “stupid” and Roker invoking 19th-century minstrel shows and Amos ‘n’ Andy.
• Kelly delivered a tearful on-air apology that Wednesday, but NBC News announced on Friday, October 26 that “Megyn Kelly Today is not returning,” handing the 9 a.m. hour back to the existing “Today” anchors.

The Comments That Started It

The segment was supposed to be a light Halloween panel about costumes and political correctness. Instead, Kelly used it to ask aloud why blackface was considered offensive if a costume was worn “respectfully” as part of a character — a comment that landed inside NBC like a grenade. It wasn’t a slip in a private meeting or a tweet that could be deleted; it went out live, on her own hour of network television, in front of the audience she’d been hired to rebuild since jumping from Fox News to NBC in 2017.

The reaction wasn’t confined to viewers. According to reports at the time, Kelly sent an internal apology email to NBC staff almost immediately, an acknowledgment that the damage was already spreading inside the building before it ever reached a press release.

Colleagues Turn On Her, On Camera

What made this different from a typical controversy cycle was where the pushback came from: her own newsroom, on the same network’s flagship morning broadcast. Al Roker didn’t soften it. He told viewers that while Kelly had apologized to staff, “she owes a bigger apology to folks of color around the country,” walking through the history of minstrel shows dating back to the 1830s that were built specifically to demean Black Americans.

Craig Melvin went further, dismissing any read of the moment as “political correctness run amok” as flatly wrong. He called her remarks “indefensible” and “stupid” on air, adding that framing the backlash as oversensitivity was itself “ignorant and racist.”

“She owes a bigger apology to folks of color around the country.”

That kind of on-air rebuke from co-anchors, aimed at a colleague still technically employed by the same network, is rare — and it signaled NBC had no intention of quietly absorbing the story the way networks often do with internal disputes. For a broader look at how quickly a media career can unravel over a single broadcast or post, see Reporters Who Ruined Their Careers On Social Media.

The Apology That Didn’t Stop the Bleeding

Later that Wednesday, Kelly appeared on her own show and delivered a visibly emotional apology, admitting she’d been wrong and stressing the need for sensitivity around race and history. It’s the kind of mea culpa that, in other cycles, might have bought a host a few weeks of goodwill and a slow news cycle to recover in. It didn’t work here. The backlash from viewers, advertisers, and her own newsroom kept building through the rest of the week.

By Friday, October 26, NBC News made it official: “Megyn Kelly Today” was not returning, and the existing “Today” co-anchors would take over the 9 a.m. hour starting the following week. Reports at the time indicated Kelly was already negotiating the terms of her full exit from NBC, meaning the show’s cancellation wasn’t a pause — it was the effective end of her run at the network she’d joined with considerable fanfare just a year and a half earlier.

A Familiar Pattern for On-Air Hosts

Kelly’s collapse followed a pattern familiar to anyone who’s watched a cable or network host misjudge a live moment badly enough that colleagues stop covering for them. The speed of it was the striking part — comment on Tuesday, on-air rebukes and an apology by Wednesday, show canceled by Friday. There was no slow drip; NBC moved through the entire cycle inside one work week. It’s worth comparing to how other networks have handled hosts whose off-script moments turned into liabilities, like the revolving door detailed in Why The Republican Co-Host Seat On The View Is Cursed.

What happens next is the negotiation nobody at NBC was talking about publicly on October 26: how Kelly’s contract, reportedly worth tens of millions over several years, gets unwound now that the show she was hired to anchor no longer exists.