Home » Latest » Celebrity » The Real Reason Megyn Kelly Is Leaving NBC

The Real Reason Megyn Kelly Is Leaving NBC

6

19 0 Celebrity

8.4

SaveSavedRemoved 3

NBC’s most expensive morning-show experiment collapsed in five days, and the wreckage traces back to one word: blackface.

Megyn Kelly’s run at NBC ended the way a lot of insiders privately expected it would — just not over the reason most people assumed. The blackface comments that torched her career in late October were the spark, but the kindling had been piling up since she signed her three-year, $69 million deal with the network in 2017. What happened over five days in October 2018 turned a slow-motion ratings problem into a full-blown exit.

• On October 23, 2018, Kelly defended blackface Halloween costumes on-air, asking, “What is racist? Because you do get in trouble if you are a white person who puts on blackface on Halloween, or a black person who puts on whiteface for Halloween.”
• She apologized internally the same day and delivered an emotional on-air apology on October 24, but NBC News chairman Andy Lack still condemned the remarks at a staff town hall.
• NBC announced on October 26, 2018, that Megyn Kelly Today would not return to its 9 a.m. slot, ending a run that had already been weighed down by slumping ratings and rocky interviews, including one with Jane Fonda.

The Comments That Ended It

The segment that finished Kelly’s morning show came during a panel discussion about Halloween costumes, a normally harmless staple of daytime TV. Instead of steering clear of the third rail, Kelly leaned into it, questioning why blackface was treated as racist if the intent was to portray a character rather than mock a race. She framed it as a generational thing, recalling that “back when I was a kid that was OK, as long as you were dressing up as, like, a character.”

The clip spread within hours. By that evening, Kelly had sent NBC staff an internal memo apologizing for the remarks. It wasn’t enough to stop the bleeding, and the following morning she used her own show to deliver a visibly emotional on-air apology, telling viewers she now understood why the comments had caused so much pain.

Colleagues Turned on Her Publicly

What made this different from an ordinary controversy-and-apology cycle was how fast Kelly’s own NBC colleagues distanced themselves from her, on camera. Al Roker and Craig Melvin both publicly rebuked her remarks rather than defend a colleague, a break from the usual network instinct to close ranks. Andy Lack went further, using an internal town hall to condemn the comments directly to staff — a chairman publicly scolding one of his own highest-paid anchors.

“Back when I was a kid that was OK, as long as you were dressing up as, like, a character.”

That kind of internal rebuke rarely happens without a network already looking for the exit. It’s the same dynamic that’s sunk other on-air personalities after a single bad segment goes viral — the kind of moment covered in Reporters Who Ruined Their Careers On Social Media, where one clip outweighs years of goodwill.

A Year of Friction Before the Blackface Scandal

The October 23 segment was the trigger, not the whole story. Kelly’s transition from Fox News primetime to NBC’s 9 a.m. morning slot had been rocky from the jump. Ratings for Megyn Kelly Today had slumped for months, and high-profile interviews — most notably an awkward sit-down with Jane Fonda — became recurring examples of a host who never quite fit the softer, chattier register of daytime morning television.

Internally, there was reportedly ongoing debate about whether Kelly’s brand — built on combative Fox News interviews — translated to a format built around cooking segments, celebrity chats, and lifestyle features. Other network anchors have faced similar questions about fit and format, a tension explored in The Untold Truth Of Brooke Baldwin. For NBC, the $69 million question was never really answered before the blackface comments made it moot.

The Official Cancellation

NBC made it official on October 26, 2018: Megyn Kelly Today would not return to its morning slot. The announcement came just three days after the blackface segment aired, a remarkably fast turnaround for a network that had bet nine figures on Kelly being its future. The show’s cancellation effectively closed the book on Kelly’s NBC career less than 18 months after her splashy hire away from Fox News.

Kelly’s contract still had time left on it when the show was pulled, which left open the question of what NBC would do with her for the remainder of the deal. Either way, the 9 a.m. hour that had been built around her went back into NBC’s hands to figure out — proof that a single Halloween segment can undo a nine-figure bet a lot faster than it took to make it.