Ladies Who Punch by Barbara Walters - Book Review

When Barbara Walters started The View in the late 1990s, she definitely wanted to helm a successful daytime show - but she probably wasn’t prepared for the absolute cultural juggernaut it turned out to be.

Whether you love it, hate it, or feel entirely indifferent towards the show, it would be hard to deny that it has introduced a tremendously influential format.

A once seemingly strange hybrid of hard-hitting news, opinionated ranting, and pop culture salivating with four or five women spearheading the table, The View is now one of the most widely imitated shows ever.

Of course, it has given birth to tons of cringe-worthy drama, as documented in Ramin Setoodeh’s, impossible to put down, book Ladies Who Punch: The Explosive Inside Story of “The View”. 

This book has it all; it dishes the dirt on a lot of backstage machinations in the vein of the best showbiz tell-alls out there, while also being a prescient tale of how one of the show’s former besties - Donald Trump - eventually became its greatest nemesis. But, of course, not without taking advantage of the spotlight whenever he could. 

Setoodeh knew pretty much every host who has ever worked on The View, and he interviews them at length in the book, which makes it feel gossipy and insidery in the best way possible.

Those of us who watched infamous moments on the show such as Rosie O’ Donnell’s argument with Elisabeth Hasselbeck back in the early aughts know that there were many operatic moments on The View, so it’s no wonder that this book reads like something of a soap opera.

Even as it delves into serious issues and explores the ways in which The View - for better or for worse - changed the television landscape, it can’t help but be entertaining.

The array of topics and scandals the book covers is dizzying, and even when the stars’ egos can take frighteningly hilarious turns, Setoodeh doesn’t denigrate any of them into mere punch lines. For all of its salaciousness, Ladies Who Punch is a remarkably clear-sighted account of the backstage machinations of an enormously influential television show.