So far, Drew Barrymore seems too famous to succeed as a daytime talk show host

Variety

"The best talk show hosts are made into stars by the medium," says Daniel D'Addario. "To wit: Rosie O’Donnell was a well-known comic and actor but hardly the dynamo she eventually became when she began her daily show. She reinvented the medium that had, before her, been dominated by former local news anchor Oprah Winfrey. Both these stars did not bring to bear huge amounts of persona that was already known to the audience, so they had to work to carry across an idea of themself with each episode and segment. At their best, you walked away from their shows knowing O’Donnell and Winfrey in a way you might not otherwise have, before. Drew Barrymore, a newly-minted talk show host with her Drew Barrymore Show carried in daytime by CBS stations, has less of herself to introduce, and, more crucially, less apparent desire to do so." Barrymore, he says, was hampered in her first week by her reliance on celebrity friends. "Barrymore’s show is squarely in her comfort zone, and as such is in the comfort zone of any celebrity; it’s so soft and unthreatening, though, as to often make us feel we know subjects and interviewer both less well when the interview is done," says D'Addario. "We hardly need a Mike Wallace-style expose on the stars Barrymore books; that’d be weird in daytime, and it’s not what viewers look to Barrymore for. But — speaking as a Barrymore fan who was excited to see her in conversation — there is as yet untapped potential for her to dig deeper, to show us more of what she really believes or finds important."

ALSO:

• Drew Barrymore's show is so weird, it's almost hypnotic: There have been two major takeaways from The Drew Barrymore Show after one week: "Drew Barrymore definitely has a lot of cool, famous friends, and Drew Barrymore sometimes acts in ways that are tremendously weird when asked to talk into a camera by herself," says William Hughes. "The combination has formed some of the most hypnotically, authentically strange TV the internet has had a chance to dine out on in a while, as Barrymore jumps between recreating famous movies she’s made with her buddies, to monologuing, for minutes at a time, about her love of removing stains from T-shirts."
• Barrymore has been a nonstop ball of energy, which can be exhausting and endearing