"Live with Kelly and Michael" to Air "After Oscar® Show"

Kelly Ripa and Michael Strahan Bring the Show to Hollywood On the morning after the Academy Awards, Monday, February 23, 2015, Kelly Ripa and Michael Strahan will air their fourth annual special segment of Live with Kelly and Michael: their After Oscar® Show. The show will film from Hollywood’s Dolby Theatre, where the episode will include interviews from the red carpet and backstage, as well as live on the show. Both winners and presenters will be featured as special guests, interviewed by Kelly and Michael with their renowned style. Presumably, the show will return to New York the following morning for their regularly scheduled programming, where it is filmed at ABC Studios at 7 Lincoln Square, on the corner of West 67^th St and Columbus Avenue. The show airs on WABC-TV and is syndicated throughout the country. It normally tapes live at 9:00am Eastern Standard Time, and then is tape-delayed to play at the same time in the rest of the country.

Will It Really Be “Live”?

It has long been apparent that Live with Kelly and Michael, as well as the franchise’s predecessors Live with Regis and Kelly and other couples, actually incorporate a limited amount of live content. Some attendees of the live studio audience have complained that their experience is made less enjoyable due to the fact that Kelly and Michael appear in the same clothes as they were wearing on previously taped segments, wherein they actually interviewed celebrity guests. Studio audience members, therefore, are often asked to sit through pre-recorded interviews played on a large monitor, awaiting the less interesting live segments wherein Kelly and Michael introduce the guests. This After Oscar® special will most likely have a similar structure, particularly because the show will surely include many pre-taped segments from the night before at the Academy Awards, both on the red carpet and backstage. However, some of these guests will hopefully also visit the live studio taping the following morning, as that is the reason that the show will relocate to Hollywood in the first place.

The History of the Franchise

Michael Strahan has been Kelly Ripa’s co-host on Live with Kelly and Michael since 2012, when Kelly was in search of a replacement following the departure of Regis Philbin. The concept of pairing Regis with a female co-host dates back to 1988, when his co-host was Kathie Lee Gifford, and the show was called Live with Regis and Kathie Lee from 1988 to 2000. It took a year for Regis to find a suitable replacement for Kathie Lee, and thus the show was called only Live with Regis from 2000 to 2001. Kelly Ripa, at the time a successful soap opera star, was paired with Regis in 2001, and Live with Regis and Kelly was born, which lasted until 2011 when Regis finally retired. Similar to when Regis was left alone, Kelly hosted the show with a series of rotating cohosts for a year from 2011 to 2012, until Michael Strahan joined her. Strahan had already hosted the show 16 times, so it was a natural fit although not as highly rated as other trial co-hosts such as Seth Meyers, who soon got his own late night show. However, ever since Strahan joined Kelly, the show has been on a whole new level with renewed, healthy ratings.