Drew Barrymore’s Post-Strike Season Premiere: A Meandering Muddle That Could Use Better Writing
Drew Barrymore’s talk show returned for its fourth season Oct. 16 without its previous writing staff — with its writers from last season having been offered, but declining, the opportunity to return. And it proved that it’s possible to run a show like this without any writers with experience on the show — just so long as you whittle away any connective tissue that makes an interview legible. And maybe include some long, wordless sequences of horseback riding for good measure.
Barrymore, who earlier this year seemed to be riding high as one of the standard-bearers of the sweetly sunny post-Ellen daytime landscape, tanked her public image last month with a subset of the audience by announcing that she’d be bringing her show back Sept. 18, before the WGA strike had concluded. Although she reversed her decision, her writers departed the show, leaving Barrymore in the unenviable position of having to launch her show when she would have, anyway, just without the people who had been stringing it all together.
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And it was plain, even as she didn’t mention the strike or her own actions around it once, that something was missing from the show — some leavening agent to work against the pure uncut force of Barrymore’s persona and self-belief. We were plopped into an episodelong interview at the home of country singer Shania Twain with Barrymore simply declaring, “All right, everybody, welcome to Season 4! Let’s go, girls!” The shout-out to Twain’s song “Man! I Feel Like a Woman!” was at least the beginning of a hint of what was going on, but questions a gifted writer might have asked, and helped to answer, in buttressing material around the interview — why Shania Twain now, and what connection did Drew feel to her? — we were left to extrapolate from Barrymore’s demeanor and body language. Compared to the practically luxurious interview segments on the old “Oprah Winfrey Show,” which would have done similar home-visit stunts, Barrymore seemed both rushed, skittering from topic to topic and moment to moment without doing much situating of who Twain is and why she’s important, and at a loss for what to say.
Give Barrymore this much — for a host in the genre known as “talk,” she’s as close to post-verbal as it gets. Her physical closeness to Twain and the directness of her gaze were left to do much heavy lifting, as questions like “Why do you love horses so much?” didn’t quite get the job done. At times, she seemed to want to hint to the segment of the audience with whom she was in the doghouse that she got the awkwardness of her position; asking Twain if she enjoyed taking a 15-year hiatus from public life, Barrymore added, “I’m asking for personal reasons,” and punctuated it with a mordant laugh. And as both women discussed being family breadwinners in their childhoods, Barrymore noted that she’d always felt responsible for people beyond herself. “There’s work that has to be done,” she said, her voice suddenly rich with emotion that may or may not have pertained to the work she thought needed to be done in September. A writer who’d worked with her before might have told her, here, that she was giving a bit too much away.
The episode broke out of Twain’s living room for a lengthy final segment in which Twain and Barrymore ride horses together; Barrymore mused aloud about why she has to try to look funny, not sexy, while riding, a line of thought on which Twain did not join her. Indeed, the two women speak sparingly as they ride; “Now I’m happy,” Barrymore said, at one point, to the air. (Little wonder why — she finally got her answer to the question of why Twain loves horses so much!) Near the episode’s end, Barrymore addresses her horse. “If life is about redos,” she says, “maybe this one will be a little sexier than the last one?”
That’s a big if. Barrymore’s life, to this point, has indeed been one big redo — just as she tells Twain, and as she repeats to many of her interview subjects, she went from child star to emancipated minor to A-list actress and powerhouse producer with a speed that’d unsteady most people. And now she’s bringing back a talk show that already survived launching into the awkwardness of COVID, this time with a refreshed staff, and thus without the writers who had been working to get it this far. But in this season premiere, this host seems to have a brutally unclear idea of why Twain — a defining star of the past quarter-century — matters, or what Barrymore, specifically, can get out of her. There’s work that has to be done on Barrymore’s part — and it’s making amends to good writers however she can. Because it’s not at all clear this team can get the job done.
Correction: This column was adjusted to reflect the fact that “The Drew Barrymore Show” does in fact have a new writing staff, replacing the previous writers who declined to return to their positions after the conclusion of the WGA strike.
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