Rosie Perez had been away for a month—in rehearsals for her role in Larry David’s hit Broadway play, Fish in the Dark—when in early February she returned to the set of The View. As the 50-year-old star strode across the stage, she was greeted with a shower of red, white, and blue confetti and loud cheers and applause from the live studio audience and from her co-hosts. Rosie O’Donnell smiled and actually looked happy to see her, as did Whoopi Goldberg. “That is your seat, sister,” Nicolle Wallace, the political analyst and former Bush White House director of communications, said to Perez, who looked happier and far more relaxed than she had during the previous four months, since she had become a co-host of the ABC talk show. “Mi gente, gracias,” Perez said, with emotion, looking directly at the camera, as if speaking to someone in the television audience. As the show moved forward, everyone seemed to get along. There was no sign of the tension that had marked The View’s latest season, the first without Barbara Walters, who had created the show and presided over it for 17 years. The conversation crackled: the Republican Party’s wooing of the rap star Pitbull; the lack of male nudity amid so much female nudity in Fifty Shades of Grey; whether divorce can be good for children; and the anti-vaccine debate. At the end of the show, the four women stood and locked arms, smiling almost defiantly as Whoopi Goldberg spoke to the audience. “I think something should be said about the four of us being back together,” she said. “You will hear a lot of rumors. You have heard a lot of rumors. But we are here. This is The View, y’all.”

One of those rumors, which had been circulating for several weeks, was that Rosie Perez had been fired. A show insider was quoted anonymously in the Daily News, in January, saying that Perez “was not the sharpest tool in the shed,” and in Variety saying that she had trouble reading a teleprompter. The stories had created a furor. “Outraged,” a group of prominent Latinas—including New York’s City Council speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito—issued an open letter to ABC executives demanding “an immediate apology,” excoriating the network for “slandering” Perez and then adding “insult to injury” with its lukewarm defense of the actress, which had indeed been tepid: Perez’s “status with the show has not changed,” was the network’s initial comment. Rosie O’Donnell also expressed shock at hearing the news—“What the fuck?” she said, slack-jawed, on air. It was another drama in a season, the show’s 18th, that seems to have been filled with them—and that had made the goings-on at The View the buzz of the television world.

Meredith Viera, Star Jones, Joy Behar and Barbara Walters on the set of The View in June 2003 (top); Whoopi Goldberg, Nicolle Wallace, Rosie Perez, and Raven-Symoné in May 2015 (below). Top, Ed Bailey/AP Photo; bottom, by Fred Lee/ABC/Getty Images.

Since Walters’s retirement last May, there had been the mystifying departure of Bill Geddie, the show’s longtime executive producer. There was the exit of his number two, also last summer, along with the sudden departure of two co-hosts, Jenny McCarthy and Sherri Shepherd. Rosie O’Donnell was rehired in July, in an attempt to boost sagging ratings. But problems only seemed to get worse. There was the screaming match between O’Donnell and a senior producer that was so intense that staff had to physically separate the women. There were the reports that Rosie Perez had broken down in tears backstage, rumors that Whoopi Goldberg had ordered that the senior ABC executive in charge of The View was not to speak to her, or even approach her. And the persistent rumors of a power struggle between Rosie O’Donnell and Whoopi Goldberg that last September, just two weeks into the season, erupted in a blowup between the two stars in front of the studio audience. During a commercial break, O’Donnell took the microphone and began complaining that Goldberg had cut her off and “hurt my feelings.” Goldberg explained that they’d run out of time, but O’Donnell did not know it because she refused to wear an earpiece on air. O’Donnell persisted. “This isn’t the time for this, Rosie,” replied Goldberg, according to the Daily Mail. But O’Donnell continued to vent, and Goldberg snapped. “Fuck it, I told you to leave it alone and you just don’t want to listen,” she shouted, as the audience sat in stunned silence. “If you want to go there, Rosie, I will, dammit. I’m really sick of your shit.” Five months later, in mid-February, O’Donnell abruptly left the show.

Loved and hated, hilariously parodied on Saturday Night Live, the first daytime talk show to host a sitting president—a show that was watched by 6.6 million viewers—and a must-stop for politicians and celebrities alike, The View, during Barbara Walter’s reign, was a cultural institution. But in the past year, it has become more of a cultural punch line. With viewership down to just under 3 million, and the show fighting for dominance in the ratings with shows that have copied it shamelessly, including CBS’s The Talk, the place had become mired in conflict. If press reports were to be believed, a group of high-powered, talented, and famous women were behaving like high-school mean girls. The co-hosts were bickering so badly, according to press reports, and the ratings were so weak, that the show might be canceled.

BARBARA ON THE LINE

In the months since her retirement, Barbara Walters says she has watched The View “almost every day.” There have been times—and “I try not to,” she says—when she cannot stop herself and she calls the control room and gets the executive producer or the director on the line. “We are not Meet the Press,” she has decreed, when a segment has become too weedy or serious. “Or I’ll correct them if they get a fact wrong,” she says, recalling the morning she heard one of the panelists say “oil from Syria,” and grabbed the phone to alert the control room that Syria is not currently an oil exporter. She also e-mails her thoughts to the producers and executives who run the show these days—“the notes,” says one ABC insider, with the hint of an eye roll.