The daytime talk show space continues to get crowded, and this time, Keke Palmer and BET are hoping to strike gold with a new talk show targeting so-called millenials – essentially those in her age group – which Palmer will of course host.
The 20-year-old Palmer (I actually thought she was 3 or 4 years older than that) will become the youngest talk show host in TV history, with The Keke Palmer Project, besting the likes of Ricki Lake, who was 25 when she begun hosting her 1990s daytime talk show, also aimed at her generation at the time.
Per the press announcement, The Keke Palmer Project will cover a variety of topics important to her target audience, as you’d expect, and will also include celebrity guests, and more.
“I like to read quotes that touch on how I am feeling,” Palmer said. “If I am dealing with confusion, I will read quotes about clarity and peace of mind. I started posting these quotes on my Twitter page, and the fans responded so positively! I realized that many of them were dealing with similar issues, and the quotes helped to open up a genuine dialogue between us.”
Palmer boasts 1.4 million Twitter followers, and I suspect a good number of them will follow her to BET when her talk-show premieres in July.
She will join The Wendy Williams Show, The Queen Latifah Show, and new series, The Real (hosted by Tamera Mowry-Housley, Tamar Braxton, Loni Love, Adrienne Bailon, and Jeannie Mai,) all in syndication on BET (Latifah and The Real head to the network this fall). Clearly BET is reinforcing its dominant female audience (it’s rebranding Centric to become a network for black women as well).
As I noted, the day-time TV talk show space is already crowded enough; surely, every single one of the existing (and upcoming new) shows can’t all survive – can they?
And I should mention that a good number of those shows are hosted (solely, or co-hosted) by black personalities. It’s too bad this hasn’t quite transferred to the late night talk show circuit.
