ENTERTAINMENTKelly Ripa Considering Stepping Away From 'Live With Kelly and Mark' After 25 Years on Air: 'Is It Time?'
Kelly Ripa is thinking about her future after a quarter of a century hosting 'Live With Kelly.'
July 17 2025, Published 5:40 p.m. ET
Kelly Ripa's time as a talk show host may be coming to a close.
During the Wednesday, July 16, episode of her "Let's Talk Off Camera Podcast," Ripa, 54, pondered whether she should step away from Live With Kelly and Mark after over two decades and several rounds of co-hosts.
Kelly Ripa might want to quit 'Live With Kelly and Mark.'
"I've been at the talk show now for 25 years, so, I'm asking for a friend: How did you know it was time to step away?" Ripa questioned guest star Oprah Winfrey.
The media mogul quickly assured her that it's not her time yet.
"And I, if I were advising you, I would say absolutely not, because you and Mark are in a groove. And that groove continues to work," she asserted.
Kelly Ripa has been a talk show host for 25 years.
Winfrey praised Ripa and her co-host, husband Mark Consuelos, for their on-air chemistry that's "fun," "easy," "light enough and serious enough when it needs to be." She also pointed out that it's "not a grind" when you get to go to work with the person you love every day.
"As much as I loved being a part of the show every day, and as much as I loved the audience, I'm telling you, the nature of what we were doing every day became just so hard," Winfrey reflected on her own experience hosting The Oprah Winfrey Show, which aired from 1986 to 2011. As Ripa noted, Winfrey was also "dealing with very serious topics a lot of the time."
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Kelly Ripa currently hosts her talk show with husband Mark Consuelos.
The author ultimately pulled her talk show out of Emmy consideration because it wasn't what mattered most to her. While Ripa joked it was because she was running out of shelf space, Winfrey guaranteed her that her goal was to be "putting out the effort to do good things, to be a force for good in the world."
"It's not gonna be measured by an award at the end of the year. It's measured in every viewer response," the Color Purple actress continued. "I've said many times, your legacy is every life you touch. It's measured in all the lives that are being affected by what you're doing and saying."
Kelly Ripa asked Oprah Winfrey for advice about whether she should leave 'Live With Kelly and Mark.'
Winfrey urged Ripa to hold onto her platform and use it to touch people around the world.
"Do not do it," she said. "Don't even consider it, because I feel that the reach that you have, the audience that you've built, the family that you've created — both inside the studio and in the rest of the world — is really more vital and important now than ever before."
Part of Ripa's impact is continuing to host a talk show that has grown to be a source of entertainment and joy in hospitals.
"When you host a talk show or a talk show like ours, where we don't really cover heavy topics, it is appointment viewing in all of those chemotherapy labs and all of those rooms where people receive their treatments, because it's not anxiety-inducing," the mom-of-three explained. "And so I have to remember that when I'm thinking, 'Is it time? Is it time?' … that there are certain people that I will never know who count on me right now, who are counting on me. And counting on the show."
