CBS silences The Talk for a few days while Sharon Osbourne thinks about what she did

Last week, Piers Morgan’s predictably blustery descent into self-destruction (emphasis on “self” and an equal emphasis on “destruction”) over Oprah’s Prince Harry/Meghan Markle interview was capped off by Sharon Osbourne’s complete refusal to acknowledge the possibility that her good friend Piers Morgan—one of the most famously unlikable people on the planet—could be a racist. Osbourne defended Morgan on an episode of CBS’ The Talk, during which she demanded that co-host Sheryl Underwood explain to her why it was racist for Morgan to utterly disregard the racism that Markle told Oprah she experienced in her time with the royal family.

Osbourne later said she “panicked” and “felt blindsided” by the discussion of Morgan, because who could’ve possibly predicted that a show called The Talk would touch on a topic that a lot of people were talking about, but all of this also prompted former The Talk cast member Holly Robinson Peete to point out that Osborune had reportedly expressed concerns about her being too “ghetto” for the show shortly before she was fired (implying a connection between the two events). Now, Deadline says The Talk is going to go on a “brief hiatus” while the network continues its internal review into Sharon Osbourne’s… whole thing. The live shows scheduled for today and tomorrow (that’s Monday and Tuesday) have been canceled, but at this point the show is still set to come back as normal on Wednesday.

The internal review itself is kind of an odd beast here, since it’s not like it was set off by allegations happening behind the scenes. The argument that Osbourne and Underwood had last week happened on the air, so it seems unlikely that some new revelation is going to come to light today or tomorrow, so it’s probably less about what anyone said or did and more about whether or not any particular hosts are bad for The Talk as a brand—and we’ll presumably know what conclusions CBS came to by Wednesday.