Drew Barrymore avoids mentioning writers strike in season premiere

Drew Barrymore is back, though whether the fourth season premiere of her eponymous talk show is “better than ever” would be a matter of opinion. The actor accumulated a fair amount of goodwill over the last three seasons of her loose, quirky, intimate daytime television series—goodwill that, in some circles, evaporated during the writers strike. Barrymore ultimately walked back her decision to premiere the show without her writers, yet that’s what happened anyway, as her three WGA employees declined to return to the program even after the strike was resolved.

The fact that Barrymore shot herself in the foot did not come up in the premiere. Barrymore—apparently with new writers—chose not to address her recent controversy, instead choosing to start the season with a chipper, “Alright everybody, welcome to season four. Let’s go girls.” She then spent a day with Shania Twain on the country singer’s Las Vegas farm. The pair discussed a number of non-inflammatory subjects, including Twain’s health journey, the women’s approach to romantic relationships, and (what else?) Taylor Swift.

Per Variety, the closest Barrymore came to touching upon the strike backlash was asking Twain if she enjoyed taking a 15-year hiatus from public life. “I’m asking for personal reasons,” she said with a laugh. But Barrymore has a lot of good reasons to contemplate retreating from the public eye, including the fact that she’s been in it since she was a child. Rather than duck the constant scrutiny, though, it seems Barrymore has resolved to soldier on and keep living her life out in the open.

Indeed, that was something of the mission statement behind her decision to go forward with her show during the strike. “Since launching live in a pandemic, I just wanted to make a show that was there for people in sensitive times, and I weighed the scales and I thought if we could go on during a global pandemic, and everything that the world experienced through 2020, why would this sideline us?” She said in her second of three statements on the subject. “So I want to just put one foot in front of the other and make a show that’s there for people regardless of anything else that’s happening in the world because that’s when I think we all need something that wants to be there being very realistic in very realistic times.”

In her conversation with Twain, Barrymore said that rather than refusing to trust she’d “rather be an open vessel that feels so embarrassed and raw.” The talk show host has certainly proved that in her willingness to let her missteps play out for the world to see. In this case, maybe she feels (not unreasonably) that her multiple previous statements on the subject were enough. Does that openness really have to apply to every situation?

Correction: The initial story said that The Drew Barrymore Show premiered without writers. While the former three writers have left the show, a source from the show tells us that they have hired new ones.