There are few things the internet loves more than a good resurrection arc, and this week it handed one to Star Jones, the former *View* co-host who spent the better part of two decades as America's favorite punching bag.
Apparently we've all decided to reconsider.
Nothing says "we have run out of actual problems" quite like a mass reconsideration of a daytime TV host from 2006.
For the uninitiated, Jones was the lawyer-turned-talker who sat at that table during the show's peak chaos years.
She was ambitious, she was polished, she was openly hungry for the spotlight, and the culture of the mid-2000s rewarded exactly none of that in a woman who wasn't a size two.
The discourse has now memory-holed all of it and replaced it with a tidy redemption narrative.
Here's the part everyone keeps skipping: Jones did not get quietly pushed out for being "too much." She got pushed out because she announced her own departure on air without telling her bosses first, which is either the ballsiest move in television history or a masterclass in career arson, depending on which thread you're reading.
Barbara Walters reportedly found out along with the rest of us.
The registry that read less like a gift list and more like a quarterly earnings report.
The woman turned her own nuptials into a branded content event before "branded content" was even a phrase people said out loud, and the internet has never forgiven her for it.
But here's where the cynics among us have to admit something uncomfortable: she was right about the game.
She understood, years before every influencer with a ring light figured it out, that personal life is inventory and attention is currency.
She just did it on network television, in real time, wearing a bad dress, while everyone watched and judged.
The current reappraisal isn't really about Jones.
It's about us, and about how quickly a woman gets labeled difficult when she's simply playing the same sport as the men next to her.
Which, in this economy, is basically the same thing as being correct. **The take:** Star Jones was never the villain of that story.
She was just ahead of a curve the rest of us spent fifteen years catching up to, and she got roasted for it the entire time.
Final Thoughts
If that's a crime, half of TikTok owes her an apology and a cut of the revenue.