Amy Kaufman: Drew Barrymore is too much — and that's just right
A walk, she decided. That would help. Just some time to process everything.
It was Sunday dawn on the eastern shore of Long Island. Drew Barrymore still had the October morning to herself. But the quiet only amplified her most self-destructive thoughts.
Maybe people were right. Maybe she was annoying. Weird. Wacky. Too much.
That's what the initial feedback had been from the focus groups who'd seen her recent debut as a daytime talk show host. And now this: Just three weeks after "The Drew Barrymore Show's" September 2020 premiere, there was a "Saturday Night Live" skit satirizing it.
She'd awoken at 6 a.m. to a barrage of text messages, and sure enough, there it was on her DVR: Chloe Fineman dressed in a tie-neck blouse, speaking like a Valley girl with a lisp and radiating a cloying level of positivity.
Barrymore watched it once. Anxiety crept in. She left the house.
As she walked by her neighbors' manicured lawns, in the Hamptons, her mind raced through disaster scenarios. If she, Drew Barrymore, was the problem, then her show couldn't be fixed. Her vision of working on a set while raising her kids would evaporate. Something she loved would, yet again, slip away.
Barrymore checked her phone again. Friends, including Jimmy Fallon and Gayle King, had sent texts, saying how great they thought the "SNL" bit was. She resolved to go home and watch it again. This time, it seemed less mean. She started to laugh and documented herself doing so on Instagram.
People who don't matter don't get caricatured on national television. She knew that. She'd hosted "SNL" six times — and still holds the record for the youngest ever to do it, at age 7. This was almost like being anointed.
"Everything shifted in that moment," said Barrymore, 48. "It set me free and stopped me from beating up on myself as much. It opened up doors inside me that went, 'It's OK for you to be silly. Maybe you won't get fired.'"
Two and a half years later, she still has the job. Instead of getting her canceled, her kooky, untamed energy has made Barrymore — whose highly publicized career began when she was in diapers and has since straddled two centuries — a star. Again.
Barrymore began exploring the possibility of a talk show with CBS in the summer of 2019, and she's been fixated on its fate pretty much ever since. It launched in late 2020 when the pandemic was still raging, so she and a skeleton crew were alone in a cavernous 9,000-square-foot space at the CBS Broadcast Center. The audience was virtual, guests beamed in through special effects that made it appear as if they were sitting across from Barrymore.
"She was alone in a studio trying to fill a lot of space with a lot of energy," said Jason Kurtz, the program's showrunner. "Everything was sort of heightened."
And that did not go over well.
Barrymore was making ... choices. She interviewed an American Girl doll. She nuzzled a bottle of cleaning spray to show her affinity for stain removal. She invited Billy Porter to sing "Edelweiss" to a fake flower because, apparently, science says singing to
