Kelly Clarkson’s Daytime TV Reign Ends in Tears

Weiss Eubanks/NBCUniversal This piece first ran on the Obsessed by Kevin Fallon Substack .

Subscribe here to read more like it! There was no other way to end The Kelly Clarkson Show .

Obviously, she had to sing.

A lot.

After seven seasons and 1,200 episodes, the series ended its blockbuster daytime TV run Monday by giving its fans exactly what they want: an hour of the Grammy-winning pop star performing a curated greatest hits set from her career, bookending her vocal gymnastic routines with candid stories behind each of the songs, some of the drama behind recording them, and how it feels singing them at this point in her life.

I was at the taping of the series finale, which essentially meant living out an elder millennial’s dream: attending a matinee Kelly Clarkson concert.

You know when any music star’s songs sound the best? In the early afternoon, when you can lose your mind jumping up and down while screaming along to the chorus of “Since U Been Gone” and then gorgeously venture back out in the world in time to grab a late lunch.

“You know that Kelly Clarkson would love every concert to start in the afternoon,” Alex Duda, the show’s executive producer and showrunner, told me, laughing.

Over its run, The Kelly Clarkson Show won 24 Daytime Emmy Awards.

It’s up for 11 more this year.

Once a lucrative pop-culture mainstay, the genre seemed to be gasping for air before the chart-topping artist revitalized it.

The series also introduced a new side of Clarkson to audiences and fans, revealing the singer as a candid, adorably self-deprecating storyteller and earnest conversationalist, her gee-golly Texas enthusiasm inflecting her screen presence like some of her best vocal runs.

Debuting during the pandemic and, eventually, moving its production across the country from Los Angeles to New York City’s famed Rockefeller Center, the show became an unexpected daily salve, with Clarkson as a TV solar flare of warmth puncturing through the incessant fog of, for lack of a better way of putting it, the world’s bad vibes.

The country’s first—and best— American Idol became its Daytime TV Queen.