28-05-2025
Hoda Kotb Addresses Rumor She's Replacing Kelly Clarkson on Daytime Show
During a Wednesday-morning return visit to NBC's Today, Hoda Kotb cleared the air on a rumor that's been swirling — that she is in queue to 'take over' The Kelly Clarkson Show if the American Idol alum decides to wrap her daytime run in 2026.
Rumors of Clarkson's potential departure began swirling in March, when she missed several tapings of The Kelly Clarkson Show due to a personal matter; at the time, a carousel of other celebrities filled in as host, but Clarkson's absence was never addressed directly on the series. Then, in April, the New York Post reported that Clarkson hoped to leave the series when her contract was up, though there was no comment from either Clarkson's team or series producer NBCUniversal at the time.
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Confronted by Today's Craig Melvin with the rumor on Wednesday morning, Kotb — who famously left Today in January to spend more time with her children — chuckled and then set the record straight.
Addressing both Melvin and Savannah Guthrie, she said, 'I want to ask you all a real question: Do you think, if I ever came back to TV…. Do you know where the only place I would ever come back to is? Right here' on Today, she asserted. 'This is the spot. There's no place like home.'
'So the rumors are done?' asked Melvin.
'Delete, delete — not true,' Kotb insisted.
Kotb served as a co-anchor of NBC's Today from 2018 to January 2025, when she departed the morning news program to spend more time with her family. 'I had my kiddos late in life, and I was thinking that they deserve a bigger piece of my time pie,' she told her Today colleagues in September 2024, when she announced her decision to leave. 'We only have a finite amount of time.'
It has since been detailed one of Kotb's children, 6-year-old Hope, is living with type 1 diabetes.
'I really wanted to and needed to be here to watch over her. So whenever she needs anything, and it can happen at night, multiple times, I'm up — I'm up up up,' she explains in a new People cover story. 'But I would never, ever want Hope to one day grow up and say, 'Oh, my mom left her job because [of me].' It wasn't that alone. But if you look at it cumulatively, it was a part of that decision.'
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