Brandy's Star Turn: The Sequel
Brandy came back Friday morning for another guest-host go-round in Star Jones' old seat on "The View," and it looks like she's going to need to throw her (not very considerable) weight around a little more if she's hoping to get the permanent gig.
The actress-singer-talent show judge did her level best to play along as Elisabeth Hasselbeck prattled on endlessly about her scatologically obsessed baby (getting the word "poop' in at least 15 times in a minute) and Joy Behar did a painful bit at the "Hot Topics" table about male personal ads that she'd "discovered." (It didn't escape our notice that she advised a man who advertised himself as being 444 pounds to "get gastric bypass," and made relentless fun of his obesity. Ahem.)
Though she was pretty, elegant and engagingly self-effacing and self-aware, Brandy might have been a little too smooth for her professional good, and not prone enough to the kind of pop philosophizing and too-much-information personal detail sharing that made Star Jones such a cringe-inducing (and popular) co-host.
Barbara, Joy, and Elisabeth will welcome an interesting panoply of guests to Star's vacant chair in July, among them Shannen Doherty, Katharine McPhee, and Kelly Monaco, but we'd start the odds on Brandy becoming the next co-host on "The View" at a middling 6-to-1, with last week's fill-in Renee Goldsberry a longer shot at 10-to-1.