Few details have been confirmed about Katie Couric’s new ABC series, but one thing is for certain: When Couric premieres her live daytime show in September 2012, it will have a familiar feel.
“It’ll be sort of a little bit of what Oprah did,” Couric, 54, told Jay Leno during an interview Monday, hours after Couric signed a multi-year, multi-platform deal with ABC. “Obviously, no one can ever fill Oprah’s shoes, but some of the things that she did on her show, some of the things we used to do on the Today show.”
Couric, who left NBC’s Today in 2006 to make the jump to CBS, is excited to get back to her daytime roots as she hosts and produces her new venture.
“I’m really looking forward to it because, creatively, it’s such an exciting challenge for me and I think I’m better at interacting and talking to people and synthesizing complicated subjects — I hope — and you know doing interviews that require some empathy,” Couric told Leno. “On the [CBS] Evening News, it was hard to do that in that very structured format.”
Couric was the first woman to anchor a network evening news show solo.
