The Best Female Talk Show Hosts on TV

Ranker TV
Updated October 1, 2023 3.7K votes 485 voters
Over 400 Ranker voters have come together to rank this list of The Best Female Talk Show Hosts on TV
Voting Rules
Vote up the women who have been the best at hosting talk shows.

Though the field is expanding, most of the best female talk show hosts are the faces we see and the voices we hear on morning and daytime talk shows. Women like Ellen DeGeneres, Barbara Walters, and Oprah Winfrey are household names who have hosted some of the longest running talk shows on television. There are more female late night talk show hosts than there used to be, with Samantha Bee and Busy Philipps joining the ranks of comedians and personalities such as Chelsea Handler and Joan Rivers. Whether they're great at conducting interviews, know how to ask the hard questions, or just make a show something you can't miss, these women are the best at what they do.

Of these great female talk show hosts, which of these women have been the very best? Vote up the women who have done the best job hosting chat shows, late night talk shows, morning shows and more.

Most divisive: Kelly Ripa
Ranked by
  • Leah Remini
    1

    Leah Remini

    The Talk
    82 votes
    • Age: 53
    • Birthplace: Brooklyn, New York, USA
    Leah Marie Remini (born June 15, 1970) is an American actress, author, former Scientologist, and Scientology critic. She starred as Carrie Heffernan on the long-running CBS comedy series The King of Queens (1998–2007) and later co-hosted The Talk in 2010–11. Since 2016, she has co-produced and hosted the Emmy Award–winning A&E documentary series Leah Remini: Scientology and the Aftermath. Raised as a member of the Church of Scientology from childhood, Remini left the organization in 2013 and began public criticism of Scientology. Two years later, she released Troublemaker: Surviving Hollywood and Scientology, her memoir about her experience with Scientology and reasons for leaving it. She followed up the book with the aforementioned series to highlight other former Scientologists' experiences. After a successful first season, the series was renewed by A&E, and the second season debuted in late summer 2017. On March 14, 2018, A&E announced that the series would return for a third season. From May 2017 until May 2018, Remini also starred in Kevin Can Wait as Vanessa Cellucci, alongside Kevin James, her former co-star on The King of Queens.
  • Candace Cameron-Bure
    2

    Candace Cameron-Bure

    The View
    71 votes
    • Age: 47
    • Birthplace: Panorama City, California, USA
    Candace Cameron Bure (; born Candace Helaine Cameron; April 6, 1976) is an American actress, producer, author, and talk show panelist. She is known for her role as D.J. Tanner on Full House, which she reprised as D.J. Tanner-Fuller on Fuller House. She is also known for her work with Hallmark Channel, playing the title character in Hallmark Channel's film adaptation of the Aurora Teagarden novel series, as well having starred in many of their Christmas films. In 2014, she was a contestant on season 18 of Dancing with the Stars, finishing in third place. She also starred as Summer van Horne on Make It or Break It. She is the sister of actor Kirk Cameron, known for Growing Pains. From 2015 to 2016, she was a co-host of the daytime television talk show The View.
  • Marie Osmond
    3

    Marie Osmond

    The Talk
    34 votes
    • Age: 63
    • Birthplace: Ogden, Utah, USA
    Olive Marie Osmond (born October 13, 1959) is an American singer, actress, author, philanthropist, talk show host and a member of the show business family the Osmonds. Although she was never part of her family's singing group, she gained success as a solo country music artist in the 1970s and 1980s. Her best known song is a remake of the country pop ballad "Paper Roses". From 1976 to 1979, she and her singer brother Donny Osmond hosted the television variety show Donny & Marie. Osmond is set to premiere as new co-host on The Talk in 2019.
  • Aisha Tyler
    4

    Aisha Tyler

    The Talk, Talk Soup
    52 votes
    • Age: 53
    • Birthplace: USA, California, San Francisco
    Aisha N. Tyler (born September 18, 1970) is an American actress, comedian, director and talk show host. She is known for playing Andrea Marino in the first season of Ghost Whisperer, Dr. Tara Lewis in Criminal Minds, Mother Nature in the Santa Clause films and voicing Lana Kane in Archer as well as recurring roles on CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, Talk Soup and Friends. She is formerly the co-host of CBS's The Talk, where she won a Daytime Emmy Award for Outstanding Entertainment Talk Show Host and currently hosts Whose Line Is It Anyway?. She also hosted Ubisoft's E3 press conferences and has lent her voice to the video games Halo: Reach and Gears of War 3.
  • Oprah Winfrey
    5

    Oprah Winfrey

    The Oprah Winfrey Show
    103 votes
    • Age: 69
    • Birthplace: Kosciusko, Mississippi, USA
    Oprah Gail Winfrey (born Orpah Gail Winfrey, January 29, 1954) is an American media executive, actress, talk show host, television producer and philanthropist. She is best known for her talk show The Oprah Winfrey Show, broadcast from Chicago, which was the highest-rated television program of its kind in history and ran in national syndication for 25 years from 1986 to 2011. Dubbed the "Queen of All Media", she was the richest African American of the 20th century and North America's first black multi-billionaire, and has been ranked the greatest black philanthropist in American history. She has also been sometimes ranked as the most influential woman in the world.Winfrey was born into poverty in rural Mississippi to a teenage single mother and later raised in inner-city Milwaukee. She has stated that she was molested during her childhood and early teens and became pregnant at 14; her son was born prematurely and died in infancy. Winfrey was then sent to live with the man she calls her father, Vernon Winfrey, a barber in Tennessee, and landed a job in radio while still in high school. By 19, she was a co-anchor for the local evening news. Winfrey's often emotional, extemporaneous delivery eventually led to her transfer to the daytime talk show arena, and after boosting a third-rated local Chicago talk show to first place, she launched her own production company and became internationally syndicated. Credited with creating a more intimate confessional form of media communication, Winfrey popularized and revolutionized the tabloid talk show genre pioneered by Phil Donahue. Through this medium, Winfrey broke 20th-century taboos and allowed LGBT people to enter the mainstream through television appearances. In 1994, she was inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame.By the mid-1990s, Winfrey had reinvented her show with a focus on literature, self-improvement, mindfulness and spirituality. Though she was criticized for unleashing a confession culture, promoting controversial self-help ideas, and having an emotion-centered approach, she has also been praised for overcoming adversity to become a benefactor to others. Winfrey had also emerged as a political force in the 2008 presidential race, delivering about one million votes to Barack Obama in the razor close 2008 Democratic primary. In 2013, Winfrey was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Obama and honorary doctorate degrees from Duke and Harvard. In 2008, she formed her own network, Oprah Winfrey Network (OWN).
  • Barbara Walters
    6

    Barbara Walters

    20/20, Today, ABC World News Tonight with David Muir
    30 votes
    • Age: Dec. at 93 (1929-2022)
    • Birthplace: Boston, Massachusetts, USA
    Barbara Jill Walters (September 25, 1929 – December 30, 2022) was an American broadcast journalist, author, and television personality. Walters has hosted a variety of television programs, including Today, The View, 20/20, and the ABC Evening News. Since retirement as a full-time host and contributor, she continued to report for ABC News through 2015 occasionally. In 1976 Walters became the first female co-anchor of a network evening news, the ABC Evening News. From 1979 to 2004, Walters worked as co-host and a producer for the ABC newsmagazine 20/20. In 1997, Walters created and debuted as a co-host on The View, a daytime talk show with an all-female panel, and was a co-host for 16 seasons. Her final on-air appearance for ABC News was in 2015. In 1996, Walters was ranked #34 on the TV Guide "50 Greatest TV Stars of All Time" list, and in 2000 she received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences.