NEW YORK – Tamron Hall will never forget the day she filmed the pilot for her daytime TV talk show. It was late in 2018 and Hall was 48 years old. While in the makeup room preparing for the shoot, she received a call from her doctor that she was pregnant.
"I'm like, 'Well, that's two babies at once,'" Hall, now 55, tells USA TODAY from the set of her show in Disney's Tribeca headquarters. "You don't know what's possible. And I believe what our show does so well is, show you."
Hall always wanted to be a journalist and a mother. Neither came easy. And now as her self-titled talk show readies for its eighth season (premiering Monday, Sept. 14), the TV host is reflecting on both journeys, which she calls "gifts."
Tamron Hall traveled but never stopped working over the summer
Hall split her summer between Texas
and Long Island. The journalist, who is originally from the Lone Star State, jokes that she was outnumbered two-to-one during the NBA Finals when the New York Knicks defeated the San Antonio Spurs. Hall's husband, music executive Steven Greener, is a New Yorker as is their seven-year-old son Moses.
"Someone said to me today, 'Season 8, you're walking out this door, how do you feel?'" she recalls. "And I actually got emotional because [when] I started this show, my son was five-months-old."
During the interview, Hall pulls out her phone and plays a video of Moses excitedly yelling, "We're going to Season 8!" Hall says her son spent the summer going to sports camps and swimming, and that she enjoyed the chance to bond with him.
But despite the travels and family time, Hall says she never stopped working. "I will wake up in the middle of the night and write something down or grab my iPhone," she says.
The slogan for the show's new season, "Let's Keep Talking," came to her in that manner. "We recognize that daytime, like every industry, is going through a transition," she notes, addressing the elephant in the room.
NBCUniversal, which housed a number of daytime shows including Kelly Clarkson's, shut down its syndication production division entirely. Sherri Shepherd's show also wrapped earlier this year. As the number of syndicated daytime talk shows dropped to its lowest number in decades, Hall began to think of a strength that the format still has: "the ability to keep talking."
"That allows you to understand people, that allows you to be curious about people, that allows you to be curious about yourself," she continues. "And so for me, it just came out. 'Let's keep talking.'"
And Hall's son will be excited about at least one of the guests his mom will keep talking with this season: Knicks star Jalen Brunson, joined by his family.
Tamron Hall recalls the moment her talk show hit its stride
Hall's journey to motherhood came through in-vitro fertilization (IVF). The journalist has been open about her struggle with treatments in her 30s and how she managed the stress of hormone shots and heartache of the process with her burgeoning career.
That career started in local news before she landed at NBC, rising through the ranks before making history. Hall became the first Black woman to co-anchor the "Today" show when she was installed into the morning show's third hour. But in February 2017, Hall left NBC after she refused to re-sign a new deal that offered a lesser role.
Then in July 2017, Hall signed a deal with Harvey Weinstein's production company to develop her own talk show. In October 2017, Weinstein's sexual misconduct scandal broke. After confronting the disgraced executive over the allegations, Hall and her team dissolved the deal.
In August 2018, Hall inked a new contact with Disney. She credits in part, the COVID-19 lockdown, with the show's longevity.
"When everything changed for those many, many months of being inside my home or in the studio alone, it reminded me of the muscle of being a journalist," she says. "I believe that was the transition for the show."
Hall still does celebrity interviews (and her dream get in-studio is Eddie Murphy). But the show moved from celebrity-driven to a mix of topics involving stars, culture, news and lifestyle. For Season 8, Hall will reprise segments like "Up-and-Coming Designers" to give aspiring fashion stars a platform and "Tamron's Tasting Table" where popular chefs cook for Hall and her audience, affectionately known as the "Tam Fam."
She's also moving into the memoir world. Hall will release "Bet on Yourself: Why Faith and Fierceness Are All You Need" on Jan. 26, 2027.
"Your future is not determined by anyone other than yourself," she says. "And that is my life. That is my experience. The memoir is about building this show. It is about believing that there is always more in the tank."
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: How Tamron Hall's pregnancy at 48 shaped the course of her career
