Kelly Ripaand Mark Consuelos are moving on…to a new studio.
Live With Kelly and Mark aired its final episode filmed on the former set of the long-running series on Tuesday, April 1. After 37 years at its studio on the Upper West Side of New York City, Live moved to a new set downtown recently — and the morning show’s co-hosts were understandably emotional about the change.
“Our kids grew up here,” Consuelos told People in an interview given last month, shortly after Live‘s last episode in its original studio was filmed. “They’d come visit mom here a lot — they were always backstage, even when they were babies.”
Ripa and Consuelos share three children: Michael, 27, Lola, 23, and Joaquin, 22.
“They came to work with me every day until they went to school,” Ripa continued. “They would go to All My Children with me, they would come here with me…we meant when we say they grew up in this building, in these four walls.”
Ripa went on to say that she had her kids “back in a time when maternity leave was not really a thing; we didn’t really know how to negotiate that or navigate that. But the good news is you could bring your kids to work with you. And because they’re very mindful of our hours here — as it is a live morning television show — I was able to be a full-time working woman and a full-time mother simultaneously, which is a very rare thing and not something I take for granted at all.”
Consuelos chimed in to say that some of their “closest friends are people that work here.”
“We’re a family at Live, and growing up, those were some of the people our kids were closest to,” he explained.
“Yeah, my kids have full text chains with some of the people here,” Ripa agreed. “Like, Lola doesn’t look at some of our producers as producers; she looks at them as other moms. These are moms she and my sons can go to if I’m on set if there’s an emergency. So there’s a lot of that.”
