Kelly Ripa reveals she often thinks about quitting “Live With Kelly & Mark”: ‘Is it time?’

After nearly three decades of helping kick off America’s mornings at the helm of Live, talk show icon Kelly Ripa has revealed that she often thinks about quitting the daytime series she currently cohosts with her husband, Mark Consuelos.

The 54-year-old star sought advice from a fellow TV legend after she admitted to a nagging point of consideration in her mind in a new interview with Oprah Winfrey on her podcast, Let’s Talk Off Camera.

” I’ve been at the talk show now for 25 years, so, I’m asking for a friend: How did you know it was time to step away?” Ripa asked Winfrey.

Winfrey quickly replied, “First of all, it’s not time for you to step away. And I, if I were advising you, I would say absolutely not, because you and Mark are in a groove. And that groove continues to work.”

Winfrey said she thinks Ripa and Consuelos “have fun and it’s easy, and it’s light enough and serious enough when it needs to be,” adding that the show is “not a grind,” as the couple gets to work together every day.

She later said that “your legacy is every life you touch” and suggested that Ripa consider “all the lives that are being affected by what you’re doing and saying.”

The 71-year-old former talk show host stressed, “Don’t let go of the platform that you have. Do not do it. Don’t even consider it. Because I feel that the reach that you have, the audience that you’ve built, the family that you’ve created, both inside the studio and in the rest of the world, is really more vital and important now than ever before.”

Ripa responded that she thinks Winfrey’s sentiment is true, as she’s noticed a phenomenon over the years of audiences discovering Live while in the hospital, as it airs early in the mornings.

“When you host a talk show or a talk show like ours, where we don’t really cover heavy topics, it is appointment viewing in all of those chemotherapy labs and all of those rooms where people receive their treatments, because it’s not anxiety-inducing,” Ripa said. “And so I have to remember that when I’m thinking, ‘Is it time? Is it time?’ … that there are certain people that I will never know who count on me right now, who are counting on me. And counting on the show.”

Winfrey closed the discussion by agreeing with Ripa that “through appointment television, [people] are counting on you right now.”

After joining Live in 2001 alongside the late Regis Philbin, Ripa has remained with the show across several iterations and cohosts, including Michael Strahan and Ryan Seacrest, before her husband, Consuelos, took the seat beside her in 2023.

In an interview with Entertainment Weekly before Consuelos took his new post, Ripa admitted that she had considered retiring. “It’s so funny. Every time you get a new cohost, it’s like a little jolt of energy,” she said at the time. “But to be clear, I am always thinking about retiring [laughs]. It is my favorite topic of discussion.”

She added, “I commend Ryan for lasting as long as he did because I really had my concerns. We’re friends, we’re open, we’ve talked about this in the past, but, of course, I had my concerns about him picking up and moving to New York because it’s not as easy as one thinks it might be. The sacrifices he made are not lost on me, and I really think he did it for as long as he possibly could.”

Live With Kelly & Mark airs weekdays in syndication. Check your local listings for showtimes in your area.