'Anderson': 2 Shows A Day, 3 Days A Week

‘Anderson' to Show Lighter Side of CNN Host

Cooper will continue to travel, tape three days a week to balance schedule

By Andrea Morabito -- Broadcasting & Cable, 6/29/2011 -- 2:07:36 PM

New York -- Now that Anderson Cooper is launching a syndicated daytime talk show, he can finally reveal how much he likes the Real Housewives franchise.

"It's nice to do something that shows you as a fully-rounded person," he told the audience at the PromaxBDA conference Wednesday of his upcomingAnderson, which premieres Sept. 12. "I think people know you can be incredibly passionate about what's happening in Syria and you can have guilty pleasures."

Cooper will continue on his nightly CNN news program, AC 360, which means Anderson will shoot two shows a day, three days a week to allow the anchor to manage his other responsibilities. He also said he'll have a week's worth of shows pre-taped should he have to travel to cover breaking news for CNN.

"I know for a fact that I'll still be able to travel and that's important to me," he said. He also noted that if a news event was of interest to a daytime audience, that he'd bring some Anderson staff with him to cover it for the daytime show.

Cooper made a point of saying that nothing will be repurposed from one show to the other, each will have separate staffs with a separate focus. "There will be times when there will be similar things," on both shows, he said. "But the two shows are going to be very different and distinct."

For Cooper, his foray into daytime was really just an outlet to tell more human stories, exemplified by his past coverage of news eventslike Hurricane Katrina and the Gulf oil spill, but that he can't always do on a newscast if the topics aren't newsworthy.

"I realized that's what I like to do the most, it's when I feel most useful," he said of telling personal stories of relevance to people's every day lives. "In daytime, you can do that pretty much every day."

While Anderson launches this fall, a year ahead of the 2012 elections, Cooper says the show won't be doing a lot on politics, at least not until the race gets much narrower. "There are so many places where viewers who are interested in that can get that."