Megyn Kelly on Anna Faris: What Entertainment Tonight Refused to Say

Entertainment Tonight ran a package on Anna Faris at a red carpet event, played a throwback photo of her looking young and healthy, let her talk about her Scary Movie origins, and called it a day. Maureen, on The Megyn Kelly Show, watched the same clip and reached a completely different conclusion about what the story actually was.

The contrast Maureen draws is brutal and specific. Young Anna Faris in the archive photo: normal, healthy, eyes lit up. Current Anna Faris on the carpet: a different person entirely. The comparisons she reaches for are not gentle.

This Anna Faris looks like a meth addict. She looks like someone you would see on TLC, some sort of freak show reality show. She looks like someone you would see waiting for their relative to get out of prison on Love After Lockup.

That’s a lot of TV references fired in rapid succession, and Maureen is not being coy about what she thinks she’s seeing. The point isn’t to mock Faris. The point is that Entertainment Tonight sat on footage of someone who looks, in Maureen’s words, like she’s near death, and produced a puff piece anyway. Faris is 49, has a young kid, and her ex-husband Chris Pratt has moved on publicly and visibly with Katherine Schwarzenegger. None of that context made it into the package. The red carpet smile did.

The Press Release as Journalism

This is the critique underneath the critique. Maureen isn’t really just talking about Faris. She’s talking about what celebrity media has become: a distribution channel for studio promotional material that happens to employ people with microphones. You show up, you say the movie was a journey, they show your old photos, everyone goes home. Nobody asks the question the footage is actually raising.

Keep going, Entertainment Tonight. That’s not the package. The package should be holy alarm bells are going off.

There’s real media criticism buried in the hyperbole here. ET has access. They’re standing right next to the person. If a publicist controls enough of what gets published, the press stops functioning as a press and starts functioning as a PR relay. Maureen’s frustration is that the lane for actual observation is wide open and nobody in the credentialed celebrity press wants to walk into it.

Please, by all means, keep leaving this lane open to the nerve. It’s why we’re here.

That last line is the tell. This segment isn’t really about Anna Faris. It’s a positioning statement. The Megyn Kelly Show is explicitly claiming the territory that mainstream entertainment outlets won’t touch, the uncomfortable observation, the thing you say out loud at home that never makes it on camera. Whether that’s a genuine public service or just a more combative version of celebrity gossip dressed up as courage is a fair question. But Maureen isn’t wrong that Entertainment Tonight looked at the same footage and chose not to see it.