“The View” pulls an Oprah Winfrey, moves audience to tears as ‘everyone’ wins huge prize on season 30 premiere
“The View” pulls an Oprah Winfrey, moves audience to tears as ‘everyone’ wins huge prize on season 30 premiere
Joey NolfiTue, September 8, 2026 at 5:01 PM UTC
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Whoopi Goldberg on ‘The View’; A ‘View’ audience member cries during premiereCredit: ABC (2)Key Points -
The View moved some of its studio audience to tears with a shock giveaway on the season 30 premiere.
Whoopi Goldberg announced a major prize for the studio crowd, including a trip to Mexico.
The camera showed an audience member wiping away tears following the surprise announcement.
The View just pulled an Oprah Winfrey.
In the final moments of the show’s season 30 premiere Tuesday morning, moderator Whoopi Goldberg revealed a surprise so big that it even moved some audience members to tears.
“There’s nothing more that we love than giveaways on this show,” the 70-year-old EGOT winner said, introducing The View’s 30 Days of Giveaways segment. “All season long, we’ll be surprising the audience with incredible giveaways, and today is our very first one!”
‘The View’ returns for season 30Credit: ABC
Cohost Sara Haines indicated that the audience was filled with “View superfans,” and that “one of them is going to win a three-night stay” at the Secrets and Dreams Playa Mujeres resorts in Cancun, Mexico.
A drumroll sounded as Goldberg fished around inside a gold box, before pulling one card that — judging by the look on her face — perplexed her in the moment.
She then turned the card around to reveal that “everyone in the audience” would win the prize, leading to pandemonium in the room.
The camera cut to various shots of the studio audience. Some viewers jumped, some clapped, others raised their arms into the air while shouting out in excitement.
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After panelist Sunny Hostin explained more details of the trip, the audience could still be heard in the background, celebrating the development.
Goldberg finally cut in to tell viewers, “You know, we will be right back!” amid the chatter. As the show went to a commercial break, the camera caught one woman wiping away tears of joy.
‘The View’ audience surprised with major season 30 giveawayCredit: ABC
The moment recalled an iconic 2004 episode of The Oprah Winfrey Show, on which the titular talk show icon surprised her entire studio audience with free cars.
Winfrey recently opened up to Vanity Fair about preparing for the major episode — including when she realized the initial plan to simply place keys inside a gift box for each audience member wouldn’t work, as they were under the impression that only one person would win the vehicle.
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“I said to the producers, who were up all night long, actually, for this show, ‘We’ve got to tape the keys in the boxes because the first thing people are going to do is shake the box,’” Winfrey told the outlet. “I don’t know if people know this, but we had already given out 11 cars. We’d given out 11 cars on this particular day. There was this 12th car, there was supposedly one car left, and everybody was thinking they were going to be that one person.”
The View airs weekdays on ABC.
on Entertainment Weekly
Source: “AOL Entertainment”
