Hoda Kotb Is Leaving Today … Next Year

New York is doing some autumnal cleaning: Eric Adams is being indicted (yay!) and Hoda Kotb is leaving Today (boo!) after 18 years. “I realized that it was time for me to turn the page at 60, and to try something new,” she told audiences on September 26. “I remembered standing outside looking at these beautiful bunch of people with these gorgeous signs, and I thought, This is what the top of the wave feels like for me. And I thought, It can’t get better, and I decided that this is the right time for me to kind of move on.” Kotb has been with NBC for 26 years, after starting her career as a reporter for Dateline. Kotb said she’ll stay on as host through the end of the year. She did tease, through tears, that she is “gonna stay in the NBC family.” No word on what that looks like yet, but they should just give her a sitcom.

Kotb currently co-anchors Today with Savannah Guthrie; they are the network’s first all-female co-anchor team in the show’s history. Kotb was also a pioneer of Today’s fourth hour, technically considered a separate program: in 2007, she became the first host of the new 10 a.m. time slot before co-hosting that time slot with Kathie Lee Gifford from 2008–19. Jenna Bush Hager joined Kotb in 2019, and they remain co-hosts to this day. Yes, that does mean NBC will either have to find someone who can pick up both Kotb’s co-anchor jobs or two new people. No successor is named yet, but maybe she and Adams can just switch jobs.