We will miss you!
Photo: Nathan Congleton/NBC via Getty Images

New York is having a fall cleanup: Eric Adams is being sued (yay!) and Hoda Kotb is leaving Today (boo!) after 18 years. “I realized it was time to turn the page at 60 and try something new,” she told the crowd on Sept. 26. “I remember standing outside and looking at this beautiful group of people with these beautiful signs, and I thought, This is what it feels like to me when I’m at the top of the wave. And I thought, It can’t get any better than this, and I decided this was the right time for me to move on.” Kotb has been with NBC for 26 years, having started her career as a reporter for Date line. Kotb said she will stay on as host through the end of the year. She teased, through tears, that she will “stay in the NBC family.” There’s no word yet on what that will look like, but they should just give her a sitcom.

Kotb is currently co-anchor 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 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 means NBC will either have to find someone to take over both of Kotb’s co-anchor duties, or two new people. No successor has been named yet, but perhaps she and Adams can simply swap jobs.