Why Were Kelly Ripa & Ryan Seacrest Absent From the ‘Live’ Set This Morning?

Published Jan 21, 2021

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2:35pm

2021 is proving to be the year of prerecorded episodes of Live with Kelly and Ryan. While we aren’t even through the month of January, we’ve already received three episodes that were filmed beforehand (AKA not live), including today’s installment.

On Thursday, producers of the hit morning show announced in a video on Instagram that the episode was recorded “earlier this week!” In the clip, Kelly Ripa (looking chic in a black, Ba&sh dress and d.bleu. bedazzled tights) and Ryan Seacrest are seen making their way to the stage to begin shooting. “Today’s NEW show was recorded earlier this week!” the post’s caption read.

As we mentioned above, this is the third time this month that the series aired a taped episode (first on January 7 and again on January 8). Unfortunately, it has still not been revealed why these episodes were not live but they were clearly planned for since the show organized to shoot ahead of time. However, if we had to guess, maybe the 50-year-old actress and the 45-year-old TV personality took some time to themselves after yesterday’s exciting inauguration.

Normally, viewers and followers have a lot of questions about the decision to air pre-recorded episodes, but this time people in the comments section seemed more concerned with the fact that Seacrest referred to Ripa’s tights as “socks.”

One user wrote, “I love how Ryan calls them socks,” while another added, “The sparkle socks,” with a laughing-face emoji.

So, while we’re sad to not see these two live today, we guess the sparkly socks make up for it.

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Alexandra Hough

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