BIG BROTHER host Julie Chen Moonves once worried that trading news interviews for reality-show evictions would wreck the career she wanted.
“The reviews hated the show, they hated me,” she recalled during a CBS Mornings conversation with THE AMAZING RACE host and executive producer Phil Keoghan.
These days, she sees that same job as a blessing. In the Sept. 30 installment of BETWEEN US, the two longtime hosts compared career detours, unexpected lessons and the work that helped change their outlook.
Chen Moonves had good reason to take journalism seriously. Her CBS biography traces a career through local reporting, network news and morning television, including roles on CBS MORNING NEWS and THE EARLY SHOW.
But when CBS approached her about BIG BROTHER, she said, her ambitions pointed toward 60 MINUTES, not a house full of contestants. The proposed schedule meant flying from New York to Los Angeles to handle a live eviction, then returning for the morning news.
She remembered asking whether taking the job would leave room for the correspondent career she hoped to build. The answer discouraged her enough that she tried to decline the assignment.
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According to Chen Moonves, a news executive then explained that the company could assign her the work and treat a refusal as insubordination. She took the job, but the early criticism left her questioning where her career would go next.
Keoghan knew something about a television opportunity not going to plan. Before landing THE AMAZING RACE, he said, he had wanted to host SURVIVOR and felt devastated when he missed out.
“I think it worked out for the best,” he said when Chen Moonves asked whether he was glad he ultimately landed the other show.
That other job became a globe-spanning career. CBS now identifies Keoghan as the host and executive producer of THE AMAZING RACE, and he told Chen Moonves that the experience broadened his perspective on the world.
For Chen Moonves, one encounter helped her recognize a purpose she had overlooked. While reporting from the Middle East in 2003, she recalled meeting American service members who wanted photographs with her because they watched BIG BROTHER with their wives, mothers or siblings.
She had been wrestling with whether she should concentrate on news rather than a reality competition. Those conversations showed her that viewers connected the show with people they loved, and she decided she did not want to give up the hosting job.
Looking back on her years with BIG BROTHER, Chen Moonves expressed gratitude and humility rather than the career anxiety she remembered from its beginning. She described what she once considered a struggle as a blessing.
“I have nothing to complain about,” she said.
Her next project puts hope at the center. Chen Moonves told Keoghan she is working on a faith-based book, When We Choose Hope, about choosing hope in chaotic times.
Publisher Harper Celebrate lists a Feb. 16, 2027, release for the devotional, which contains 40 reflections, Scripture, prayer and daily prompts. Its focus is trusting God’s plan when life does not make sense — a fitting next chapter for a host who can now look back on an unwanted assignment with gratitude.
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