The care with which she has spoken about her daughters’ privacy is notable. A person who spent her own childhood in an almost complete absence of privacy, whose most vulnerable moments were subject to public narration, has been consistent in her desire to protect her children from the same exposure. She mentions them. She speaks of loving them. She does not make them characters in her public narrative in the way that she was made a character in the entertainment industry’s narratives about her.
What she has said, explicitly, is that she is determined to be the parent she did not have — not in a way that frames her mother as a villain, but in a way that acknowledges that the template of her own childhood is not the template she wants to replicate. The determination to do better than was done for you is one of the most ordinary and most significant human ambitions. In Drew Barrymore’s case, the fact that she can clearly articulate it, that she has done substantial work in understanding what went wrong and why, and that her public behavior as a parent reflects those values, suggests that the determination is more than rhetorical.
## The Talk Show and What It Revealed
The Drew Barrymore Show, which premiered in September 2020 on CBS in syndication, represented a different kind of project than anything Drew Barrymore had done before. It was not a film she was producing or acting in. It was a daily live broadcast in which she was, essentially, herself — her public self, the warmth and enthusiasm and curiosity that she had developed over decades of professional experience deployed in a format that allowed very little separation between the person and the persona.