Two LA TV legends finally sit down — then Kym flips the interview
This one feels especially Los Angeles. Comedy and television fixture Kym Whitley finally sits down with longtime CBS LA anchor Pat Harvey for the kind of conversation that can only happen when two women have spent decades working the same city, crossing paths at the same events and somehow never getting the proper sit-down.
Harvey has been part of Los Angeles television news since joining KCAL in 1989, while Whitley built a career here across sitcoms, movies, stand-up, reality television, producing and now Paramount+’s The Varnell Hill Show. So yes: two LA TV legends, one couch, and eventually absolutely no control over who is interviewing whom.
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Kym Whitley Comes Home to LA TV
Pat Harvey gets Kym Whitley talking Hollywood, motherhood, comedy history and her new Paramount+ series — before Kym decides Pat needs to answer a few questions too.
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Kym Whitley chose Los Angeles because it felt like freedom
Harvey takes Whitley all the way back to the beginning: growing up in Ohio in a very funny family, attending Fisk University and realizing that performing might actually become a life instead of something she did around the house.
Whitley says seeing Whoopi Goldberg perform a one-woman show on HBO helped make the possibility click. Seeing a Black woman command television with comedy made her think, essentially, I can do that.
When it came time to decide where to chase it, she visited both New York and Los Angeles. New York felt cold and intimidating. LA felt loose, approachable and free. Whitley remembers thinking she could talk to the security guard and somehow get herself into the room.
Which, as it turns out, was not a terrible career strategy.
A wrong turn on Harlem Nights helped make Kym a comic
One of the best Hollywood stories arrives when Whitley remembers being on the set of Harlem Nights — not as one of the stars, but helping watch a friend’s young son who needed a guardian on set.
She was also, naturally, looking for opportunity. Whitley wandered around a corner and found herself near Eddie Murphy, Redd Foxx and other comedy heavyweights. After she fired back at a joke and got the group laughing, Foxx told her she should be a comic and instructed her to put together ten minutes of material.
Whitley admits the idea scared her. Ten minutes felt enormous for somebody who had not come up through the traditional comedy-club route. But on the night Foxx died in 1991, she finally went onstage and did two minutes of stand-up. She tells Harvey that without that moment, she might never have done it.
Then came a phone call that made Kym Whitley a mother
The interview shifts beautifully when Harvey asks about motherhood and Whitley retells the extraordinary way her son, Joshua, came into her life.
Whitley had been mentoring a young woman who became pregnant. Then one day a hospital called and told Kym there was a baby there — and her name had been left as the person to contact. At first she thought somebody was playing a joke on her. The social worker made it very clear that nobody was joking.
The baby needed somewhere to go. Whitley’s parents happened to be visiting from Cleveland, and her mother delivered the deciding line: go get that baby.
Whitley did. She remembers social workers arriving with the infant, diapers and formula while she stared at the reality that an actual human being had just been placed in her care. Her mother helped her through those first bewildering moments. Fifteen years later, Kym looks at Joshua and simply calls him “my baby.”
The Varnell Hill Show brings Kym into another LA comedy family
The timing of the interview is no accident. Whitley is now part of Paramount+’s The Varnell Hill Show, the long-awaited spinoff built around Tommy Davidson’s outrageous talk-show host character from Martin.
The eight-episode workplace comedy premiered September 1 with Davidson alongside Kym Whitley, Wendy Raquel Robinson, Chris Williams, Nick Cafero and Emmanuel Hudson, with special appearances from Martin Lawrence and a rotating lineup of guest stars.
Whitley explains that the show does not just recreate Varnell’s late-night program. It also goes behind the scenes into the offices and writers’ room as everybody scrambles to put the show together. In other words: a fake late-night show surrounded by a workplace comedy, built out of a character that has been waiting nearly 30 years for his own spotlight.
And then Kym Whitley decides Pat Harvey is the guest
This is where the whole “two LA TV legends” thing really pays off.
After more than 40 minutes of Harvey interviewing Whitley, Kym refuses to let the conversation end. She starts teasing the producers, tries to turn an imaginary lunch with the two of them into a fundraiser for Special Needs Network and then straight-up begins interviewing Pat.
Whitley asks Harvey about her first news job in Saginaw, Michigan, whether she ever imagined reaching this point in her career and whether racism affected her climb as a Black woman in television news.
Harvey’s answer is pure Pat: she says she always let racism be somebody else’s problem and simply kept moving.
That little reversal is what makes the interview feel bigger than standard promo. Harvey has spent decades asking the questions on Los Angeles television; Whitley has spent decades turning whatever room she enters into a story. Eventually one of them was always going to grab the other one’s job.
By the end, Harvey is laughing hard enough that Whitley has completely won the room. Forty-four minutes somehow feels like the warm-up.
Watch Kym Whitley’s CBS Los Angeles Interview With Pat Harvey
The 44-minute CBS Los Angeles conversation traces Whitley’s road from Ohio to Hollywood, Redd Foxx’s early encouragement, becoming Joshua’s mother, her decades on television and her role in Paramount+’s The Varnell Hill Show.
Sources: CBS Los Angeles; Paramount+.
