“It’s about family, it’s about community, it’s about church,” says Sara Haines of life in northern New Jersey. Photo: ABC/Jeff Lipsky
It took one visit to the New Jersey suburbs for Sara Haines to fall in love. The View cohost and her husband, Max Shifrin, had been looking for years to buy a home in Westchester for their family of five. But one day, very early in the pandemic, they trekked from their home in New York City to look at properties in North Jersey. The third house did the trick—the basketball hoop in the driveway, surprisingly enough, was a big selling point. “This is it,” Haines, who originally hails from Newton, Iowa, recalls telling her husband, a lawyer who grew up in Ramsey.
Life in northern New Jersey, she says, isn’t all that different from the Midwest. “Iowans would approve of this comparison,” says Haines, 47. “People in Jersey may not love the comparison back.” But, she says, “some things in the suburbs are all the same.”
Haines, who shares three children with Shifrin, explains: “To me, what I love about where we live now is, it takes it back to the basics I grew up with. It’s about family, it’s about community, it’s about church. The people I gravitate towards in my community have kind of filled that hole that I hadn’t [filled] since I had grown up at a much slower pace.”
A slower pace is far from the hustle and bustle of New York City—a positive change, as Haines says that she’s never been a city person. But she moved to the Big Apple after graduating from Smith College to pursue her dreams of sketch comedy. When Saturday Night Live never called, she pivoted to news and was accepted into NBC’s prestigious Page Program.
By 2008, she was working behind the scenes of what was then the new ten o’clock hour of the Today show with Hoda Kotb and Kathie Lee Gifford, doing celebrity interviews for Today’s website. She wanted to compile those interviews into a demo reel to get an on-camera reporting job somewhere else. “In doing those interviews, Kathie Lee and Hoda had said, ‘Why don’t you ever come on our hour?’” Haines recalls. So she went on air to help promote the new Facebook page for Today’s 10 am hour—something Haines created years before the social-media and smartphone-app boom.
“That moment was my breakthrough,” she says. “The day I went on the show to tell them about that and talk with the fans was the day I started to be on television every day.”
Haines became the fourth hour’s contributing correspondent until 2013, when she left for a high-profile reporting role at ABC News. It offered her opportunities on Good Morning America, as well as the holy grail of a guest-cohost spot on The View, the network’s flagship talk show launched by Barbara Walters in 1997.
“That was like a pipe dream for me. So I kind of felt like I had achieved everything by just visiting once,” she says.
The View didn’t call again for at least six more months; she became a permanent cohost for the talk show’s 20th season in 2016. In 2018, she returned to Good Morning America for a hosting gig on the short-lived show GMA3: Strahan, Sara and Keke (costarring Michael Strahan and Keke Palmer). But when the show halted due to the pandemic, Haines got an offer to rejoin The View. “This feels like lightning striking twice,” she remembers of the opportunity.
When the constraints of a small apartment and three young kids at home hindered her ability to go live on-air in the midst of the Covid-19 lockdown, she and Shifrin set off for their forever home.
Haines describes life with her family in the suburbs as filled with wholesome days, many of them spent outside. “It is so simple. It’s biking, scootering. We spend a lot of time outdoors. That’s the main thing that I wanted being out here,” she says of her free time when the cameras stop rolling.
That’s when makeup comes off and she’s in sweats. One of the first places Haines discovered in North Jersey were the walking trails and playground at the South Mountain Reservation, when her youngest son was still a baby. Not far from there is the Able Baker in Maplewood, another favorite. “This belongs in catalogs,” she says of the charming way the bakery’s bread is packaged. “Everything’s so sustainable, and it’s so quaint and beautiful. I am obsessed with that for myself.”
Liv Breads in Millburn is another guilty pleasure that scratches a different itch. “We also probably consume more pizzas from Liv than any family. We religiously order pizza for everything,” she admits.
With such a big television presence on a show that has made a brand of discussing the hot topics of the day, it’s a surprise that people typically don’t often approach her to debate.
“It kind of feels like it’s an extension of New York City, because in New York City, people don’t do that a lot. New Jersey kind of feels the same way,” she says, adding that, near her, most people know her first as a mom. At least one friend didn’t even realize she was on TV for years, she says.
The most heated discussions happen at her monthly neighborhood book-club gatherings. They are so engaging, Haines once didn’t head home until after midnight on a Tuesday. “Those have honestly been my core group of women friends,” she says.
Some of Haines’s best childhood memories are driving from Iowa to Pennsylvania to visit her grandparents every summer. She wanted to create her own Haines-Shifrin tradition, and recently, for the fourth year in a row, they vacationed in Cape May.
“As my husband would say, ‘It’s the least Jersey Shore town in the whole state.’ It has that time-hop feeling that’s all about family, beach, food,” Haines says. “It’s so simple and amazing at the same time.” Favorite family spots include the Washington Inn and the Rusty Nail; the latter caters to kids with sandboxes as the adults listen to live music.
When this year’s trip was in the rearview mirror on the Garden State Parkway, it was back to preparation for season 29 of The View, which premieres on September 8.
“It’s like every girlfriend you’ve ever sat down and had a glass of wine with,” Haines says of the vibes and tone of the show with current cohosts Whoopi Goldberg, Joy Behar, Sunny Hostin, Alyssa Farah Griffin and Ana Navarro. “You don’t just talk about being a mom. You talk about your job. You talk about what’s in the news. You talk about the newest face trend in plastic surgery. It encapsulates the layers of women.”
Every day, before she walks onto the set to gab about current events in front of a live studio audience, Haines still pinches herself. “It’s how I channel gratitude. It’s the way I remember to never let anything feel dull or robotic or autumn,” she says. “It’s a gift. It really was a dream. And I feel lucky, really lucky, to be here.”
And lucky to call herself a Jersey girl now, too.
Leigh Scheps, who grew up in Holmdel, is a New Jersey-based freelance entertainment reporter and Broadway expert with bylines in Rolling Stone, Vanity Fair, Marie Claire and Town & Country.
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