Lisa May has been at her new job for nearly one month now. To match her last high-profile radio gig as sidekick to popular talk show hosts “Kevin and Bean,” she’ll just need to stick around 95.5 KLOS-FM for another 23 years and 11 months.
The upbeat, fan-favorite traffic reporter and entertainment-minute chatterbox was rather unceremoniously-yet-famously canned from mega-station KROQ in February. May detailed what she called the “story no one has really heard” on the “Alison Rosen Is Your New Best Friend” podcast shortly thereafter. She and Rosen had much to discuss — and bond over — as Rosen had recently been fired via email following four years on uber-successful podcast “The Adam Carolla Show.”
“I haven’t really gotten anymore information about it,” May said after rehashing her recap of the exodus to TheWrap a few months later. “I think what I was told is pretty much what the truth of it was.
“It’s a more competitive morning show environment now, and I think they wanted to [make some changes],” she elaborated. “Obviously Kevin and Bean weren’t going anywhere, and I don’t think Ralph was going anywhere — and that left me. And they weren’t going to do traffic anymore, so it kind of all made sense.”
The optimistic May, who said she still talks to Bean a lot (“It’s nice to be missed”), landed on her feet, and is now doing traffic, entertainment and generally gabbing with her new KLOS morning duo on “The Heidi and Frank Show.”
So far, so good on the transition, May (pictured above, between Heidi and Frank) told us.
“Everyone has been incredibly helpful in every way,” she said. “Probably the biggest challenge is just learning Heidi and Frank’s interaction and patterns and the way that they play off each other, and then fitting into that.
“I imagine the first week I tended to step on some of their jokes or didn’t catch them,” the veteran admitted. “I just wasn’t getting the rhythm of it. I’m better now, but I’m certainly not where I want to be. That takes time.”
“I did call Frank a ‘dick’ on Day 2,” May offered, adding, “In a friendly way, of course.”
As often seems to be the case in the competitive world of talk radio, the new gig comes with an ounce of controversy as well. The renamed “Heidi and Frank Show With Lisa May” has been on the receiving end of some rough feedback ever since KLOS Program Director Keith Cunningham came aboard and shoehorned music into the format.
“There were people who were really unhappy,” May admitted.
But she’s not among them. There’s something else special about her new job that May is particularly proud to be a part of.
“I think the fact that KLOS picked me up is amazing to me, because now we have two women and a guy on a radio station,” she said. “I don’t think there’s another station like that in L.A. We’re the second-largest market in the country and the last time there was a two-woman morning show … at least eight years ago. Maybe more.”
May, like many, believes that radio is behind the times in terms of the aforementioned acknowledged lack of diversity.
“Personally, if two women are interesting and intelligent and have things to say and are funny, I want to listen to them,” she said. “I don’t know if there’s some idea that men don’t. I don’t understand what it is, but I think women are mostly still relegated to sidekick.”
That is, until they get fired.