Sara Haines in ‘dark place’ when Michael Strahan, Keke Palmer show was canceled

“The View” co-host Sara Haines said she was “in a dark place” when ABC canned “Strahan, Sara & Keke,” its daytime show that aired from August 2019 to March 2020 and was a casualty of the COVID-19 pandemic.

“I was in a dark place and when you’re depressed, you can’t distinguish reality from your created narratives,” Haines, 46, said Monday on “The View” executive producer Brian Teta’s “Behind the Table” podcast.

“Working with Michael Strahan and eventually Keke Palmer, I miss them all the time,” Haines said. “The laughter, the joy, even the staff.

“But the show didn’t really have a chance out of the gates. We fumbled, all of us, through the whole thing.”

“Strahan, Sara & Keke,” which aired at 1 p.m. on ABC, was the third iteration of “GMA3,” spun off from “Good Morning America.”

The show started as “GMA Day” (2018 to 2019), then “Strahan & Sara” in 2019 and finally “Strahan, Sara & Keke” when Palmer joined in August 2019.

Haines said that when ABC pulled the plug on the show amid the pandemic outbreak, she was mourning “the dream I always had.”

“Meanwhile, I got through finding out I’m pregnant unexpectedly and really dropping into a depression, having major postpartum depression as I tried to race back and save a drowning ship, which was our show, six weeks after having a baby,” she said, adding that she “was a wreck” when ABC announced the show was kaput.

“I was in mourning. It was the dream I’d always had,” she told Teta. “Out of the gates, it almost never was that but I was so determined not to fail and not to let go, that I was being dragged behind a car, metaphorically.”

Haines, who grew emotional talking about “Strahan, Sara & Keke,” added that she ran through a gamut of emotions during the show’s run.

“I so vividly remember how invisible I felt,” she told Teta. “What was playing out in front of me and some of the storylines [in the press] weren’t what was happening [behind the scenes].”

She added that she doesn’t remember “many days where I wasn’t crying in my dressing room. It was a rough time and again, no shade to any of the people. I worked with some fun, amazing people and we had a lot of fun.”

Haines co-hosted “The View” on a full-time basis (after numerous guest spots) from 2016 to 2018.

She then joined what was then called “GMA3” with co-host Strahan.

After “Strahan, Sara & Keke” was canceled, Haines was asked to rejoin “The View” during the pandemic.

She said she was “so grateful to be called [back] because you don’t get two chances unless you’re Joy Behar.”

Behar, an original co-host of “The View,” was axed in 2013 but rejoined the show in 2015.

But even after returning to “The View” in 2020, Haines said, she felt like “a shell of myself” in thinking about her previous years on the show — and put pressure on herself because of her high expectations.

“I was so tense that day that I didn’t know if I’d remember how to do my job,” she said. “I had become really invisible in those two years in my own mind, through the depressions and stuff. I couldn’t have even told you what my talent was. I didn’t even know how to do what I had been paid to do for years.”

Haines broke into tears telling Teta that, when she returned to “The View” that first day, she was shaking — but eventually found her footing.

“It was a haul to kind of find myself again,” she said. “I would never trade what happened because the valleys and the low points, one, are not all bleak and terrible and there were so many amazing moments.

“All of that and the skills it brought with me because having hit that dark place myself, I almost came back with a little fearlessness.”

Haines co-hosts “The View” (11 a.m./Ch. 7) with Behar, Whoopi Goldberg, Alyssa Farrah Griffin, Ana Navarro and Sunny Hostin.