Katrina: 10 Years After the Storm with Robin Roberts drew ABC’s biggest non-sports audience to the time period this summer, averaging 3.8 million viewers Sunday night at 10 p.m. ET. Roberts held a private screening of the special at the Le Petit Theatre in New Orleans a few days prior to the TV debut, and the Mississippi Gulf Coast native struggled to re-live the experience.
“I mean this respectfully: It was difficult to watch with this audience, because they lived that. Other people, when we were showing it in New York or to people who weren’t from the area, they were just seeing the pictures. But to hear the gasps, to feel the emotion, knowing that I was bringing them back to something they would rather forget. I’m like that, too. It was hard for me to see myself 10 years ago, crying like a baby on national television because I’d just found my mom in Biloxi,” Roberts told the New Orleans Times-Picayune.
“But it was important. It was very important to show it here first. I didn’t want them to see it for the first time on Sunday with everybody else. It’s their story, and I was very appreciative of their reaction.”