Despina "Debbie" Matenopoulos (born December 13, 1974) is an American television host, journalist, and lifestyle expert. Early life Matenopoulos was born in Richmond, Virginia, of Greek ancestry. She is the daughter of Efrosini, a hair stylist, and Nicolaos T. Matenopoulos, a furniture maker, She also has an older sister, Maria, and older brother, Ike. Her birth name is Despina Matenopoulos, named after her grandmother. Despina was later anglicized to Debbie. Matenopoulos went to John Randolph Tucker High School, and then attended Virginia Commonwealth University for one year before transferring to the Journalism Department at New York University. She was a member of the women's fraternity [[Alpha Omicron While at NYU she also worked at MTV as an intern. She quickly moved up the ranks, soon becoming story coordinator for MTV News: Unfiltered. TV career In 1997, Matenopoulos was an MTV production assistant and, after a chance meeting with Barbara Walters was invited to audition and was cast, at age 22, as the youngest co-host on Walters's new talk show, The View. She was parodied on Saturday Night Live by Ana Gasteyer, Claire Danes, Cameron Diaz, and Sarah Michelle Gellar as being an uninformed ditz and eventually invited to appear on SNL as a guest, where she played herself. In January 1999, her contract with the show was not renewed, and she was replaced by Lisa Ling. Later that same year, she joined the TV Guide Channel as one of their first on-air hosts. Matenopoulos starred in the claymation show Celebrity Deathmatch as herself. In 2004, Matenopoulos served as a panel judge on the TBS series He's a Lady. In January 2004, Good Day Live brought in Matenopoulous (along with Arthel Neville) to co-host the nationally syndicated program. On September 29, 2004, she was hospitalized for an injury that was the result of a stunt she attempted for a segment of Good Day Live. The segment was focused on firefighter training, in which she practiced a fall from a three-story building at a Los Angeles fire station. She landed incorrectly on an airbag and was rushed to the hospital for a possible head injury. It was a closed head wound and she was temporarily blind. Despite massive promotion, including a mall-tour featuring Matenopoulous and Arthel Neville, Good Day Live was canceled by its syndicators in March 2005. In January 2006, Matenopoulos joined E!'s coverage of the Golden Globe Awards. In April