The New York Daily News Gossip column Confidential has an insane piece of rubbish about Ronan Farrow’s show…
Ronan Farrow’s MSNBC talk show is facing cancellation amid poor ratings, sources exclusively tell Confidenti@l.
Cancellation? After a month? After Phil Griffin and Patricia Fili-Krushel publicly stuck their necks way out for the kid? There is ZERO…I repeat…ZERO chance of Farrow’s show getting killed off any time soon based solely on its ratings. In a year? Possibly. But not now. Too many egos are on the line and too many faces would have egg on them if itchy trigger fingers prevailed at 30 Rock…
Politico’s Dylan Byers agrees…
But the “facing cancellation” part is only true in an abstract sense. He’s facing cancellation in, say, nine months to a year, if things don’t improve. Not because executives have given him a timeline, but because that’s just common sense. The idea that Phil Griffin is sitting in his office mulling over whether or not to drop the knife is not true, simply because the show is so new. Few TV executives would dare to cancel a show just one month — or even six months — after its launch.
But then Byers blindly falls into the exact same trap the New York Daily News bumbled into…
The poor ratings part is very true. Painfully true: almost no one watches the show. He’s bringing in something slightly north of 300,000 viewers. Last Wednesday’s show was rated 708th by Nielsen, meaning more people watched the midnight airing of “Baggage” on the Game Show Network.
Those numbers are being used completely out of context. This is MSNBC dayside we are talking about, not primetime. Yes, if this were prime those numbers would be atrocious. But for dayside? They fall right in line with what MSNBC usually does at that time of day. If Farrow was putting out a P2+ of 150,000…yeah…then it’s all hands on deck time at 30 Rock and heads are rolling. But he’s not. It’s not important where his show ranks with all of cable. What’s important is how his show does relative to the rest of MSNBC dayside.
Now…THIS is trouble…
“He sort of stinks on TV,” an MSNBC source told Confidenti@l. “He hasn’t turned out to be the superstar they were hoping for.”
Cackling in the ranks already? Not good. It means not everyone has buy-in on Farrow internally.
And then there’s this quickly erected MSNBC straw-man…
A source defending him said: “Half the time Ronan has been on the air, the missing plane has dominated daytime TV.”
Two things:
1) So what? Cover the plane then! Get on experts. Have Farrow talk about the geopolitics at work in the background between China and Malaysia…something NOBODY is talking about but is a VERY real factor in all this. Oh, wait…that’s right…MSNBC doesn’t do news anymore. Chickens do come home to roost…
2) The plane isn’t depressing Farrow’s numbers at all are they? The show hasn’t dipped since the plane story took off has it? Then what the hell is this source babbling on about? They’re making an excuse for a problem that does not exist. If Farrow’s numbers haven’t tailed off in the past three weeks because of MH370 then the plane story has no impact on his numbers…so why cite it?
Filed under: MSNBC
