Stop Laughing... This is a Funeral

At the end of August, John Bono started the Donahue Show Death watch. A number of us amateur television critics posted our hopeful predictions. Here's mine:

He's gonna last until one week after the elections, when the idiot MSNBC bigwigs realize even post election analysis work save them from the curse of Phil.

Friday, November 15 will be the last show.

I was certainly wrong. However, at the time, I thought my prediction was quite conservative. Several others had far sooner predictions. After all, Donahue had been rapidly eroding MSNBC's ratings since his show started on July 15. Not even the vile Alan Keyes show was such a fiasco. Surely the MSNBC execs could see this disaster for what it was and cut their losses.

Well, that was a perfectly reasonable line of reasoning, predicated on one simple assumption: that these execs had any fucking common sense whatsoever. Instead of realizing Donahue was a gigantic problem, they figured the show just needed some tweaking (and in my predictive defense, these tweaks were made in mid-November). So, now, thanks to these power-tie wearing assmonkeys, we've got Phil in front of a live studio audience, pandering to the same bored housewife audience that watched him in the early eighties.

There was a reason Phil's first talk show got canceled: Oprah stole his format and sodomized him with it. Yes, Oprah Winfrey is better at this format than Phil. Oprah. Freaking. Winfrey. And, lets face facts, the fans of the audience talk show format can get something like 12 hours a day of the big O on Oxygen. And this audience does not have a much of an overlap with the cable news junkies, who are the ratings base of MSNBC, Fox, and CNN.

I've wanted MSNBC to survive. I've hoped for a centrist alternative to the leftist filth on CNN and the idiotic right-wing posturing of Fox, but it's not to be. Drudge gave us this report today on the latest cable news ratings. MSNBC is now dead last in all its timeslots. The network suits, finally realizing the horrible mistakes they've made, are coming to the conclusion that, rather than kill Phil's show, they'll just axe the entire network:

Executives "clearly put all their eggs in the Donohue basket," says one well-placed NBC source. "The word from the higher-ups is that if Donohue can't sell the network, then NBC will have to sell the network. It's not just a coincidence that Brian Williams was moved to CNBC; they wanted to protect him, anticipating any MSNBC failure."

I love these guys. Pure freaking business genius at work.

How could anyone have possibly expected a boring, tedious, ignorant, irrational, self-righteous twit with a shitty haircut and stupid looking glasses to sell anyone anything? The raw stupidity involved in this whole process is beyond my reckoning, and I've reckoned some seriously stupid shit in my day.

The worst part of the whole thing is that you know the soulless, asslicking executives making these disastrous programming decisions earn more money squeezing off a turd on their gold-plated toilets than I'll make all year. There is no God.

 

Posted by Captain Mojo at December 06, 2002 12:42 AM | TrackBack