CNN is taking “King Charles,” its prime-time program with Charles Barkley and Gayle King, off the air less than five months after its debut.
The show was the brainchild of former CNN Chief Executive Chris Licht, who left the network in June after a chaotic tenure of a little over a year. Another one of Licht’s initiatives, a revamped morning program, was scrapped earlier this year.
“King Charles,” which ran at 10 p.m. on Wednesdays, was designed to run through the spring. A CNN spokeswoman described the show as “a great addition to CNN’s lineup,” with a young and diverse audience.
CNN said the show was watched by about half a million people on average.
Both King and Barkley are hypervisible elsewhere on TV. Barkley is one of the hosts of the popular “Inside the NBA” program on TNT—which like CNN is owned by Warner Bros. Discovery—while King co-hosts “CBS Mornings,” the morning program of Paramount Global’s CBS.
When CNN announced the show last April, Barkley said it would be nonpolitical. “We don’t want to say, ‘We’re a liberal, conservative, Republican, Democrat’—that’s one of the things that’s already ruined television in general,” he said at the time.
The show had been part of an effort to experiment with prime-time programming and stem a continued ratings decline for the cable-news network.
CNN has made some programming changes since former New York Times CEO Mark Thompson became the network’s chief executive last fall. Shortly after he took over, Thompson warned staff that CNN was nowhere near ready for the future and needed to step up its digital game.
Thompson has since moved to combine all of CNN’s newsgathering operations into one unit that will serve its TV, streaming and digital platforms, while creating a division tasked with exploring growth opportunities.
― scott seward, Monday, 15 April 2024 22:30 (one month ago) link