Appearing on the Thursday, May 24 broadcast of The Mike Missanelli Podcast, NBA Hall of Famer Charles Barkley sounded off on CNN, slamming it for canceling his show with Gayle King, “King Charles,” just months after its debut. The news that CNN would pull the plug came in April, just six months after its debut, and though Barkely insisted he only wanted to do it for a limited time, he still sounded off on the executives and decision.
As background, “King Charles” opened quite poorly, having the lowest debut of a CNN premier in decades and being outcompeted by a relatively small-name MSNBC show on the night that it came out. As The American Tribune reported at the time:
In any case, the new show’s low opening was not only disappointing on its own, as a show with half a million viewers would be far from good for most of the major cable channels, but was made even worse by it being a premiere of the show, which theoretically would boost it a bit.
In fact, it performed quite poorly compared to other premieres. According to the Daily Best, the Wednesday premiere of King Charles was the worst weeknight premier for CNN in at least a decade, with CNN’s other debuts in its post-Chris Licht programming doing somewhat better.
Nielsen, giving some data on the show which shows just how poorly it did, notes that King Charles managed to bring in just 501,000 total viewers, of whom just 139,000 were in the much-desired advertising demographic of adults aged 25-54.
By way of comparison, a show called The Last Word with Lawrence O’Donnell, which also airs on MSNBC, CNN’s closets cable competitor, at 10 p.m., tripled King Charles’ ratings. It managed to draw in a much more respectable 1.621 million viewers overall. It had just 132,000 viewers in the advertising demographic, losing slightly to King Charles on that front.
In any case, Barkley, attacking the CNN executives with whom he worked, said, “You know the type of boneheads I work with? First of all, it wasn’t canceled. I talk to Gayle all the time. They haven’t told us we were canceled. That’s how stupid these people are. Like, I read the articles that we were canceled and I was like, ‘We weren’t canceled.’”
Continuing, he tried to save some face, arguing that he only ever wanted to do the show for a short time and then would go back to NBA-related projects. He said, “I was always only gonna do that for a short period of time and then I was going to go back to the NBA. So, me and Gayle like– this is how boneheaded these people are [that] I work with.”
Reiterating those same claims about CNN being full of nonsense and his only wanting to do the show for a short time, Barkley then said, “I was gonna do a short little window and go back to the NBA. But that just shows you how full of shit the whole thing is with CNN. Like, we had new people take over and we in disarray. Like, yesterday they put an article out that CNN had its worst ratings ever since like 1992.”
Watch Barkley here:
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