Posted on 11/27/2008 10:17:57 AM PST by My Favorite Headache
November 27, 2008 NBC's Rosie O’Donnell variety show disappoints Rosie O'Donnell gave NBC a real turkey.
The network's attempt to revive the primetime variety show failed to draw an audience Wednesday night, tying for the evening’s lowest-rated program.
A mere 5 million viewers tuned in for the 8 p.m. premiere of “Rosie Live,” with the program earning a 1.2 preliminary adults 18-49 rating. The telecast matched ABC’s recently canceled “Pushing Daisies” as the night's lowest-rated program on a major broadcast network.
NBC had high hopes for the special and planned to expand the program into a series should viewers re-embrace the decades-old variety format. Other networks, too, were watching closely since several are developing variety shows of their own.
“There’s a notion that the climate is right for the genre to make a comeback,” emailed one executive at a rival network. “I guess we now know what not to do, thanks to Rosie.”
Segments included Kathy Griffin impersonating Nancy Grace, Alec Baldwin hitting Conan O'Brian with a pie, O'Donnell singing "City Lights" with Liza Minnelli and Jane Krakowski doing a striptease while showing images of product placement.
Critics were not kind. The NY Times described it as "hokey comedy with an enemies list." TV Guide called it a "ghastly ego trip."
Networks have been chasing variety show programming as a low-cost option to revive the genre. But the idea has been sought by executives due the format’s rock-bottom low cost, cross-promotion possibilities and advertiser-friendly format rather than being a genre that's bursting from the creative community or demanded by viewers. In other words, the neo-variety show is a product designed to solve financial woes rather than an inspired act of programming creativity and therefore had the odds stacked against it drawing large numbers.
NBC’s variation in particular, starring O’Donnell with appearances by Alannis Morrisette, Ne Yo, Griffin, Rachael Ray, Harry Connick Jr., Clay Aiken and Gloria Estefan seemed pretty niche, skewing heavily female for a show broadcast the eve of a family holiday, and some observers thought the lineup was better suited for daytime than primetime.
Given the holiday week, programming was lower rated last night than average. One special that did perform well was Barbara Walters’ interview with president-elect Barack Obama (11.6 million, 3.0 rating), which nearly matched "CSI: NY" in the 10 p.m. hour and gave ABC its highest non-awards show rating in the time period in more than a year.
The only good thing about Rosie being on TV is that I get to turn her off. Happy Thanksgiving TE!
Even useful things, like milk, sours if it sits around too long.
“jamming their politics down our throat” This is SOP for liberals. All politics, all the time. It is boring and obnoxious.
“Unbelievable that five million Americans are so brain-dead that they tuned in to see this regurgitated hairball.”
Five million sounds about right. They all switched from Bravo to watch Rosie.
...hm - you want liberal talking points page 1 or 2?
What a choice.
O’Donnell has a show?
I can’t think of a more fitting network for her than NBC, the home of TrashNews.
Amazing how that loud, ugly POS thinks that she has any kind of a draw.
Even more amazing, that a major TV network agrees with her.
Gosh why wouldn’t America want to watch a moronic variety show hosted by a talentless, hate-filled bull dyke with the personality of a Teamster’s Union legbreaker and a face like the hind end of a baboon?
That’s entertainment!
I looked at it for a couple of minutes. There were people dressed like cupcakes dancing around. Awful.
Well, at 5 million audience, she did manage to corner every gay, lesbian, transexual and refuse-to-state in the United States.
Maybe NBC should save time and change its name to GBC...
I thought so, too. Then it occured to me that it was a broadcast channel, so not so much.
Variety shows can be fun, I’d like to see them make a comeback. But you need a host that’s multi-talented. Rosie can’t sing, can’t act, and while she was good at stand-up 20 years ago she isn’t anymore. Wrong person for the job.
Not so surprising.
She seems to have drawn every freak and pervert in the country.
1.7% of the population sounds about right.
Nowhere to go but down, from there.
Boy do they suck. That has to be the worst football team of all time. They make Cleveland and Cincinnati look like world champions.
Joe Scarborough is coming to WABC radio. Another ratings disaster in the making.
No ratings really is it. The reason they picked Rosie is actually pretty obvious, she’s been a long term B lister with pretty good ratings most of the time and she’s probably pretty cheap. The thing they forgot until too late is that the “queen of nice” days of her daytime talk show are long gone, now most people see her as an angry dyke. If you ignore The View section of her career it seems like an OK idea, if she could wind her own personality clock back to the days of her talk show it might even have worked. But she can’t so they’ll show all the episodes that have been taped and quietly move on.
She is?
Ellen DeGenerate?
One of my greatest regrets in life is going to my grave without once watching anything in which she performed.
Driveby commercials included.
< /sarc >
I don’t think America was willing to risk having their visual senses assaulted again in case the lunatic hung herself upside down again.
People still have nightmares from the last time she did that.
What's a TV? Do you mean the remote Obama praise and whoreship machine?
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