Larry King’s Endgame at CNN
By DAVID CARR NY TIMES 
At the beginning of June, CNN’s Larry King celebrated 25 years in the same slot on the same network — a remarkable achievement in a come-and-go business — and was joined over a week by Bill Gates, LeBron James and the leader of the free world to mark the occasion. Not bad for a former color commentator of the Shreveport Steamer of the World Football League.
The most exciting get of the week had to be Lady Gaga, the incandescent pop star and performance artist. During the interview, however, the person in black suspenders and white shirt sought a connection across generations, evincing both earnestness and playfulness, but was forced to communicate with someone imprisoned in a character, offering little more than a performance piece full of aphorisms and nervous laughter.
Maybe you saw this coming, but it was Lady Gaga who wore those trademark suspenders in tribute (she called him “King Larry”). She appeared via a satellite feed from London, but Mr. King may as well have been dialing in from a distant solar system. He blew past several surprising answers without follow-up and ambled on to the next canned question. “Is there any boundary you won’t cross?” he asked portentously, without mentioning any that she had.
In Lady Gaga, Mr. King had a willing, wildly famous subject. If he can no longer hit a hanging curve ball over the middle of the plate, shouldn’t CNN be thinking hard about who is on deck?
As my colleague Brian Stelter reported last month, Mr. King’s audience has been cut in half since the presidential election, to an average of just 725,000 viewers a night, a number that ranked him far behind Sean Hannity on Fox News, Rachel Maddow on MSNBC and even at times behind the relatively new “Joy Behar Show” on HLN, CNN’s sister network.
Mr. King’s contract is up a year from now, and while CNN had no specific comment on succession, a spokeswoman did remind us that Mr. King is still a force, regardless of what the ratings say:
“The world has never seen a better or more influential talk show host than Larry King,” said Christa Robinson, the spokeswoman. “While the media regurgitates speculation about his coveted role, Larry is busy organizing a telethon on Monday night to raise money to help clean up the gulf the way he raised nearly $10 million for Haiti earthquake relief a few months ago. That kind of influence and impact is exceedingly rare.”
It’s nice that the network is supportive of a talent that helped build its identity, but is this really how CNN wants this all to play out? It’s not as if the idea that Mr. King’s reign might end came out of nowhere. He has always been a bit of a cartoon, but a willing one, and he made for good television as he wobbled his way toward greater truths using a regular-guy approach to inordinately famous or newsworthy people. Not any more.
On Thursday night, he took on BP’s Congressional testimony with four highly politicized commentators and failed to tame the lions. Each segment ended in unwatchable cross-talk. Earlier in the week, he stepped up on the gulf story by interviewing Sammy Kershaw, a country singer and candidate for lieutenant governor of Louisiana, but seemed powerless as Mr. Kershaw kidnapped the show by reading a windy infomercial about the glories of gulf seafood from notes scribbled on a piece of paper.
In the same week, his show tacked to the tabloid side of the news, with interviews of the family of the slain Peruvian woman, a death for which Joran van der Sloot has been charged. Mr. Van der Sloot is a suspect in the earlier, much followed disappearance of the Alabama teenager Natalee Holloway in Aruba.
The interview was a weave of long pauses and odd pivots — “How well did you know your sister-in-law?” — that looked and sounded more like cable access than the work of a cable powerhouse.
No one will replace Mr. King. As Robert Thompson, professor of television and popular culture at Syracuse University points out, Mr. King is part old-school broadcaster and part vaudeville act, more Ed Sullivan than Edward R. Murrow. But a segue, some kind of plan, seems merited.
“When you tune in and watch Larry King interviewing Lady Gaga and he seems to be the more Dada performance artist, that speaks volumes,” Mr. Thompson said. “Larry King has always been a bit of a punch line, but you don’t want him to become a joke.”
The struggles at “Larry King Live” have less do to with the host’s age — 76 — than the chronic, relentless needs of a daily, one-man show that tries to encompass the whole civic and cultural waterfront. Charlie Rose is 68, but he doesn’t have to fight for ratings and he is not compelled to spend quality time with a former Miss USA contestant, Carrie Prejean, if she is found to have taken her shirt off.
The bigger problem is that CNN has more than one problem. Its 7 p.m. slot with John King has failed to connect, and Campbell Brown is taking it upon herself to step away from the 8 p.m. slot because the ratings aren’t there. While Anderson Cooper has not moved the needle much, he is a core asset, on-brand and on-message, who might do better if he had a better show leading in to his.
There are fixes being considered. Eliot Spitzer, of all people, has the attention of people at both the news network and its corporate ownership, as a potentially tangy, risky choice for the 8 p.m. hour. Piers Morgan, a judge on “America’s Got Talent,” has been mentioned as a potential replacement for Mr. King, as has the “American Idol” host Ryan Seacrest.
Katie Couric’s contract anchoring the “CBS Evening News” will be up at about the same time as Mr. King’s, and the format would nicely frame her gift for interviews. But given the instability of the lineup and the mysteries about lead-in, there is zero chance right now that she would consider sliding into the slot.
There is another choice for CNN. Think of the hand-off from Tom Brokaw to Brian Williams — graceful and profitable, with Mr. Brokaw continuing to show up doing work that interests him and Mr. Williams storming along in the ratings as the anointed heir.
Why not announce a yearlong victory lap for Mr. King? You could probably count on both Obamas, both Clintons, both George Bushes, both Martha and Jon Stewart, with maybe some Tiger, a little Oprah, all stopping by for some much deserved ring-kissing.
The 25th anniversary week proved that Mr. King can still move the ratings with aggressive booking, and meanwhile CNN could negotiate with Mr. King to free up some nights for a kind of bake-off, a rolling audition of hopefuls.
A year of occasional substitutes just might yield a worthy, and viewer-friendly, successor. As it is, Mr. King has been left to dangle, battered by tabloid reports, sliding ratings and his own daily battle to anchor the show five days a week. The more legendary the talent, the more delicate the endgame. Think of Helen Thomas’s exit, which did not end well for anyone.
E-mail: carr@nytimes.com;
twitter.com/carr2n
At the beginning of June, CNN’s Larry King celebrated 25 years in the same slot on the same network — a remarkable achievement in a come-and-go business — and was joined over a week by Bill Gates, LeBron James and the leader of the free world to mark the occasion. Not bad for a former color commentator of the Shreveport Steamer of the World Football League.
The most exciting get of the week had to be Lady Gaga, the incandescent pop star and performance artist. During the interview, however, the person in black suspenders and white shirt sought a connection across generations, evincing both earnestness and playfulness, but was forced to communicate with someone imprisoned in a character, offering little more than a performance piece full of aphorisms and nervous laughter.
Maybe you saw this coming, but it was Lady Gaga who wore those trademark suspenders in tribute (she called him “King Larry”). She appeared via a satellite feed from London, but Mr. King may as well have been dialing in from a distant solar system. He blew past several surprising answers without follow-up and ambled on to the next canned question. “Is there any boundary you won’t cross?” he asked portentously, without mentioning any that she had.
In Lady Gaga, Mr. King had a willing, wildly famous subject. If he can no longer hit a hanging curve ball over the middle of the plate, shouldn’t CNN be thinking hard about who is on deck?
As my colleague Brian Stelter reported last month, Mr. King’s audience has been cut in half since the presidential election, to an average of just 725,000 viewers a night, a number that ranked him far behind Sean Hannity on Fox News, Rachel Maddow on MSNBC and even at times behind the relatively new “Joy Behar Show” on HLN, CNN’s sister network.
Mr. King’s contract is up a year from now, and while CNN had no specific comment on succession, a spokeswoman did remind us that Mr. King is still a force, regardless of what the ratings say:
“The world has never seen a better or more influential talk show host than Larry King,” said Christa Robinson, the spokeswoman. “While the media regurgitates speculation about his coveted role, Larry is busy organizing a telethon on Monday night to raise money to help clean up the gulf the way he raised nearly $10 million for Haiti earthquake relief a few months ago. That kind of influence and impact is exceedingly rare.”
It’s nice that the network is supportive of a talent that helped build its identity, but is this really how CNN wants this all to play out? It’s not as if the idea that Mr. King’s reign might end came out of nowhere. He has always been a bit of a cartoon, but a willing one, and he made for good television as he wobbled his way toward greater truths using a regular-guy approach to inordinately famous or newsworthy people. Not any more.
On Thursday night, he took on BP’s Congressional testimony with four highly politicized commentators and failed to tame the lions. Each segment ended in unwatchable cross-talk. Earlier in the week, he stepped up on the gulf story by interviewing Sammy Kershaw, a country singer and candidate for lieutenant governor of Louisiana, but seemed powerless as Mr. Kershaw kidnapped the show by reading a windy infomercial about the glories of gulf seafood from notes scribbled on a piece of paper.
In the same week, his show tacked to the tabloid side of the news, with interviews of the family of the slain Peruvian woman, a death for which Joran van der Sloot has been charged. Mr. Van der Sloot is a suspect in the earlier, much followed disappearance of the Alabama teenager Natalee Holloway in Aruba.
The interview was a weave of long pauses and odd pivots — “How well did you know your sister-in-law?” — that looked and sounded more like cable access than the work of a cable powerhouse.
No one will replace Mr. King. As Robert Thompson, professor of television and popular culture at Syracuse University points out, Mr. King is part old-school broadcaster and part vaudeville act, more Ed Sullivan than Edward R. Murrow. But a segue, some kind of plan, seems merited.
“When you tune in and watch Larry King interviewing Lady Gaga and he seems to be the more Dada performance artist, that speaks volumes,” Mr. Thompson said. “Larry King has always been a bit of a punch line, but you don’t want him to become a joke.”
The struggles at “Larry King Live” have less do to with the host’s age — 76 — than the chronic, relentless needs of a daily, one-man show that tries to encompass the whole civic and cultural waterfront. Charlie Rose is 68, but he doesn’t have to fight for ratings and he is not compelled to spend quality time with a former Miss USA contestant, Carrie Prejean, if she is found to have taken her shirt off.
The bigger problem is that CNN has more than one problem. Its 7 p.m. slot with John King has failed to connect, and Campbell Brown is taking it upon herself to step away from the 8 p.m. slot because the ratings aren’t there. While Anderson Cooper has not moved the needle much, he is a core asset, on-brand and on-message, who might do better if he had a better show leading in to his.
There are fixes being considered. Eliot Spitzer, of all people, has the attention of people at both the news network and its corporate ownership, as a potentially tangy, risky choice for the 8 p.m. hour. Piers Morgan, a judge on “America’s Got Talent,” has been mentioned as a potential replacement for Mr. King, as has the “American Idol” host Ryan Seacrest.
Katie Couric’s contract anchoring the “CBS Evening News” will be up at about the same time as Mr. King’s, and the format would nicely frame her gift for interviews. But given the instability of the lineup and the mysteries about lead-in, there is zero chance right now that she would consider sliding into the slot.
There is another choice for CNN. Think of the hand-off from Tom Brokaw to Brian Williams — graceful and profitable, with Mr. Brokaw continuing to show up doing work that interests him and Mr. Williams storming along in the ratings as the anointed heir.
Why not announce a yearlong victory lap for Mr. King? You could probably count on both Obamas, both Clintons, both George Bushes, both Martha and Jon Stewart, with maybe some Tiger, a little Oprah, all stopping by for some much deserved ring-kissing.
The 25th anniversary week proved that Mr. King can still move the ratings with aggressive booking, and meanwhile CNN could negotiate with Mr. King to free up some nights for a kind of bake-off, a rolling audition of hopefuls.
A year of occasional substitutes just might yield a worthy, and viewer-friendly, successor. As it is, Mr. King has been left to dangle, battered by tabloid reports, sliding ratings and his own daily battle to anchor the show five days a week. The more legendary the talent, the more delicate the endgame. Think of Helen Thomas’s exit, which did not end well for anyone.
E-mail: carr@nytimes.com;
twitter.com/carr2n
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