Poor Ronan Farrow. Born to celebrity parents, a Rhodes scholar, college graduate at age 15, Cronkite Award winner, degrees from Yale and Oxford, more than 245,000 Twitter followers — yet none of this prepared him to host a TV show.
Farrow made headlines Monday after it was reported that his show placed 708th on the Nielsen ratings. “Ronan Farrow Daily,” which airs weekdays at 1 p.m., was ranked lower than a midnight rerun of “Baggage,” the dating show hosted by Jerry Springer on the Game Show Network, and the 8 a.m. rerun of the “Golden Girls” on the Hallmark Channel.
Ouch. A source at MSNBC told the New York Daily News that Farrow “sort of stinks on TV.”
“Just because someone is a boy genius-turned-Twitter star doesn’t mean they deserve their own TV show,” the source said.
Naturally, Twitter buzzed at the news.
Ronan Farrow won a Cronkite award for a TV show that got beat in the ratings by reruns of golden girls http://t.co/kivJ3OQmNZ
— Bill (@thatbillokeefe) March 31, 2014
I, for one, think it is a tragedy that Cronkite Award winner, Ronan Farrow…. wait… I can’t stop laughing.
— RBe (@RBPundit) March 31, 2014
Man, Ronan Farrow just needs to pull a Conan and go nuts. What does he have to lose?
— Charlie Spiering (@charliespiering) March 31, 2014
Canceling Farrow would be another blow to the left-leaning cable news network, which lost nearly a quarter of its prime-time audience and 15.5 percent of its daytime audience in 2013 amid problems with some of its hosts.
In December 2013, host Martin Bashir resigned after making distasteful remarks toward former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin. Just one month before Bashir’s departure, actor Alec Baldwin’s show was cancelled after the host went on an anti-gay tirade.
And of course we all remember Keith Olbermann’s departure from the network in early 2011.
MSNBC has given no indication that Farrow may be cancelled, and a spokesman said that the network was “happy with the debut” of the show.
