Ronan Farrow Bested by the Ghosts of NBC Past

Ronan Farrow Daily “has been a ratings ‘disaster’ since its premiere in February,” Jeff Dunetz writes at Ben Shapiro’s Truth Revolt Website, linking to this article in the (left-leaning) New York Daily News:

The NY Daily News is reporting that Ronan Farrow’s new MSNBC talk show is facing cancellation because of poor ratings. “He sort of stinks on TV,” said an MSNBC source. “He hasn’t turned out to be the superstar they were hoping for.”

MSNBC believed they had the makings of a television superstar on their hands, a face that might prove to be the face of the news outlet. The son of actress Mia Farrow and Woody Allen (though much speculation surrounds the possibility that Frank Sinatra might actually be his biological father) seems to have not only the genes but the intellectual and ideological makeup of the perfect MNSBC host. But as NY Daily News reports, “Ronan Farrow Daily” has been a ratings “disaster” since its premiere in February.

“Nielsen rated Wednesday’s show 708th among all programming in total viewers in the crucial 18-49 age group,” Dunetz adds. “As the Daily News notes, the show was beat out by a ‘Golden Girls’ rerun on the Hallmark Channel.”

Which makes sense, given that the Golden Girls was a product of the earlier, funnier, more competent era of NBC, when Brandon Tartikoff still ruled the roost. Not my cup of tea given the subject matter and even more sclerotic recombinant sitcom themes, but my parents loved it — and Tartikoff gets credit for noticing the graying of TV’s audience, a trend that has only accelerated as the rest of us decamped to the Internet. But the Golden Girls, which was already in its second season when Farrow was born in 1987, boasted a talented, veteran cast, a staff of professional writers, and a competent production crew, all of whom are increasingly in short supply at the beleaguered peacock network and its spin-off channels. In sharp contradistinction to the earlier days of NBC, a competent technical crew in particular has been in very short supply at MSNBC in recent years, resulting in numerous Chyron disasters throughout the MSNBC programming day, and Ronan’s stillborn series is no exception.

Update: From the photo atop his post onward, Jim Treacher really sticks the shiv in, to use language that for 30 seconds was considered non-MSNBC approved. Writing, “Young Mr. Farrow, who’s a dead ringer for his dad Woody, is taking things in stride with his trademark sense of dry humor,” Treacher links to Ronan’s tweet that he’s “Waking up to another crushing day of not being Oprah.”

“Face it, kid, you’re not even Estelle Getty,” Treacher savagely quips — although to be fair, she had much better writers than Getty. Not to mention much less of a sense that the world owed her a living simply because of her name.

Or as Drew of Ace of Spades adds, “Somewhere in the great beyond, Frank Sinatra is telling everyone there’s no chance this no-talent loser is his kid and if he were he’d smack the smirk off the kid’s face.”