Ed Schultz' new 6pmET MSNBC show premiered Monday night, and so far the reaction to The Ed Show on the Web has been mixed. The ED Show's ratings show lots of potential, and it seems MSNBC has finally found a 6 p.m. host, although it is too early to tell. Please continue to read below the fold....
• Variety's Brian Lowry thought MSNBC wants Schultz "to be its Glenn Beck." Although he thought the show might "gradually right itself," Lowry writes the first night consisted of "talking to people coached to speak with the kind of speed and urgency normally reserved for the game show '$100,000 Pyramid.'"
• NewscastStudio.com goes in depth about the "look" of the show. "Producers are making liberal use of fancy camera moves similar to those seen on 'The Rachel Maddow' show, often incorporating the studio's mobile plasma cars into sweeping shots," writes Michael P. Hill. And how about this detail: "The tall LCD array that is often used to create the illusion of a window looking over Rockefeller Plaza was creatively used to display moving colored bars mimicking the spikes seen on an audio board, a subtle nod to Schultz's radio roots."
• Jerry Remmers, columnist at The Moderate Voice, thought Schultz was "a decent addition" to MSNBC. "I like the format and theme of 'The Ed Show.' Schultz has a long way to go to finesse and fine tune it," he writes. "The opening editorial or commentary segment is entertaining with room to grow on substantive issues. But, he cannot be Mr. Nice Guy and allow guest answers to circumvent his questions."
The early ratings are in for Ed Schultz’s The Ed Show on MSNBC, and they have provided a boost to MSNBC’s 6 pm (ET) hour. It is too soon to tell if his show will be a hit or a miss, and the show definitely could use some tweaking, but Schultz is definitely off to a good start.
For his debut on Monday night, Schultz drew 247,000 viewers age 25-64, and 725,000 total viewers. Both numbers were good enough only for third place behind Fox News and CNN, but they did represent a substantial increase over the previous occupant of the timeslot David Shuster’s 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. For the sake of comparison, Shuster’s last night at 6 pm drew 151,000 viewers in the 25-64 demographic, and 486,000 total viewers. The number of total viewers for 1600 usually hovered between 350,000 and 550,000, but MSNBC is hoping for much more from Ed Schultz.
It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to see that MSNBC’s target is the third hour of CNN’s The Situation Room which despite having itself as lead in shows some audience erosion from the 5 pm ET hour. In order to catch CNN on Monday The Ed Show would have had to have drawn about 400,000 more viewers to give Wolf Blitzer a real run for his money, but on an average night CNN has roughly 800,000 total viewers at 6 pm. If Ed Schultz matches his debut numbers on a nightly basis, he will not only compete with, but he will be beat CNN on some nights....
The obvious comparison to make would be between Schultz to Rachel Maddow. They both came to MSNBC from national radio. They are two of the more popular progressive radio talkers, and they both had very limited television experience when they began. The difference is that Maddow has a highly rated lead in with Keith Olbermann’s Countdown, but Schultz is following Hardball, which is usually running in third. A key difference is that while Schultz is popular on the radio, when MSNBC hired Maddow was already poised to be the youngish breakout star of lefty media.
Somewhat surprisingly the 7 pm (ET) Hardball replay, does better than the live 5 pm show, which leads me to wonder if the network wouldn’t be better served by turning over the 5 pm slot to someone else, and making 7 pm the live Hardball with Schultz serving as Chris Matthews’s lead in. A live 7 PM could also only serve to help Keith Olbermann in his ratings jihad against Bill O’Reilly.
Schultz is making the same transition that Rachel Maddow did when she began her show, so one can expect that there will be some clunkiness and growing pains, but once he settles in Schultz will get more comfortable. His radio show is my opinion the most polished of the liberal shows, so it is a safe bet that if given time his television show will improve in a similar fashion. The Ed Show is in its awkward teenager stage right now, but it has the potential to mature into the long term answer to MSNBC’s 6 PM troubles.
The most interesting part of in the article by politicususa.com, and what I have always believed is that since that Chris Matthews' 7p.m. repeat is doing better that it's 5p.m. live show. Hardball 7p.m. ratings would see a significant hike by adding a different program at 5p.m. and giving Chris only a live 7p.m. hour/show. This would increase ratings significantly not only for Hardball, but also for Countdown.
Also, on another point, I was listening to The Ed Schultz Show on the radio yesterday, and he said something I have never really hard from a Cable News pundit/host. He said he did not do so well with the panel because everything was so new, and he was still trying to figure everything with the cameras. Then he went after Joe Scarborough of Morning Joe, which really surprised me for going at someone on his own network. All in all, it is really nice to see Ed succeed and hopefully he will continue to.