No Surprise Spitzer's CNN Show Garners Horrible Reviews; Ratings

It should come as no surprise that Eliot Spitzer's attempt at a television show was a failure out of the gate.

The show comes to the screen with a whole host of negatives even before one starts digging into the show. Spitzer, the former New York Governor who resigned over a prostitution scandal, is someone that few people want to hear from - particularly when it comes to issues on ethics and morals.

Yet, that's exactly what he was doing in his first show opposite Kathleen Parker.

The show aims to be something like a toned-down Crossfire, but it simply misfires.

The political discussion program, featuring the hosts Kathleen Parker, the conservative columnist, and Eliot Spitzer, the one-time governor of New York, fizzled badly in its initial outing Monday, attracting only 454,000 total viewers.

That not only left CNN far behind its main rivals — Bill O’Reilly on Fox had 3.1 million on Fox News and Keith Olbermann had 1.1 million on MSNBC – but it also trailed Nancy Grace on the HLN channel, who had 468,000 viewers.

Even worse for the new CNN program, it lost viewers from the show on just ahead of it, “John King USA,” which had 471,000 viewers. Perhaps more troubling for CNN, “Parker Spitzer” was down sharply from the show it replaced, “Rick’s List,” hosted by Rick Sanchez, who was recently ousted from CNN. And it even fell short of the show that had long occupied the 8 p.m. slot on CNN, with Campbell Brown.

CNN doesn't have many alternatives for the time slot, so they'll likely let Spitzer/Parker continue for now. After all, they just canned Rick Sanchez after his anti-Semitic outburst and Brown left the time slot because she wasn't competitive with Bill O'Reilly or MSNBC. Brown had at least been garnering 500,000 viewers. No one since has come close in that time slot for CNN.

Parker/Spitzer can't even hold their lead-in audience, and it isn't likely to get better.