NY Daily NewsRatings may sink Ronan Farrow's show on MSNBC 'Ronan Farrow Daily' came in 708th in the Nielsens on Wednesday, and a network source says he 'sort of stinks on TV'
BY MARIANNE GARVEY, BRIAN NIEMIETZ AND LACHLAN CARTWRIGHT
Monday, March 31, 2014, 2:00 AM
Ronan Farrow’s MSNBC talk show is facing cancellation amid poor ratings, sources exclusively tell Confidenti@l.
Farrow, 28 — the opinionated, blue-eyed son of actress Mia Farrow and either Woody Allen or Frank Sinatra (even Farrow’s not sure which) — has been a disaster for MSNBC. The channel took the frequent cable-show guest and handed him his own program, “Ronan Farrow Daily,” which premiered in late February.
“He sort of stinks on TV,” an MSNBC source told Confidenti@l. “He hasn’t turned out to be the superstar they were hoping for.”
The theory was that Farrow, a Rhodes scholar who graduated college when he was 15 and went on to score degrees from Yale and Oxford, would bring his 245,000 Twitter followers with him to television. “But that hasn’t happened,” the source said. “Just because someone is a boy genius-turned-Twitter star doesn’t mean they deserve their own TV show.”
Last Wednesday, Farrow drew an average of about 312,000 total viewers, which might be stellar for Twitter but “is rather measly for someone who is supposed to be a major national personality,” another source said.
Even worse: Wednesday’s show was 708th among all programming ranked by Nielsen, in both total viewers and the 18-to-49 age group advertisers covet. The midnight airing of “Baggage” on the Game Show Network came in ahead of it, at No. 707, and the 8 a.m. “Golden Girls” on the Hallmark Channel (No. 700) crushed it.
Farrow, who has also worked for the House Committee on Foreign Affairs and the Obama administration, has looked uncomfortable on camera and often stumbles over his words. His lack of TV experience was especially apparent last week during an appearance on NBC’s “Today” in which he seemed to have trouble linking sentences.
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