After 25 years and 50 000 interviews, one of the giants of American infotainment, Larry King, has announced that he is hanging up his brightly coloured braces and bringing to an end an era of soft-focus TV talkshows.
The broadcaster told viewers on Tuesday night he was to end the Larry King Live show this autumn. He said that he wanted “more time for my wife and I to get to the kids’ little league games”.
King (76) is to move to a new contract presenting special one-off programmes by November at the latest.
The termination of Larry King Live will signify not just the end of the line for this uniquely long-lived show — it recently entered the Guinness World Records as the longest-running programme presented by the same host in the same time slot — it also promises to bring to a close the TV format that he helped to pioneer. Since his first interview in 1985 with the then-governor of New York state, Mario Cuomo, he has been treating politicians, film stars and scandalmongers to his brand of tame questioning and unashamed flattery.
Whether that formula survives his leaving is in doubt. Ratings have plunged in the past few years – close to 40% in the past year alone – and he is now watched by 677 000 viewers, according to media researchers Nielsen.
“In the last couple of years the show had come close to comedy,” said Robert Thompson, professor of television and popular culture at Syracuse university. “Larry himself had come close to being a parody of himself.”
The Larry King Live show opened in 1985, bringing its presenter’s celebrity-friendly style from radio to TV as one of the first small-screen talkshows of its type. It quickly established itself as a place in which top politicians such as presidents Bill Clinton, George Bush and Barack Obama, businessmen like Bill Gates, and tabloid favourites such as Lady Gaga felt coddled and safe.
Softball questions
The show’s rise, and more recent decline, mirrored the fortunes of its parent network, CNN, which went on air as the first 24-hour rolling news channel five years previously. Like King himself, the network is now struggling to find a place for its middle-of-the-road voice amid the cacophony of politically polarised competitors, notably Fox News on the right and MSNBC on the left.
Over the years King has been criticised for giving public figures too easy a ride with his softball questions. “Let’s face it, he’s not an investigative journalist and these were not probing interviews,” Thompson said.
After he made his announcement, King rebutted the charge to CBS News: “I never presume what my guests would say. I listened to answers. I asked short questions, left my ego at the door and I had a motto through my whole career that I never learned anything when I was talking. That’s true to this day.”
King’s time-delayed stepping down now clears the way for a scramble to take his place in the primetime 9pm slot. Should CNN stick with the soft-soap formula, the frontrunner is likely to be Ryan Seacrest, compère of American Idol, who would extend a gentle hand to stars. King himself has declared Seacrest his preferred successor.
But should the network consider the challenge of Fox and MSNBC irresistible, as well it might, it could turn to a spikier host capable of generating more controversy. There has been speculation that Piers Morgan, the mischievous former editor of the Daily Mirror and a judge of America’s Got Talent, is in the running. — guardian.co.uk