Latest Ratings Disaster Shows Morning Joe Has Lost Its Mojo

All successful shows eventually go downhill. Sometimes familiarity breeds contempt. Sometimes a reboot or addition (or subtraction) is needed to bring some much needed energy to a set. And in cable news, all of this specifically applies to MSNBC’s Morning Joe, once described as “revolutionary” by Time magazine and once ranked as the top news program on television by the New York Times back in 2008.

Fast forward seven years later and the show is basically the same as it was during that magical run of 2008: Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski are still your primary co-hosts, with Willie Geist as capable third wheel. The other players rotate but are all still the same familiar faces: Mike Barnicle, Mark Halperin, John Heilemann, Donny Deutsch, Mike Allen (Politico), Eugene Robinson, Nicolle Wallace, etc., all brought in to periodically add to the debate. And that’s somewhat a foreign word at MSNBC lately: Debate.

But over the past year, something just doesn’t feel right about the show. The energy level is poor, particularly in the case of Mika and Geist. Frowns and blank stares seem to permeate the set; it’s like that look Bill Murray had in Groundhog Day from watching the same Jeopardy episode over and over again and knowing the answers before they were asked. The passion that was so apparent in ’08 and even as recently as 2012 does not remotely approach the same level.

Proof positive came this past Friday night, when the show was broadcast in primetime for two hours from the site of the Super Bowl. The ratings result was disastrous: 65K in the key 25-54 demo at 8:00 PM and 72K for the second hour at 9:00 PM. For context, Chris Hayes and Rachel Maddow did a 104K and 143K at those hours the night before, respectively. Yes, viewership is lower on Friday nights compared to Thursdays, but that didn’t seem to affect Fox and CNN very much: Fox’s O’Reilly Factor and Kelly File did a 434K and 331K in the demo last Friday night, with Anderson Cooper and a CNN Special at 9:00p doing a 157K and 179K, respectively. Add it all up, and even with a Katy Perry interview and Super Bowl backdrop, the show got beat nearly 7-to-1 by Fox at 8:00 p.m., while CNN had two-and-a-half times the audience at 9:00 PM. And it’s not any prettier in the morning race, either.

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