TV Week plays the story straight:

MSNBC is rearranging its weeknight lineup starting Aug. 8 to put former Fox News Channel personality Rita Cosby at 9 p.m. and move 6-week-old “The Situation With Tucker Carlson” to 11 p.m., where it will be the only live cable news program.

David Bauder of the AP takes a more skeptical line with this headline in the Houston Chronicle:

MSNBC dumps Carlson from prime-time slot

Broadcasting & Cable modified it’s original story. TVNewser earlier noted that B&C said the move appears “to be a vote of low-confidence for Tucker Carlson.” But that passage was missing from the article when ICN read it. There is this though…

“The move had all the earmarks of a downgrade, but Kaplan and Carlson saw it differently”

ICN is doing some rethinking on my earlier comments and was probably too quick to rush to judgement this morning in claiming that this was a vote of no confidence. Clearly the show wasn’t doing well in its 9pm slot and there wasn’t any indictation of the show trending higher in the ratings, though six weeks isn’t really enough time to make a definative judgement on that. But it is possible that the show in its current form could find a new larger audience at 11 pm without having to be tweaked. And ICN is intellectually honest enough to admit that Kaplan and Carlson’s comments played a role in this re-assessment. Sure, they’re going to put the best possible face on the story. But, and this is the key for ICN, Kaplan said that he’d been wanting to do something with 11 pm. ICN is going to give Kaplan the benefit of the doubt on that. If you want to call that backpeddling, I could see why you would come to that conclusion.

ICN thinks Cosby’s show should fare better against the competition than The Situation though. This is due in no small part to Cosby’s reputation of getting the big interview and her tenacity when given a challenge. Like Geraldo Rivera, Cosby has a history of flourishing when she’s gets a big interview. And she has something of a fan base that I’m sure MSNBC is counting on following her over in kick starting a rebounding of the numbers for the 9 pm hour.

Here are Thursday’s numbers…a wee bit late (hey, occasionally I actually have to do work at my job). And a not great day it was for CNN. Its sibling network decided to knock it around a bit. HLN beat CNN in both the Daytime and Primetime Demo and came dangerously close to beating it for Prime Time flat out. Grace beat Zahn again. Larry King was flat as was Cooper. FOX beat the competition combined in everything except the Total Day Demo. MSNBC didn’t do too bad for itself. Countdown, Hardball, and Scarborough were all over the 300,000 mark and The Situation had an above average evening.
(more…)

TVNewser, who has for all intents and purposes owned the Situation story today, tops it off with comments from both Carlson and Kaplan.

After all, “it requires a real commitment of resources,” MSNBC president Rick Kaplan said. “It’s cheaper to just run your schedule, turn it around and run it over again.”

“I told the network back in December or January that we were going to do an 11pm show,” Kaplan told TVNewser this afternoon. “What we really created for Tucker was a late-night show, but the hole in the schedule at that moment was nine, so we figured ‘Okay we’ll premiere it, we’ll fill the schedule.’”

…

The bow-tied host discussed a late-night show with Kaplan before he even came to MSNBC. “This is what I’ve wanted to do for a long time,” he said.

He continued: “This is a chance for Fox viewers, CNN viewers, people who are tired of reruns, to find a first-run program…It’s a huge move, from my perspective, on MSNBC’s part. As Rick said, it’s a commitment of resources. It’s a big deal. Other networks haven’t wanted to do it because it costs money, but MSNBC is bold enough to do it.”

ICN doesn’t think that this is spin we’re reading here and that Carlson was always intended to be on late night. Though one wonders why they didn’t just come out and say that Tucker was moving to 11 when Cosby was signed instead of making it this big guessing game about what was going to happen since they were going to put The Situation on at 11 in the first place. It just makes things look bad like it was a panic move when you already knew what you’re going to do but didn’t signal it that way (and even let conflicting data come out through back door means that Cosby was going to be on at 11 as other boards had reported).

But MSNBC will need more than the “Hey we’ve got fresh programming here.” tagline to make it work. They’re going to have to give viewers a reason to watch. That will mostly depend on whether a) The format of the progam is something that late night viewers truly want, and b) Whether Carlson is the guy to deliver those viewers. This is uncharted territory MSNBC is wading in to. Clearly they’ve done their due dilligence on the matter, to a greater extent than ICN had given them credit for. And ICN is pleased that this isn’t a return to the “here one day, gone the next” days of Erik Sorenson and that the commitment is still there. Because this show is going to need that commitment to have a chance at succeeding.

Here is a year to year comparison of the 9pm hour. The first number is the Total Viewers number. The number in parentheses is the P25-54 Demo number. The third number is the HH rating.

6/14/04-07/28/04 Norville/Hardball 353,000 (109,000) 0.4 rating
6/13/05-07/27/05 The Situation 201,000 (82,000) 0.2 rating

What these numbers don’t reflect though is the period from when Norville’s show ended its run to when The Situation started. That 9 pm time period became a programming graveyard of sorts for about 4-5 months where a rag tag group of specials and canned programming aired. In ICN’s opinion this made things difficult for The Situation at launch because there had been no consistency at that time period for so long and you never knew from week to week what would be on. Viewers would have to be led back to that time slot once The Situation started up.

UPDATE: Changed “audience share” to the more correct “HH rating”

TV Newser says that The Situation is going to be bumped to 11 pm to make room for Rita Cosby’s new show on August 8th.

If this is true this is a huge setback for The Situation and and Tucker Carlson…tantamount to a no confidence vote in the program. It has only been on the air for a few short months (much less time than the even lower rated Connected: Coast To Coast which has had no action taken against it so far). For Rick Kaplan, who has been following the “baby steps” approach in how he manages primetime, to juggle the lineup this quickly, as opposed to tweaking the program format and giving it more time to establish itself, suggests that the in house research on the program has come back so negative that only a program switch will save the 9 pm hour.

Cosby’s show was originally supposed to launch in Q4 so ICN’s eyebrows were raised when the Aug 8 launch date was announced. Something caused MSNBC to change its mind. Despite the biggest advertising blitz in MSNBC’s history for a new prime time program, The Situation, which took five months to come together after Carlson was signed, has been in trouble almost since the day it was launched. Panelist Jay Severin was removed from the program for reasons that are still murky. The ratings came back showing that people were tuning out in huge numbers from its lead-in Countdown and then coming back for the next program Scarborough Country. Now The Situation is being moved to 11 pm without tweaking the show first. It’s only a matter of time before the previously unthinkable word “cancellation” will start being bandied about regardless of the merits of such a discussion…