CNN has announced plans to air Real Time with Bill Maher on Saturdays at 8 PM ET. Keith Olbermann wasn’t impressed by the move.
After the announcement came that Maher’s show, which originally debuts on Fridays on HBO, would receive an “encore” presentation on cable news, Olbermann took aim at his former cable news home during his Countdown podcast.
“The real motivation for doing this is actually a little bit more cynical than ‘Oh, I’m sure this will work. God something’s got to work,'” Olbermann said. “Even though all the CNN executives who tried Bill Maher last year are working elsewhere this year, the upper managers of that company…they know they are not going to draw flies with a day-old political insight and comedy show based on what Bill Maher read this week in the columns of Bari Weiss and Maureen Dowd and George Will.
“In other words, they’re not gonna get any ratings from a political insight comedy show without any comedy and without any insight. They’re doing it because they inexplicably just resigned Maher to a two-year contract extension and putting his rerun on at 8 PM on Saturday nights on CNN is called amortizing, even if it literally draws like 250 viewers,” posited Olbermann.
“The point is the costs at CNN for the 8 PM Saturday hour have just been reduced from like a million dollars, at least, to however much it costs to pay the guy who presses that one button that reads ‘play.’
Keith Olbermann then joked that the network could pick up another digital video show that recently launched.
“Maybe they could get this Don Lemon guy, with his new online interview series like that one with Elon Musk…Air them Don Lemon interviews on Saturday at 8 PM. Wait, there’s a flaw somewhere in that idea. I just can’t put my finger on it.”
