Over a month since its debut, Piers Morgan’s Talk TV show has landed with a thud in Britain’s prime time ratings – having shed more than 80 percent of its audience since launching on April 25th.
The late April debut of Pier’s Morgan: Uncensored averaged 317,000 viewers on its 8 p.m. debut in the U.K. Unfortunately for Morgan, that number dipped to 62,000 viewers by May 4th and to an abysmal 24,000 viewers on May 18th.
Rupert Murdoch founded Talk TV in 2022 and reportedly signed Morgan to a $63 million three-year deal. Morgan’s show is also broadcast on Fox Nation in the U.S. and Sky News in Australia.
Slate’s Imogen West-Knights detailed the massive advertising blitz in London that preceded Uncensored’s debut. “Walk around a corner in London at the moment, and there’s a good chance you’ll come face to face with Piers Morgan,” West-Knights wrote.
“‘Love him or hate him, you won’t want to miss him,’ say the endless billboards, accompanied by an alarmingly large picture of Morgan’s face, a halo over one side of his head and devil horns on the other,” she adds of the omnipresent advertising for the show, which has failed to secure a loyal audience.
Morgan’s show has managed to produce some memorable content, including a highly contentious interview with Donald Trump, a controversial grilling of the Taliban’s international spokesman, and a trans activist calling Morgan a “c*nt” live on air.
Morgan took to Twitter to brush off the importance of nightly ratings, writing, “Linear TV [is] increasingly irrelevant [compared] to total eyeball potential for a global show like this, especially with younger viewers who don’t really watch TV anymore.” Morgan’s tweet included a press release showing his show having a wide digital reach.
The Guardian’s Jim Waterson was happy to puncture that logic, noting, “However, the methodology behind this claim is unclear and recent episodes of the show on Morgan’s YouTube channel are attracting about 10,000 viewers.
Morgan’s ratings have gotten so bad that British media began speculating that he would take a 6-week break to regroup. The British tabloid The Daily Star wrote, “Ex GMB host Piers Morgan moved to TalkTV after he quit the ITV show, but has failed to pull in a large audience and is set to take a break for longer than the channel has been live.”
Reports later surfaced that Morgan’s break had been pre-scheduled and included him working on a project about American serial killers.
(Excerpt) Read more in: Mediaite