Olbermann Flops in Primetime

On Sunday, NewsBusters asked readers, "Will NBC Succeed in Making Olbermann Mainstream?"

70 percent of respondents said, "No, he's too crazy."

Well, Nielsen ratings of his "Countdown" program aired Sunday evening on NBC validate this position, and wonderfully depict Olbermann as clearly not being ready for primetime (h/t Thomas Stewart):

Let the smack talking begin: NBC ran a special one hour Countdown with Keith Olbermann and it pulled Quarterlife style numbers (3.37 million) and did even worse in the demo with a 0.5/2. I’d blame that on the basketball overrun except that a rerun of King of the Hill on Fox did about three times as well as KO in the demo. Even a rerun of America’s Next Top Model on the CW had a better 18-49 result than Olbermann. We know from our regular coverage that almost all of Olbermann’s (and O’Reilly’s too) viewers are over the age of 55 on cable, and it would seem NBC was doing their own little Katie Couric experiment to see if it could capture the youth using Keith Olbermann. The verdict is in: nope.

I'm verklempt. Talk amongst yourselves.