Dennis Millers rating are shrinking...shrinking...shrinking. [View All]

[xray s]

If you are a Miller fan you better catch him fast before he disappears.

http://www.chicagotribune.com/features/chi-0402110236feb11,1,2314107.story

Even at CNBC, Dennis Miller has a monkey on his back

By Steve Johnson
Tribune television critic
Published February 11, 2004

On his new and flailing CNBC talk show, Dennis Miller has, to these guests' faces, lauded California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's accent as "infectious" and opined that former New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani has personal parts the size of Macy's parade balloons.

He's also granted co-host status to a chimpanzee, whose wanderings through Miller's darkened studio are often very amusing but also a sign of a show that doesn't know whether it wants to deflate standard television or join it.

Or maybe, by then, it'll be Phase 1 all over again. Miller's disconcertingly flaccid attempts to meld jokes on the news, serious political commentary, conservative hero worship and the chimp were greeted by a huge-by-CNBC-standards initial audience of 746,000 viewers, but they seem to be plummeting. Week one averaged 540,000 viewers for the first airings of new shows; week two pulled in less than half, just 261,000.

And it's no wonder, because a once-iconoclastic, hyperskeptical comic who seems to have moved into bowing before swaggering conservatives is nobody's idea of entertaining, no matter how hard the crew that is Miller's only in-studio audience chuckles. You can't spend a career deflating absurdity, and then conduct the kind of fawning interview with Schwarzenegger that Miller did on his first CNBC show, Jan. 26. Viewers' discomfort was mirrored in the face of the man who, Miller seemed to forget, was a bodybuilder-turned-actor-turned-governor.