Megyn Kelly is back.
The former Fox News star jumped shipped to NBC where her Sunday Night w/ Megyn Kelly was abruptly canceled after failing the ratings miserably.
NBC then decisively moved Kelly to the non-political Today show because they realized her former followers were tired of her political antics.
Well that and the fact that Megyn Kelly is under contract with NBC for a bloated $15 million per year.
Funny enough, the liberal network thought that figure was a steal when they signed her, but they couldn’t have been more wrong.
Sunday Night w/ Megyn Kelly premiered with an interview with Russian President Vladimir Putin, but was destroyed in the ratings by a rerun of 60 Minutes.
Following that, Kelly interviewed the highly controversial Alex Jones of InfoWars. That interview was met with enormous backlash because of his conspiracy theory that the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre was fake.
The show’s sponsors began pulling out and the interview was widely regarded as tasteless because it was with man who views himself as a performance artist.
Her ratings only got worse from there.
So now she’s taken the leap to a cliché, Oprah-esque daytime show claiming it’s because she’s “done” with politics.
Time reported:
“If there was one message that Megyn Kelly sought to impart in the first installment of her new NBC talk show, Megyn Kelly Today, it was this: The old Megyn can’t come to the phone right now.
The host — a law school alum whose best-known skill has long been her prosecutorial zeal — served as her own defense attorney throughout the hour, pushing the case that she’s not the person you remember from her years of political coverage.
“The truth is, I’m kind of done with politics for now,” Kelly said in a lengthy opening monologue that told her entire life story from childhood to TV stardom.
“It’s everywhere, everywhere, and I’m just like, it’s over.”
It’s not just the sentiment that makes Kelly’s case; it’s the bearing. Kelly, a precise, crystalline wordsmith when in takedown mode, awkwardly sprinkled slang into her speech.
She talked with her hands as though someone had said it was humanizing. When the cast of Today walked out with mimosas, Kelly declared, “O.M.G.!”
A person who until as recently as last summer, during her Sunday-night newsmagazine show, sought to represent herself as deeply engaged in issues of the public interest now just thought it was over. Have a mimosa!
The problem is that Kelly, for all her forced bonhomie, is more chilly than chill. Kelly’s work on Fox News, aggressively questioning perceived agents of division in a manner that was itself cleverly divisive, made her a star.
Now, there was little left but self. Her monologue came most vividly alive when she described her own ambition — her longtime dream of hosting “a more uplifting show.
But how, where, what?”
And an interview with the cast and creators of Will & Grace evinced neither particular familiarity with the show nor a take beyond that having fun is fun.
Kelly introduced the cast to a gay male “superfan” in the audience, the sort of surprise Oprah Winfrey used to pull in daytime.
“I think the Will & Grace thing and the gay thing are going to work out great,” she awkwardly told him before throwing to commercial.”
Kelly’s show was awkward and off-putting. She’s clearly not cut out for the warmy, feel-good talk shows—or the political shows.
Looks like NBC is going to be looking for a buyout soon.