Axed! Geraldo At Large to be gone by September

We got word two days ago that Geraldo At Large has finally, mercifully, been cancelled.

The show went on the air late last year, after Fox News chief Roger Ailes helped convince Rupert Murdoch's son Lachlan to quit and took over his role leading the Fox stations. Despite the conflict of interest, Ailes' first action was to kill the newly-revived A Current Affair, in part because the growing show competed with and beat his Fox News team, and because Geraldo had a fat contract and nowhere to go.

At Large was a slapped together affair that never had an executive producer or a vision beyond a desire to hype Fox News and throw Geraldo Rivera's shtick into an arena that had passed him by. The show was most notable for its promos which were among the most brutal and ugly on television: nasty, hard edged, amateur tabporn spitting words like "rape," "murder," "porn" and "child sex" amid family programming like The Simpsons and American Idol. It was bad stuff, advertising a bad show in the most crass terms possible.

And it's a shame that Ailes pulled the plug on Affair, which was gaining an audience and reclaiming its old territory and, given as much time as Geraldo At Large has wasted on the air, would be thriving today and putting money in Murdoch's pockets.

So has it been cancelled? Our sources are good ones. But we haven't seen the news anywhere else.


(Note: We see that Mike Douglas has also been cancelled. There's an interesting tidbit from his New York Times obit: "...The program also produced a pivotal moment in American political history: the creative mind behind the scenes at 'The Mike Douglas Show' in the 1960's, the producer Roger Ailes, became a crucial media adviser to Mr. Nixon in his successful run for President in 1968 after meeting him on the show. He went on to play a similar campaign role for Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush and is now chief executive officer of Fox News Channel and chairman of Fox Television...")