12 Talk Shows That Lasted Just One Season
Nick Cannon will have to fall back on one of his many other day jobs. The actor-turned-TV-host’s self-named talk show is one of three daytime series that got the boot last week, linking Cannon to many other celebrities whose chat-fests only aired one season.
From Pat Sajak’s oft-forgotten foray into late night to Kris Jenner’s little-watched daytime show, here are other talk shows that never saw a second season.
Busy Tonight
Girls5eva star Busy Philipps had her own late-night talk show, which only lasted one season but aired over 100 episodes. When E! canceled Busy Tonight in 2019, the actress wrote on Instagram that it was “lame” that there would “just be one woman in late night at a time,” per Deadline.
The Caroline Rhea Show
Rosie O’Donnell hand-picked Caroline Rhea of Sabrina, the Teenage Witch fame to take over her syndicated talk show slot in 2002. But The Caroline Rhea Show couldn’t match O’Donnell’s six-season run: It was nixed in 2003 after a solitary season.
The Chevy Chase Show
Fox axed SNL alum Chevy Chase’s late-night talk show in 1993 after a run of just six weeks, with network chair Lucie Salhany telling the Associated Press that the early episodes were “uncomfortable and embarrassing” to watch. But Chase told TIME in 2007 that he had pitched “an entirely different concept” to Fox. “What I wanted had a whole different feel to it, much darker and more improv. But we never got there,” he said.
The Dennis Miller Show
Speaking of SNL alums, Dennis Miller lost his syndicated late-night show in 1992, despite a stunt in which he had viewers call a 1-900 number to persuade Tribune Entertainment to renew the show. Miller later told the AP that more than 110,000 calls had been logged—and that the $40,000 to $50,000 raised in that stunt would be donated to the Pediatric AIDS Foundation.
Gabrielle
Gabrielle Carteris left Beverly Hills, 90210 in 1995 to host a syndicated talk show, but 20th Television yanked the show the following year after it averaged a Nielsen rating of 1.4, less than a quarter of The Oprah Winfrey Show’s audience, as The New York Times reported at the time.
Kris
Fox Television Stations SVP Frank Cicha didn’t mince his words about why Kardashian-Jenner “momager” Kris Jenner’s talk show never made it past its six-week test run. “I think she was pretty uninteresting,” Cicha told The Hollywood Reporter. “When the camera was on, she looked not just like a deer in the headlights, but like a deer that already got hit.”
The Magic Hour
NBA star Magic Johnson’s syndicated talk show didn’t even last three months, and he later attributed the 1998 show’s to booking issues. “Black stars think that if they’re not on Leno or Letterman, then they’re not making it,” he told Electronic Urban Report (per People). “Their managers and agents keep them off of the Black shows. There it is, that’s your major problem right there.”
The Megan Mullally Show
Appearances from her Will & Grace co-stars weren’t enough to save Megan Mullally’s syndicated talk show, which ended in 2007 nearly four months after it premiered. “It had never occurred to me that hosting a talk show was a job that you could actually have,” Mullally had previously told the AP. “It had seemed like a very far-fetched profession. Like being an astronaut.”
Nick Cannon
The Masked Singer host’s self-titled syndicated talk show won’t return for a second season, as production company Debmar-Mercury announced this month. Cannon reflected on the cancelation afterward, per CNN, saying, “It’s interesting. This is show business, and the biggest word is business.”
The Pat Sajak Show
The success of Wheel of Fortune has overshadowed the fact that host Pat Sajak once had a late-night talk show on CBS, which aired one season between 1989 and 1990. Sajak told the Los Angeles Times in 1998 that he wouldn’t leap at the chance to host another talk show. “I had a great time. But there are just so many of them now,” he added. “I joke that in 10 years, I’ve gone from one of the few people in America with their own talk show to one of the few people in America without his own talk show.”
The Tempestt Bledsoe Show
A few years after finishing her time on The Cosby Show, Tempestt Bledsoe got a syndicated talk show, which aired between 1995 and 1996. And unlike Sajak, she wouldn’t rule out hosting another one. “I think it’s a great genre when it works well,” she told CNN in 2012. “It’s a really great showcase for personalities and a wonderful way to really influence people and make a contribution depending on the kind of show you want to do.”
The Wanda Sykes Show
While Wanda Sykes was starring on The New Adventures of Old Christine, she was also hosting a late-night talk show, which Fox axed after one season in 2010. The demise of that show left Fox without an original late-night program for the first time since 1994.
