Megyn Kelly’s Alex Jones interview was more uneventful than its actual content previously suggested. Deadline reports that per early ratings reports, 3.5 million people watched the episode of Sunday Night with Megyn Kelly, making it the lowest viewership her new Sunday show has received in its short run.
Deadline adds:
NBC noted Kelly’s radioactive interview, which had been a top media story for days, outdelivered CBS’s 60 Minutes rerun [which it was up against] in the [news] demo. This is known in some quarters as damning with faint praise.
Ice. Cold.
CNN notes that in the 18-to-49-year-old demo, both Kelly’s show and 60 Minutes were beat by a rerun of America’s Funniest Home Videos.
Meanwhile, Variety noted that the show’s broadcast seemed light on advertisers:
NBC’s broadcast of a much-scrutinized episode of Sunday Night with Megyn Kelly, which led with a segment about controversial conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, appeared to run with fewer than the usual amount of commercials that typically accompany a first-run program. Three of the ad breaks led with public-service announcements, which usually run in less desirable ad inventory. Some of the advertisers that sponsored Sunday’s program had their commercials appear more than once during the hour. And many of the show’s commercial breaks appeared to contain a number of promos for NBC programs that is greater than the norm.
According to an unnamed Variety source, J.P. Morgan Chase, whose CMO Kristin Lemkau denounced the Jones interview on Twitter last week, “requested that its local and digital ads not be placed adjacent to any broadcast or stream of the segment.”
And it couldn’t have happened to a nicer group of people.