Current TV was co-founded by a former Democratic vice president, but it took Keith Olbermann to give the cable channel its liberal identity.


As he did at MSNBC before it, Mr. Olbermann established himself as Current TV’s star anchor — more than quadrupling the channel’s prime-time average — in addition to emboldening the network to recast itself in his own political image, furthering the trend of point-of-view television news that the Fox News Channel is credited with starting in the 1990s.


And as was the case at MSNBC, Mr. Olbermann will not be around to enjoy the fruit of his labors. After months of conflicts with his bosses, he was fired on Friday. Now Al Gore and Current’s other executives are bracing for a possible lawsuit from Mr. Olbermann, who disputes the channel’s assertions that he did not sufficiently show up for work or promote the channel.


But they are also busy trying to add more programs like his. On Friday night they swapped out his 8 p.m. program, “Countdown,” with a similar one, “Viewpoint,” with Eliot Spitzer, the former New York governor.


That change confirmed what Mr. Gore’s business partner Joel Hyatt said in an interview last month: “We won’t shy away from identifying our progressive point of view.” Last week, Current added six hours of progressive talk from 6 a.m. to noon, in the form of radio simulcasts. Now it is contemplating what shows to add in the afternoons and on the weekends, and trying to sell itself as a purer form of progressive TV than MSNBC.


The channel, which still has low ratings, faces a long slog, however. Already, there is open speculation that cable and satellite distributors could soon drop Current TV from their lineups. (The channel says it has long-term contracts in place.) MSNBC, meanwhile, has barely missed a beat since Mr. Olbermann’s departure and has become better known for having progressive-oriented shows.


A dozen people in the television business were interviewed for this article, but nearly all insisted on anonymity either for legal reasons or for fear of retaliation by Mr. Olbermann or their employers.


Many of them testified to the raw television talent of Mr. Olbermann. But because he gave the channels confidence to hire other hosts with liberal views similar to his, his hasty departures from the channels may not matter all that much, they said. What matters is that the channels exist at all.


Now, liberal journalists and pundits who were inspired by Mr. Olbermann’s invectives against the Iraq war and the Bush administration five years ago have multiple channels to appear on and potentially be paid by — a marketplace, in effect, for liberal talent on television.


When Current hired Mr. Olbermann in early 2011, it was a coup, a “transformational” moment, as the president of Current, David Bohrman, described it later. It was also something of a desperate move. The channel was started in 2005 as a user-generated, Internet-inspired experiment; later, it tried to be a home for documentaries. It lacked a coherent brand or political point of view (despite Mr. Gore’s presence, Current had no overtly liberal programming) or an appreciable audience. Mr. Hyatt was convinced that Mr. Olbermann would bring both with him.


Mr. Olbermann did bring a point of view — Current quickly added like-minded liberal shows at 7 and 9 p.m. — but the scrounging for viewers continues to this day. Although he raised Current’s prime-time viewership from less than 25,000 a night to well over 100,000 a night, the audience for Current isn’t much bigger than one-tenth that of MSNBC’s. And MSNBC’s audience is only about half the size of Fox’s.


The ratings suggest either that progressive talk needs more time to take root — Fox, after all, has had the conservatives Bill O’Reilly and Sean Hannity on its schedule for 16 years — or that there isn’t as big an audience for it as its backers hope.