Given Keith Olbermann’s abrupt removal at Current and his typically temperate response — “Current’s statement are untrue and will be proved so in the legal actions I will be filing against them presently” — it seems as if his next stop will be a puppet show shot from a basement somewhere. He’ll never work in this town, or any other, again, right?
Wrong. Many of his past employers will testify to his unmanageability and unpleasantness, but the fact of the matter is that somewhere, sometime, after some kind of cooling-off period, Mr. Olbermann will be coming to a television near you.
That has less to do with the greater fool theory, which suggests that there will always be someone naïve enough to think that they can accomplish what others have not — that is, make Mr. Olbermann behave like a professional when he is not on the air. (Remember that former Vice President Al Gore and Joel Hyatt — two of the principals at Current — blew through many stop signs to get to Mr. Olbermann. They made very hopeful statements when the deal was cut, which were followed by very frustrated noises thereafter.)
No, the mistake that the executives at Current made was to think that by giving Mr. Olbermann a stake in the enterprise and a title of chief news officer, he would forgo the drama that has characterized his stints at CNN, Fox, ESPN and MSNBC. After all, you can’t rail against the Man when you are the Man.
But Mr. Olbermann is talent, and a big baby to boot — any reporter who has covered him could tell you all about that — so the idea that he would default to the good of the many over the needs of the one is just not in his nature. The title was used as leverage, nothing more, when Mr. Olbermann became dissatisfied and starting communicating with his employers through lawyer letters months ago. Mr. Olbermann is a ferocious fan of team sports, but that’s not how he plays the game.
He is the equivalent of a supremely talented left-handed pitcher with a strong arm — and some obvious control issues — that can give whatever team hires him a lot of quality innings. On the bench and off the field? He will complain about his coach, his teammates, the quality of the field and the stadium lights.
He did not solve the miserable ratings math at Current — as my colleague Brian Stelter pointed out, in his 40 weeks on Current TV, he had an average of 177,000 viewers at 8 p.m., a shadow of his former incarnation at MSNBC where he drew a million-plus people a night.
That’s not all his fault. Anybody who has watched the Keith-less version of Current could understand why they wanted him so badly in the first place. Beset by technical problems that had Mr. Olbermann broadcasting his show with a black backdrop in a kind of hostage/protest motif, Current was not and is not ready for prime time.
The channel’s election coverage has been tendentious and painful to watch, and the depth of its bench can be measured by the fact that it is bringing aboard former Gov. Eliot L. Spitzer of New York to replace him. Current will have to do some renovating to make room for all of the baggage he brings with him, from both his scandal-ridden exit from the governorship and his ratings-challenged turn at CNN.
Which brings us back to Mr. Olbermann. Anchoring a show on television looks easy. Buy a nice suit, get a nice haircut and read the words on the prompter in the right order with some semblance of conviction. But it’s not. As cable stations proliferate, the desperate search for people who can credibly show up every night — or not, as Mr. Olbermann was frequently on strike at Current — and hold an audience’s attention will only become more acute. Mr. Olbermann has a terrible relationship with actual humans, but a very good relationship with the camera.
When I was working on a magazine piece about Mr. Olbermann, we went to a Yankees game and he explained the camera voodoo:
“Mechanically, if you look very carefully in a camera, it has a series of reflections and dimensions to it, you can look past that,” he said. He holds up his hands in the shape of a box. “Here’s the camera, here’s the front of the camera, here’s the lens of the camera, but if you look deeply enough, you can see the inner rings at the far end of the lens and maybe a glimmer of light very deep in the distance. You can always see something that might be an inch or two below the surface. Whenever I can, I try to focus there, not on the prompter or the front of the lens.”
Maybe that’s overexplaining something that is actually innate, but history has shown that even though Mr. Olbermann’s employers do not like him, the camera, and the people at the other end, like him just fine. IAs Jonathan Wald, the producer for Piers Morgan put it, somewhat more industrially, in a tweet on Saturday night, “Stars star and producers produce.”
And that means he will find work. He is a free agent in a business that is remarkably akin to pro sports, full of divas who are great at hitting the curve or making impossible catches, but baffled by the rest of life. Think Terrell (“I love me some me”) Owens. Or Randy Moss. Or Babe Ruth. Or Ted Williams. Jerks, louts and narcissists, all tolerated because within the four corners of the diamond, the football field and, yes, the television studio, they can do what others cannot.
So some executives will eventually plug their noses and write a check and a contract that they hope will contain Mr. Olbermann’s less attractive aspects. He and they will say that this time it will be different, and it may be. Just don’t expect him to be part of the team.
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