And so it ends, not with a bang but a Tweet: Larry King, a fixture at CNN since God Almighty was a pup, has announced he’s ending his show in the fall. According to Variety:
Here’s what he said at the start of Tuesday night’s show:
Before I start the show tonight, I want to share some personal news with you. 25 years ago, I sat across this table from New York Governor Mario Cuomo for the first broadcast of “Larry King Live.”
Now, decades later, I talked to the guys here at CNN and I told them I would like to end “Larry King Live,” the nightly show, this fall and CNN has graciously accepted, giving me more time for my wife and I to get to the kids’ little league games.
I’ll still be a part of the CNN family, hosting several Larry King specials on major national and international subjects.
I’m incredibly proud that we recently made the Guinness Book of World Records for having the longest running show with the same host in the same time slot. With this chapter closing I’m looking forward to the future and what my next chapter will bring, but for now it’s time to hang up my nightly suspenders.
Over at Mediaite, they’ve got a nice wrapup of King’s announcement:
Larry King announced today, via his blog and Twitter page, that he would be ending his long-running iconic CNN show in the fall.
He will stay “part of the CNN family,” but now CNN will have a major prime time facelift in the wake of Campbell Brown leaving and Eliot Spitzer and Kathleen Parker coming in.
The news comes on the heels of King’s lowest-rated quarter ever. One of the names thrown around recently as a possible replacement has been reality show judge and British talk host Piers Morgan – a possibility CNN did not deny recently.
It’s easy to make fun of the raspy-voice, suspendered, oft-married King, who was recently sued for divorce by his seventh wife (or eighth, depending upon who’s counting: he married one woman twice) after rumors of an affair between King and his sister-in-law surfaced, although the couple recently called off hostilities. But there’s no doubt about his place in broadcasting, from his first national exposure as the Miami-based host of the overnight “Open Phone America” show on the Mutual Network (a must for late-night travelers and insomniacs) to his CNN show, which began in 1985, to his long-running gig at CNN.
King was generally a sympathetic interrogator, tossing out various softballs to quotidian celebrities but there was something about his dogged determination to get through his list of questions no matter what the answers that endeared him to a wide audience — and gave him access to just about everybody of importance. For a time, he also wrote an easily parodied three-dot column of off-the-top-of-his-head riffs for USA Today, which reflected his lifelong interest in sports and politics.
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A heart-attack survivor, King created the Larry King Cardiac Foundation, and wrote two books about living with heart disease. Cardiac patients everywhere salute him.
A professional obit wouldn’t be an obit without an interjection from the most famous graduate of Cornell Cow College, somehow muscling his way into the proceedings:
Larry King is a lovely, generous man who tried, for eight years, to convince his bosses to hire me to be his 8 PM lead-in at CNN.
Somehow, we don’t think Keith Olbermann is any threat to King’s Guinness Book of World Records longevity throne. So ave atque vale, Mr. King — long may you reign.
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