Steve Harvey’s new mononymous talk show is reportedly in trouble. A report that ratings for “Steve” have not been stellar due to viewers’ continued distaste over his January meeting with Donald Trump.
“This is the moment his brand took a hit,” an insider claimed to the Daily Mail Monday, Oct. 30. “He had been through a few scandals before — the divorces, the Miss Universe Pageant and the Asian joke gone bad — but he had never faced the wrath of his core audience before, middle-aged African Americans. And unfortunately for Steve, he was too arrogant to realize the weight of his mistake and never made amends to his loyal followers for it.”
“The research and the ratings line up, people who were once fans of Steve’s just aren’t anymore. The whole Trump ordeal was a wake-up call for many of them and they’ve decided they just aren’t interested in him any longer.”
During the premiere week of “Steve,” the relaunched and relocated show averaged 1.3 million viewers, 13 percent less than the 1.5 million from Chicago-based “Steve Harvey,” according to Broadcasting & Cable.
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“Steve could have continued to survive with the first version of his show with these ratings because the show was produced out of Chicago and was less expensive to produce,” the Daily Mail source explained. “But doing a daily talk show out of Los Angeles costs big dollars and with his current ratings, there’s no way in hell [production company] WME-IMG can continue to bleed money like this into a sinking ship.”
Ahead of the launch of the new show, Harvey expressed regret over the Trump meeting and told The Hollywood Reporter that his wife advised him against the meetup.
“It was so vicious that it really threw me,” Harvey said in September after initially defending his choice on his radio program. “I was being called names that I’ve never been called: Uncle Tom. A coon. A sellout. Because I went to see this man?!”
