"CNBC's hyperactive 'Mad Money' host, Jim Cramer, takes his act before a live, in-studio audience for the first time in a show airing next Wednesday," writes the New York Post's Starr Report. "The show will also introduce a new segment, 'Am I Nuts?' — offering people the opportunity to talk to 'Dr.' Cramer about the health of their stock picks (he'll don a lab coat for the segment)."
http://www.nypost.com/entertainment/25908.htm
Am I nuts? Am I having a flashback? Where have I seen "Am I Nuts?" before? Why, from an NBC offshoot based in Ft. Lee NJ, that's where. So it wasn't a flashback, it was a trip in the way-back machine. Two decades ago, CNBC was the hottest of the cablers. In the go-go 80s, it was the go-to channel. Business types had the channel on in their offices, not CNN, so that they could watch their stocks go up. And in the early 90s, when Roger Ailes took over, CNBC bulled its way into prime time, with its "All Stars of Talk" approach--showcasing, at various times, everyone from John McLaughlin to Chris Matthews to Geraldo Rivera to Cal Thomas. Some of them were hits, some of them were flops, but the idea of using the evening hours for politics and discussion was born--right there in Ft. Lee NJ. Indeed, Ailes wanted to expand the talk idea further, into a whole new cable channel called, "America's Talking." The channel got going in 1992, and it could have been Fox News without Fox--led by Chris Matthews, instead. But the suits at NBC had a better idea: a cool convergence between TV and the computer, called "MSNBC." That channel, set in the first Starbucks to grace Ft. Lee, changed the world, right? Even After Ailes left CNBC to start Fox in 1995, the channel still had plenty of momentum--Geraldo dominated the OJ Simpson coverage, for example.
But in the past five years, the channel has drifted. The idea of intense business coverage is still great, but the really hard core business/day trader types have drifted off to the Net--TV is too slow for them. Indeed, the CNBC website doesn't even exist anymore; if you click on it, you go to "MSN Money Central." http://moneycentral.msn.com/investor/home.asp -- how the mighty have fallen. Meanwhile, the other news channels--including now even CNN Headline News--picked up on the political-chat idea, leaving CNBC with nothing. After Geraldo left to go to Fox, CNBC degenerated; shows led by Dennis Miller, John McEnroe, and Donny Deutsch were/are pathetic bombs.
Now comes Jim Cramer. Although ratings are miniscule--he gets about 150,000 viewers at 6pm and a test-pattern-ish 75,000 viewers in the 9pm repeat--he does get buzz, helped by his greed-is-good, love-me-or-hate-me persona. And maybe he gets help from another source. The New York Post http://www.nypost.com/entertainment/25908.htm reports this morning that Cramer/NBC is thinking about adding a segment to "Mad Money" entitled, "Am I Nuts?" That was another segment-idea from the Ailes playbook, a decade-old by now. Ailes must've left a filing cabinet of old show-memos behind for the CNBC. Of course, if Cramer is smart, he will study closely. In TV, there's no shame in ripping off ideas. The only shame is low ratings.
