CNN now confirms The Hollywood Reporter's scoop yesterday about Anderson Cooper trying to create his own daytime show for Warner Bros., the corporate sister of CNN.
As THR puts it, "The as-yet-untitled project will not have a hard-news focus." In other words, it will like most of what's on daytime TV--Oprah-ish at best. This is no shock to Cooper; his roots, after all, are in male-modeling and fluff journalism. More recently, he has taken time from his CNN gig to guest-host with Kelly Ripa, where, Gawker asserted, he basically outed himself.
So is there room for the more and more flamboyant La Anderson on daytime TV? Sure there is!
But it will be complex and difficult to manage both the primetime show and the daytime show, as THR's James Hibberd also reports:
The talk show deal was complex as it was coordinated between Warner Bros., Cooper and Cooper's employers at CNN -- who have an exclusive contract with the newsman. As part of the deal, Cooper renewed his agreement with the cable news network for a multi-year contract. The deal calls for Cooper to continue hosting "360."
But The Cable Gamer wonders: In raising the issue of the difficulty of juggling two shows at once, from the get-go, are the masters at CNN--think new chief Ken Jautz, backstopped by big boss Jeff Bewkes--laying a predicate for Cooper to leave CNN? That is, in the end, will Cooper have to choose just one of those shows? And could Jautz & Co. be tilting him toward "forsaking" the CNN show in favor of the daytime show for WB?
Sure they could, because ratings for "AC 360" are terrible. But Cooper is a popular figure within CNN--Jon Klein fell in love with him, that's for sure--and more to the point, he's popular with the Manhattan chattering classes, whose esteem means so much to CNNers. So even if CNN wishes to push him out of primetime, the network needs to do it in the most graceful way possible. Jautz, being new on the job, can't afford to break too much china.
And there's nothing less china-breaking than giving AC his own new show--somewhere else. We've all heard of a popular but ineffective employee being kicked upstairs. Well, in this case, he would be kicked over to another network.
And the beauty of this plan is that Cooper might be so eager to get the new gig--closer to his heart, anyway--that he will never suspect that he had been manipulated off one gig and on to another. He will have a fabulous time on his new venture, and that's what matters to him.
