Rosie's Variety Show Flops!

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Looks like people weren’t interested in watching Rosie O'Donnell last night, as Rosie Live wound up being a major network flop! The program, which last night on Thanksgiving, drew in more bad reviews than viewers. Only 5 million tuned in. And you can probably bet that at least half of those people were only half-conscious in a turkey-induced coma. Here are some of the reviews. John Mayer may want to re-think his plans to host his own variety show next year, because it seems the whole country is in agreement that we don’t need another one.

LA Times: Rosie, Rosie, what on earth were you thinking? Were you thinking camp? Were you thinking this will be big and brassy and so-over-the-top even the dancing cupcakes will be irresistible? For those of us who are, and remain, Rosie fans, who think “The View” will never quite recover from her departure, who think her desire to resurrect the variety show was, and is, a great idea, disappointment does not even begin to describe it.

The Live Feed: Rosie O’Donnell gave NBC a real turkey.The network’s attempt to revive the primetime variety show failed to draw an audience Wednesday night, tying for the evening’s lowest-rated program. NBC had high hopes for the special and planned to expand the program into a series should viewers re-embrace the decades-old variety format. Other networks, too, were watching closely since several are developing variety shows of their own.

“There’s a notion that the climate is right for the genre to make a comeback,” emailed one executive at a rival network. “I guess we now know what not to do, thanks to Rosie.”

TV Guide: If the TV variety format weren’t already dead, the ghastly ego trip of NBC’s Thanksgiving-eve turkey Rosie Live would surely have killed it. Like the pie Alec Baldwin predictably pushed into Conan O’Brien’s face that fell to the floor without sticking, the entire hour landed with a sickening, sad, ill-conceived thud. It felt like an off night at America’s Got Talent, bookended by wobbly appearances from Liza Minnelli and Gloria Estefan, each forced to perform with the caterwauling host, Rosie O’Donnell.