After months of anticipation, former Fox News host Megyn Kelly recently returned to primetime with her new employer, NBC, and her return -- at least according to television critics -- has been anything but triumphant. While her return-to-primetime interview with Russian leader Vladimir Putin drew a respectable audience, it also drew harsh criticism from some viewers, including Hollywood filmmaker Oliver Stone -- forcing NBC News president Noah Oppenheim to rush to her defense.
"So long as we're offering each other professional feedback, please let him know I don't think he's made a decent movie since the early '90s," Oppenheimer retorted after Stone voiced his opinion.
'Sunday Night with Megyn Kelly' beaten in ratings by just about everyone
Unfortunately for Megyn Kelly, the jabs keep on coming. Her interview with InfoWars founder Alex Jones, in spite of much network hype and online ballyhoo, fell painfully flat with audiences; Hollywood Reporter crunched the numbers and found that Kelly's interview with the controversial king of conspiracy attracted a smaller audience (3.53 million) than a rerun of "60 Minutes" on CBS (5.31 million).
Even worse, fewer people tuned in to watch "Sunday Night with Megyn Kelly" than a rerun of "America's Funniest Home Videos" (3.7 million) on ABC. Adding insult to injury, Fox -- Kelly's former employer -- waltzed away with the top honors in the highly-coveted 18-49 demographic with its coverage of the U.S.
Open, drawing 6.09 million viewers.
Critics humiliate Megyn Kelly
Television critics across the political spectrum have weighed in on Kelly's interview with Alex Jones, and have apparently reached the same conclusion -- Megyn Kelly just isn't very good at what she does.
“Megyn Kelly is getting crushed in the big leagues and it’s beginning to show,” wrote Don Kaplan of New York Daily News, adding that while Kelly gave the appearance of asking tough questions, she failed to generate any news or move the story forward, resulting in an interview that was nothing more than a "shallow profile" of Jones.
Will Oremus of Slate concurred, writing that the NBC host failed to draw anything "particularly interesting" out of her subject. "The segment came off less as a hard-hitting work of journalism than an apologia for its own existence,” Oremus concluded.
Lorraine Ali of the Los Angeles Times opined that the entire interview was a "bald-faced ratings grab."
"[Kelly] felt it was important to ‘shine a light’ on Jones.
But come Sunday, that light was a dim bulb at best," Ali stated.
Hank Stuever of the Washington Post wrote that the former queen of Fox News "has many miles to go before she finds her footing as a big-time newsmagazine anchor," and Jeff Guo of Vox held nothing back, flat-out calling the latest installment of "Sunday Night with Megyn Kelly" "a failure of journalism."
Even the critics who enjoyed the Alex Jones interview found fault with the host. Jack Shafer of Politico, who gave the show a B+, panned Kelly as being "needlessly defensive" and said that if the host's goal had been to "take Jones down," she fell short.
Kelly's NBC debut, which featured a sit-down chat with Vladimir Putin, drew the most viewers out of the three episodes of "Sunday Night" that have aired thus far, attracting 6.1 million viewers -- two and a half million more than the number of viewers who tuned in to her interview with the InfoWars founder and noted Sandy Hook skeptic.
