Chris Wallace debuts new show, ratings already nosediving

Who would have predicted that Chris Wallace’s new CNN show would perform so poorly? It’s worse than you think!  Wallace spent over two decades on Fox before he joined CNN. Obviously, he is still struggling to find his footing in the new surroundings. The figures show that Wallace managed to pull in a little over 400K viewers in the debut of his brand new show named Who’s Talking to Chris Wallace.

According to Nielsen ratings, Wallace’s new program attracted 401K viewers, down 29% from the norm. The veteran drew 44,000 viewers in the 25-to-54 demographic, a drop of 64% from the average program.

Wallace is a veteran and one of the most well-known Fox faces. He hosted Fox News Sunday for almost 20 years straight before he made the decision to move to CNN. Wallace moderated the first presidential debate between Trump and Joe Biden in 2020 as well as the final presidential debate between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump in 2016.

Wallace was originally intended to be one of the faces of CNN+, but the project was abandoned in April. Instead of airing four days a week on the now-defunct CNN+, Who’s Talking is aired once a week on CNN and HBO Max.

Fox’s show Sunday Night in America with Trey Gowdy attracted 1.3 million viewers. Wallace apparently quit the network partly because he didn’t agree with how other network celebrities covered Trump’s attempts to annul the results of the 2020 election, culminating in the riot on January 6 in the Capitol, according to National Review.

During his final Fox News Sunday appearance, Wallace openly said that he was eager to “try something new, to go beyond politics to all the things I’m interested in,” but he was careful to point out that at Fox, he had “been free to report to the best of my ability, to cover the stories I think are important, to hold our country’s leaders to account.”