Larry King Live to End This Fall

It’s official: Larry King Live will end this fall, the 76-year-old King announced via Twitter Tuesday night. In a statement on CNN.com, King was quoted saying that he started his broadcast 25 years ago, interviewing New York Governor Mario Cuomo, and that CNN “has graciously accepted” his announcement, “giving me more time for my wife and I to get to the kids’ Little League games.” King writes that he’ll stay “a part of the CNN family” by hosting specials, “but for now it’s time to hang up my nightly suspenders.” This year, as the Los Angeles Times reports, ratings for King’s show have suffered: According to Nielsen, 677,000 viewers tuned in during the second quarter of this year, a 37 percent falloff from the same period last year. Though the decline in ratings may be one problem, a CNN source told The Wrap that it is really King’s private life that led to the decision to end the show. (King and his wife Shawn filed for divorce in April following rumors that he had an affair with her sister, but have since reconciled.) “What brought this to a head was his messy personal life,” the source said. “And he’s old—it’s too much.” Joy Behar, CBS anchor Katie Couric, Ryan Seacrest, and British TV star Piers Morgan have been rumored as successors to King. As for CNN, Larry King Live’s erosion hasn’t been its only problem: Last month, Campbell Brown quit her 8 p.m. show because, as she herself said, it was yielding terrible ratings. The network announced last week that former New York Governor Eliot Spitzer and Kathleen Parker will host a Crossfire-like roundtable show in the 8 p.m. slot, but, according to the L.A. Times, the new show “disappointed many CNN employees and drew external criticism that the network was abandoning its news mission.”