If you happen to be one of those people who watch MSNBC in the evenings (for some reason) you might have noticed something missing over the past couple of months. That’s because Rachel Maddow, typically the network’s most popular and highly rated host, took a lengthy sabbatical to work on “other projects.” But she recently returned to her regular job… sort of. Rather than appearing every evening from Monday through Friday, Maddow is only hosting her show on Monday nights. The other four nights of the week, the show is hosted by Alex Wagner. It has now become clear that MSNBC’s audience is responding with a collective yawn. The ratings in that time slot when Wagner is at the helm have plummeted. She’s drawing literally a million fewer viewers than Maddow on average and they didn’t have very many millions to begin with. (Conservative Brief)

Popular MSNBC host Rachel Maddow recently returned from her nearly two-month hiatus to reveal that she’s going to be taking more time off and only be on air once a week. Since then, Maddow has returned to the network on a new schedule. Instead of going on air every weeknight, she’s airing only one night per week to make time for other projects — and she just gave a big update on her new plans.

Maddow only hosts her own show on Mondays and Alex Wagner was named the permanent host of the 9 PM ET show on Tuesday through Friday nights. The “Maddow experiment” apparently has “executives worried” as the show’s ratings have plummeted.

“‘Alex Wagner Tonight’ has averaged 1.6 million viewers through two weeks compared to 2.6 million for ‘The Rachel Maddow Show’ when it aired on Mondays during that two-week span, as Wagner shed over 30% of Maddow’s audience.

Wagner isn’t just hemorrhaging viewers in overall viewer numbers. Her pull in the target 25-54 age group fell off of a cliff in a similar fashion. She’s drawing an average of 163,000 as compared to Maddow’s average of 241,000.

So what is this big project that is keeping Rachel Maddow so busy that she can’t show up to do her job more than one day a week? As it turns out, she’s working on a podcast about World War 2. I’ll be the first to admit that I’m fascinated by the history of that era. But with everything going on in the world today, that doesn’t exactly sound like a riveting ratings giant, does it?

So as Conservative Brief pointed out, we can summarize the current situation at MSNBC in the evening fairly easily. Rachel Maddow is reportedly still being paid $30 million per year. She is showing up for her job once per week.The person who is hosting the slot for the other four weekdays is bleeding viewers like someone who has suffered a chainsaw accident, which is driving MSNBC’s ad revenue down even further.

It’s not my job to make human resources decisions for MSNBC, but does this sound like a good business model? Or is the bench so shallow at the network that they would rather lose money and keep her name on the lineup, even if she rarely appears? Their evening lineup was already in trouble before this development. Fox News has continued to crush the competition, finishing 2022 with nearly triple the ratings of MSNBC across the board. How much longer can they continue in this fashion? Even CNN was forced to get rid of a bunch of people and shake things up in an effort to remain profitable. Of course, if MSNBC doesn’t actually need to make any money, I suppose they can keep going for as long as they like. Or at least as long as Rachel Maddow is willing to at least show up for a couple of hours per week.