The only surprise is that it's taken this long: Twentieth Television's syndicated Geraldo at Large has been canceled at last.
Has anyone seen the show? You've probably seen the promos, in which the mustachioed Geraldo Rivera struts and spits out scary, heavy-handed lines about sickos, child molesters, degenerates, rapists and perverts like all of a sudden it's the Eighties again.
We'd gotten the scoop that the show was going away a little prematurely...
...back in August, with word that the series would be pulled by September.
But the show hung in until its staff got word today that production will shut down midmonth, and the show will disappear at the end of January. Geraldo heads back to weekends at the Fox News Channel, where he'd been stranded in the fall of 2005, when his boss Roger Ailes expanded his power to the Fox TV stations and, as his first move, killed the newly-revived A Current Affair (which had competed with, and in some cases beaten Fox News on major stories) and replaced it within weeks with a cobbled-together Geraldo show manned by Fox News staffers.
Sadly, this is a third consecutive strike for television stalwart Arthel Neville, who was brought on board to bolster At Large after stepping into Affair when her previous showcase, Good Day Live, was canceled.
Geraldo's demise opens a slot for the Warner magazine series based on TMZ, the tabloid celebutard and crime-driven website fronted by flamboyant personality Harvey Levin, which got much mileage out of breaking the Mel Gibson anti-Semitism story, but whose bread and butter is sending out kids with cameras to harass celebrities, and again may find itself being too hard-edged for television.