Category: News

The Taliban returned to power in Afghanistan on Sunday as the U.S.-led coalition began withdrawing forces after 20 years of fighting. The war resulted in the deaths of at least 200,000 people on both sides of the conflict.

It’s estimated that the war could end up costing U.S. taxpayers up to $6.5 trillion by 2050.

The loss of Afghanistan is heartbreaking for those who served in the war and could be devastating for the women and girls of the country who may be forced to live under strict Sharia law.

Thousands of Afghan civilians have swarmed the Kabul airport in a last-ditch effort to flee the country. Reports from the airport say that seven people have died in the chaos.

At least seven people have reportedly been killed at Kabul airport as hundreds of people desperately tried to flee… https://t.co/QTMABzYhjJ

— Al Jazeera English (@AJEnglish)
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As countless people at the airport are attempting to flee while they can, one man who could have left to safety has stayed behind to help. Sir Laurie Bristow, UK’s ambassador to Afghanistan, has remained at the airport in Kabul to personally sign visas to help UK and Afghan nationals flee to Britain.

A spokesperson for the Foreign and Commonwealth Development Office (FCDO) told MailOnline: “We have reduced our diplomatic presence in response to the situation on the ground.”

“However our Ambassador remains in Kabul and UK Government staff continue to work to provide assistance to British nationals and to our Afghan staff,” the statement continued. “We are doing all we can to enable remaining British nationals, who want to leave Afghanistan, to do so.”

Genuinely moved by news that our ambassador to Afghanistan, Sir Laurie Bristow, has stayed behind at Kabul airport… https://t.co/xMsVsLY6Ro

— Shane Greer (@shanegreer)
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Bristow was due to be airlifted out of the country over the weekend but instead decided to stay behind to help, risking his life in the process.

It’s believed that around 4,000 British nationals and eligible Afghans are in need of evacuation from the country.

“Sir Laurie Bristow, who’s the ambassador out there on the ground, has a very tough job and has a very great team with him I’m sure,” former UK Ambassador to Afghanistan, Sir Nicholas Kay, told SkyNews.

“They will be working absolutely flat out with very little sleep, very little food. I imagine as they are processing, particularly the applications from Afghans who worked for us or have been closely associated with us over the years, who are now in desperate fear for their lives and desperate to leave the country.”

Former UK Ambassador to Afghanistan, Sir Nicholas Kay, says Sir Laurie Bristow and the team on the ground at Kabul… https://t.co/az5m1yfOIB

— Sky News (@SkyNews)
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Bristow’s sacrifice comes at a time when many fear they will be left behind.

“It’s a really deep part of regret for me,” Defence secretary Ben Wallace said. “Look, some people won’t get back. Some people won’t get back and we will have to do our best in third countries to process those people,” he added.

The ambassador’s sacrifice is even more commendable given the fact he was only posted to Kabul in June of this year. Previously, he was the UK ambassador to the Russian Federation and the COP26 Regional Ambassador to the Middle East, North Africa, Eastern Europe, Central Asia.

With fall quickly approaching, the bourbon whiskey release schedule is starting to heat up. Included in these new drops is the second edition of Pursuit United, the blended bourbon from the hosts and founders of the Bourbon Pursuit podcast. It’s an expression I tried just today and one I have a whole lot of thoughts about.

Short and sweet version: this whiskey delivers. We’ll get into the details below, but it’s really a testament to the palates and know-how of Kenny Coleman and Ryan Cecil who co-founded Bourbon Pursuit six years ago and started working on this whiskey in 2018. What started off as the “official” podcast of Kentucky bourbon is now a straight-up spirits company, filling over 1,000 barrels of juice a year.

This bottle is going to be easier to find than the last edition as the Pursuit United team continues to expand. This release was four times bigger than the first rollout, comprising 40 barrels. From the sound of things, that’s the tip of the iceberg — a very good thing for all the aficionados out there.

Let’s dive into the bottle.

Cecil + Coleman Pursuit United

ABV: 54%

Average Price: $65

The Whiskey:

As mentioned above, this is a vatted from 40 total barrels from three different states. While the team at Pursuit United doesn’t release the Tennessee distillery name, we know the juices from Kentucky and New York are from Bardstown Bourbon Company and Finger Lakes Distilling, respectively. This final release of 2021 from Pursuit United put 9,342 bottles on the market in six states (Colorado, Georgia, Illinois, Tennessee, Texas, and Kentucky) and is available online via Seelbachs.com.

Tasting Notes:

The nose opens with a rush of cedar next to Christmas spices steeped in sweet red wine. That sweetness tends to lean into fresh honey with a touch of caramel and maybe a little dark chocolate on the end. The taste holds onto the honeyed sweetness with burnt sugars, light cedar, chocolate tobacco leaves, and a hint of orange oils. That orange is what builds and powers the finish to its silken end, concluding with an orange-choco vibe and a very soft landing.

The Bottle:

The rounded bottle is an eye-catching shape. It’s sort of a cross between a stubby and port bottle. The label is underplayed and, thankfully, not cluttered with too much information. That said, it sort of looks like a United Airlines gift for frequent fliers and doesn’t hit the “bar centerpiece” levels of cool.

The Bottom Line:

This is a great workhorse whiskey. I dig sipping it on a rock or in a highball but it also works wonders in a cocktail. I think at this price point, that’s exactly the point. Buy it and enjoy it however you love enjoying your bourbon. It’s certainly not too pricey to mix into a refined highball.

Ranking:

90/100 — This is a solid bourbon that has no false notes. It’s clear, easy-drinking, and the perfect everyday dram. Is it the elixir of the whiskey gods? Well, no. But it’s not supposed to be. It’s great whiskey at a great price.

Sometimes, that’s plenty.

Although it’s been a while since Ludacris last dropped new music — he’s a busy man, after all, what with learning to cook, learning to fly airplanes(!), and starring in the Fast & Furious sequels over the past year or so — he’s found a clever backdoor back into the rap game, combining his love of the culinary arts with his tongue-twisting gift of gab for “Butter ATL,” a slippery new single partially inspired by his Atlanta contemporary Gunna.

Not only does Luda prove adept at adopting the legato flow of his hometown’s current crop of hip-hop stars, but he also gets a little side action as his mention of Jif peanut butter in one of his eye-popping punchlines ties nicely into Jif’s new ad campaign. In the commercial, Luda struggles with finding a new flow to catch the song’s hypnotic beat before getting caught with a mouthful of peanut butter on his next take. His newly muddled attack perks up Gunna in the background, who notes, “That flow crazy.” Luda challenges followers on TikTok to duplicate his feat, inviting them to spit their own verses with a mouthful of Jif.

The ad arrives in midst of a rap resurgence for the Atlanta veteran, who has popped back up with feature verses on Conway The Machine’s “Scatter Brain” with JID and Justin Bieber’s “Peaches” remix and is set to perform at the Lovers & Friends festival in 2022.

Check out “Butter ATL” and Luda’s new Jif commercial above.

Every now and then, Disclosure goes ahead and just releases a song a day over the course of five days. They did it in 2019, and they did it again last year. Now, they’re going to do it this week, too, and they started today with “In My Arms.”

At the end of the week, all five tracks will be available as an EP titled Never Enough. The songs that will follow “In My Arms” are “Seduction,” “Another Level,” “It’s Happening,” and “Never Enough.”

The group’s Guy Lawrence says of the new batch of tracks:

“The spark that ignited the creation of this body of work came from a place of wanting to revitalise a very fractured & uncertain dance music scene & club culture that has changed so much all over the world for obvious reasons in the last 18 months. While piecing together initial ideas during the spring of 2021, hope began to glimmer on the horizon for producers & DJ’s that we may soon be able to gather together again, dancing & listening to music as one, participating in something larger than ourselves. So we asked each other… what would we want to hear in those moments? What does that first moment back in a club sound like? What does walking into Shangri-la, Glasto at 2am feel like again? What does a headline show at Reading look like after all the difficulties 2020 brought on our whole industry? With all these questions unanswered & with the possibility that any of these events may actually be allowed to take place, we set to work on creating something that might fit one of those magical moments some of us have been longing to participate in again.”

Check out “In My Arms” above.

Representative Liz Cheney is facing some heat after she called out both Donald Trump and President Joe Biden for contributing to the chaos happening in Afghanistan right now. Currently, the country is in crisis with the Taliban invading the capital city of Kabul after the collapse of the Afghan government and the evacuation of President Ashraf Ghani. Despite attempts by former government officials to negotiate a peaceful surrender, Taliban forces invaded Kabul and other major civilian hubs, causing panic amongst people trying to flee the country. It’s a fairly grim situation and one that happened faster than the Biden administration anticipated when it announced that the U.S. would be pulling all troops out of the country by the end of August.

And despite Biden’s decision earning him criticism from both sides of the political aisle, Cheney’s condemnation of how his administration handled the conflict in the Middle East feels, well, tone-deaf to many. That’s because it was Cheney’s own father, along with former President George Bush, who launched the initial invasion into Afghanistan following the Sept. 11th terrorist attacks. The goal then was to defeat the Taliban and apprehend al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden, but 20 years and billions of dollars later, the U.S. government only achieved one of those goals. Still, Cheney was happy to place the blame squarely on Trump and Biden’s shoulders in a series of tweets that called the removal of U.S. troops a “calamity.”

Naturally, the inability of a career politician to reflect on her family’s culpability in a decades-long war did not escape the notice of many.

Last week, Mike Lindell’s 72-hour “Cyber Symposium” boasted that it would provide definitive proof that the 2020 presidential election was “stolen” from Donald Trump. Claiming to have over a terabyte of raw data that would back up his relentless conspiracy theory, the MyPillow CEO hired cyber security expert Josh Merritt to parse through a hard drive, which would surely end in Lindell being vindicated. It did not.

In an interview with The Washington Times, Merritt revealed that Lindell’s data contained no proof that the election was hacked. It was an embarrassing moment for Lindell who had already been humiliated by Steve Bannon and fled the stage at his own event after a judge ordered that Dominion’s billion dollar lawsuit against Lindell could go forward. (Lindell is being sued for falsely accusing the software company of election fraud.)

As the Cyber Symposium came to a close, Lindell’s anger over Merritt not finding election fraud resulted in the MyPillow CEO flipping out on a CNN reporter while screaming “forget about the evidence!” It was a bad moment for Lindell’s case, which took an even worse and weirder turn on Monday.

While appearing on his FrankSpeech website, Lindell aired a recorded conversation from Merritt, which… basically suggested that Lindell had a hand in in fraud. While calling the recording a “confession” that would implicate Merritt, all it did was show that the cyber security expert wasn’t willing to go along with any of Lindell’s schemes. Via Raw Story:

Lindell later aired audio on his FrankSpeech website of a person who he said was Merritt.

“Technically what they did violates any NDA because they’re asking me to cover up and lie about fraud,” the person on the tape says. “And what happened was fraud.”

Lindell then declared that he hired Merritt to investigate, and then he attempted to discredit Merritt by saying that he’d “preplanned” to discredit all of Lindell’s data. He also accused Merritt of what he called “criminal” acts.

In another odd move, Lindell kept playing the tape where Merritt also reveals that the MyPillow CEO lied about being attacked at his hotel and getting hacked on the first day. Merritt called both a “cover story,” and yet Lindell thought this would make himself look… good? It was all very strange, and yet entirely in character for the die-hard Trump supporter.

(Via Raw Story)

WNBA star A’ja Wilson never dreamed of playing professional ball.

In fact, having a parent who put in 10 seasons in overseas leagues meant that a young Wilson was pointedly disinterested in stepping onto the court. She wanted to craft her own legacy, one that didn’t start (or stop) at the free-throw line. But in high school, Wilson began to realize that if she could perform well enough during a game, her shortcomings in the classroom might go unnoticed.

“Basketball started to make a lot more sense to me than school ever did,” Wilson wrote for The Players Tribune. “By the time I was a senior, I had been able to accomplish so much in basketball that no one was thinking about whether or not I was having trouble reading.”

Off the court, Wilson was battling dyslexia — a learning disability that can affect reading comprehension. She dreaded moments in class when she’d be called upon to read entire passages from a book. She spent hours cramming for tests only to struggle to make sense of the questions facing her on the page. Even ordering off a fast-food menu could trip her up.

Her teachers thought she was lazy. Worse, Wilson started to think she might be too stupid to ever excel at school.

“It’s funny — how do you prove to somebody that you’re trying?” Wilson said in the same Players Tribune article. “In most things, the more work you put in the better your end results, but that just wasn’t happening with my reading. No matter how many hours I spent in front of a book, sometimes I’d just end up taking away nothing.”

When she was finally diagnosed, there was relief, and then shame. For an elite athlete who wanted to be seen as independent and capable, the idea of admitting to any kind of weakness felt foreign … diminishing, in a way. But once again, basketball gave her an answer.

As a forward who had led her high school team to a national championship, and a McDonald’s All-American player, Wilson was bound to be a hot prospect for college recruitment. She chose to plant roots close to home, committing to play for Dawn Staley and the South Carolina Gamecocks. This time, Wilson was open about her dyslexia, informing her teachers ahead of time so that she could make adjustments during their classes to learn at her own speed.

But Staley, who found ways to push Wilson as a player — benching her for most of her freshman year until she felt she was ready to step up to the paint — had a trick for encouraging Wilson’s progress off the court too. She started tasking Wilson with reading a passage from scripture in the locker room before each game.

Wilson would leave the University of South Carolina as the No. 1 WNBA draft pick, bringing her on-court reputation to the Las Vegas Aces, but her time at USC also taught her the value of being transparent when it came to her personal struggles. In 2018, while still in school, Wilson detailed her journey with dyslexia in that Players Tribune essay. The response to sharing her story was so overwhelming, she decided to launch a nonprofit, The A’ja Wilson Foundation, to empower children with dyslexia to reach their full potential.

“I knew as soon as I became a professional athlete, I wanted to change the game in a way that could benefit myself but also [other] people,” Wilson said at the time in an interview with Pop Sugar.

Her foundation provides resources and grant money to help students find alternative learning paths that work with their dyslexia, a disability that 20 percent of children reportedly struggle with. She’s raising money for after-school programs to give kids the one-on-one time with educators and mentors that she found so beneficial when she was first diagnosed. And, she’s changing the game at a systemic level, working to give teachers the resources needed so that they can spot students who may have a learning impairment early on to get them the help they need.

In July of last year, Wilson’s foundation was recognized by the league for its work in the community — both in Las Vegas where she plays professionally and in South Carolina where her roots hold firm. She received the WNBA Cares Community Assist Award for her work with local high school girls basketball teams, organizations like Opportunity Village which works with adults who have disabilities, and the camps, workshops, and after-school programs her own nonprofit hosted in South Carolina.

More recently, Wilson’s performance at the 2020 Tokyo Olympics, earned her a gold medal — another accolade to add to her overcrowded shelf of accomplishments. But for a player so invested in building a legacy away from the paint, it’s easy to guess which award might mean more.

“Having people recognize you on the court is great,” Wilson told WNBA.com when accepting the Cares award. “Having someone recognize you in the community if you take time to go out and talk to them, it’s a huge deal. Growing up, I had plenty of role models, but I never got a chance to touch someone like that. To be that person to step in for young kids today, the future of our game, but also our world and be there as a role model for them is huge.”

(Yes, There Will Be Spoilers)

Even as television has started to eclipse movies in the cultural conversation, we’ve become accustomed to disappointing endings. Even with beloved shows slightly disappointing finales (or at least polarizing ones), are practically the norm — Seinfeld, The Sopranos, Lost, Game of Thrones — the list goes on. These days if you can end a popular series without the fans sending you death threats or petitioning to remake the final season, you’ve succeeded.

The ending doesn’t necessarily make or break a show. Just as with an ex or a dead relative, we can choose to remember the better days if it serves us. Endings are hard, that’s just the nature of them. As Brian DePalma said, “Endings are tough. If you can get two or three great endings to your movies in a career, it’s a miracle.”

Last night’s The White Lotus finale on HBO Max gave us arguably the ultimate counter-example: a series that maybe didn’t become a classic until the ending. As Brian Cox’s fictionalized screenwriting guru Robert McKee lectures in Adaptation, “Wow them with the ending, and you’ve got yourself a hit.” Is this now true for television too?

All season, Mike White’s series (he wrote and directed all six episodes) bent genres. It was largely a farce-ish comedy of manners set at a fictional resort in Hawaii (it was filmed at the Four Seasons in Maui). Yet The White Lotus was always heavy on the drama, whether it was the long-suffering hotel manager, Armond (Murray Bartlett) repeatedly falling off the wagon and getting caught with his face in an underling’s ass (HBO’s second depiction of comedic analingus after Desie and Marni on Girls, if my math serves) or Paula (Brittany O’Grady) convincing her island boyfriend, Kai (Kekoa Kekumano) to rob her friend’s rich parents, and the ensuing fight scene.

In a lot of ways, The Sopranos is The White Lotus‘s closest analogue. A big part of the appeal of both is that every character is an asshole in his or her own special way, a kaleidoscope of assholes (in White Lotus‘s case both literal and metaphorical). White Lotus was heavy on contemporary politics, especially amongst the Mossbachers, and neither the smarmy Sheryl Sandberg-esque mom played by Connie Britton, her college lib know-it-all daughter played by Sydney Sweeney, or the rest of the family (clueless dad played by Steve Zahn, weirdo incel son played by Fred Hechinger, a tokenized friend of the fam Paula) ever came out seeming like the “winner” in any conversation. That’s a rare quality when political satires often start with the answer rather than the question and work backward to hector the dumbest viewer until they submit.

The White Lotus finale even gave us its first death scene, which, Sopranos-like, it treated with equal elements of comedy, tragedy, slapstick, and farce. Not since Pauly Walnuts walked through poison oak trying to kill Mikey Palmice or Tony beat Ralphie to death over a horse have we seen a death as perfectly staged and executed as Armond expiring from a stab wound to the chest in a hotel bathtub after spitefully shitting in a guest’s suitcase.

Yet The Sopranos was a “mob show,” at least in format if not entirely in practice. The Sopranos, Game of Thrones, Eastbound and Down, Six Feet Under, Girls, even Succession and Mare of Easttown — usually with HBO shows we at least have a general idea of what kind of show we’re getting. With all those shows, we knew what “the hook” would be, so to speak.

White Lotus left things ambiguous almost to the end, refusing to be less than the sum of its disparate parts. It seemed to be a comedy, but it opened with a dead body. It actually wasn’t until last night’s finale that I even remembered the opening — the terminal yuppie, Shane Patton (played by Jake Lacy) watching a box marked “HUMAN REMAINS” being loaded into the cargo compartment of a Hawaiian Airlines plane. About the best thing any story can do is make you forget the elevator pitch, and in just six episodes Mike White had made me forget that White Lotus was ostensibly about a dead body. How long did it take Breaking Bad to outgrow being about a science teacher with cancer?

With the finale, White Lotus added suspense to its genre stew, adding foreshadowing (the pineapple knife) and dropping a few Agatha Christie-worthy red herrings along the way. Jon Gries, playing the new lover of Jennifer Coolidge’s messy space cadet, Tanya (Uncle Rico and Stifler’s Mom, how about that), had his third or fourth coughing fit, and even warned her about his unnamed “health issues,” saying “I could drop dead at any time,” just to put a finer point on it.

Would the body be Greg (Gries), one of the Mossbachers (the robbery, a canoeing or SCUBA accident or shark attack), Kai the gregarious safe robber, or a domestic incident involving the Pattons? White kept his options open right up until the very end when it turned out to be the pineapple knife after all. But only after an unforgettable sequence involving an open suitcase and multiple visible turds. What a gift! (Minor quibble: how are you going to show the turds falling with no visible pee? No one can poop without peeing, though I’d love to see that parlor trick).

White Lotus yet again shattered the myth of “likeability,” a forceful rebuke to every exec and studio note giver who has ever complained about there being “no one to root for.” None of these characters especially seemed like people you’d want to succeed or even necessarily to hang out with in real life (we call that “pulling a reverse Ted Lasso“). But it didn’t matter. Because that never matters, really. We don’t need “heroes” for a story to be compelling, just characters, fully fleshed out and recognizable in both their triumphs and their failings.

And in the end, White gave the happy ending (a sort of bittersweet and ironic one) to its most initially throwaway character — Quinn, the 16-year-old dirtbag incel, such an afterthought to everyone around him that his own family forces him to sleep outside. Fred Hechinger so perfectly embodied “creepy brother” that he was basically a sight gag.

Even after Armond bled out and Rachel locked herself back into what would surely be unfulfilling marriage (defying easy catharsis to the point that I was actually shouting at the TV), Quinn was the one who got to paddle out into the sunset. It was both a triumph and a tragedy, an ending and a beginning, the perfect bittersweet note for a show to go out on. “Good” or “bad,” Mike White wrote every character as if they mattered. He proved that it’s possible to do that even in a comedy, or a whodunnit; that it only makes the funny parts funnier and the sad parts sadder.

Vince Mancini is on Twitter. You can access his archive of reviews here.

Hailing from St. Louis, Missouri, today’s guest on UPROXX Sessions is 21-year-old rapper-singer, Ryan Trey. With his album A 64 East Saga on the way, Ryan drops by the Uproxx Studios office to give a soulful performance of the project single “It’s About A Girl.” Over a muddy, swirling synth and hardcore kick drum, Ryan salutes a girl he describes as “top two, but you’re not two,” praising her for “changin’ keys on the regular.”

Dropping his debut album EIGHT24 in 2018, Ryan has continued building a following of loyal supporters, which include fellow Midwesterners Bryson Tiller and LeBron James. He’s also set to open for Jack Harlow for Sprite’s Live From The Label concert series this Wednesday, which could be the start of a star run that could soon put him in a similar position to the one Harlow currently occupies.

Watch Ryan Trey’s live performance of “It’s About A Girl” for UPROXX Sessions above.

UPROXX Sessions is Uproxx’s performance show featuring the hottest up-and-coming acts you should keep an eye on. Featuring creative direction from LA promotion collective, Ham On Everything, and taking place on our “bathroom” set designed and painted by Julian Gross, UPROXX Sessions is a showcase of some of our favorite performers, who just might soon be yours, too.

LeVar Burton may have had all the internet buzz when it came to potentially taking over as Jeopardy! host, but those tweets certainly didn’t translate into eyeballs on the syndicated trivia game show.

While the last week has been full of discussion and controversy over who Jeopardy! picked as its next hosts, a common name frustrated fans brought up when mentioning alternatives is former Reading Rainbow host LeVar Burton. Burton fans were outraged he did not get asked to host the show over Mike Richards and Mayim Bialik, who will host the syndicated run and ABC prime time events, respectively.

A rumor that Burton was offered a production deal was also squashed much to his supporters’ dismay. Picking the successor to Alex Trebek has turned into a messy process involving behind-the-scenes politics, on-screen performance and other metrics of evaluation. One thing missing from that discourse, however, was how Burton actually did in the Jeopardy! ratings. But as Newsweek uncovered on Monday it was probably for the best that wasn’t a factor for Burton, because his week guest hosting the show in July was the worst reported stretch of the guest host periods this year:

But figures obtained by Newsweek from Nielsen Media Research show that the TV personality actually landed at the bottom of the guest-hosting pile, with a paltry 4.4 audience share during his single week at the helm of the syndicated quiz show.

Before that, Savannah Guthrie and Dr. Sanjay Gupta held the record with a tied low of 4.7 during one of their two weeks as presenter—a figure also shared by Good Morning America’s Robin Roberts during her week of hosting.

Newsweek pointed out that Ken Jennings had the highest ratings of the year, taking over for the late Trebek first and posting a high of 6.1 during his six weeks of hosting. Richards, the eventual pick to replace Trebek, had a 5.9 rating during his fortnight behind the podium. Those stood as the highs for the current season, which ended on Friday with broadcaster Joe Buck hosting the show.

Looking at these ratings as a 1:1 comparison is, of course, a bit unfair. But for one reason or another the show saw a steady decline in ratings as the guest hosting string went along. Jennings also hosted immediately after Trebek’s death, and there was considerable buzz over how he would do. Both his and Richards’ hosting duties were also in winter, not late in the summer when people may be less likely to sit down and watch syndicated television with the sun still out.

It’s also worth noting that Burton got just a single week to guest host, while most got a full fortnight’s worth of shows filmed over two days. That may have a lot to do with his actual performance on the show, which he himself admitted wasn’t nearly as good as he’d hoped. All of those factors, whether fair or not, conspired to keep him out in the cold when it came to who the show actually picked to succeed Trebek.

If you’re a fan of Burton and want him to host Jeopardy!, though, none of the numbers we’re seeing (or his own performance review) will deter the frustration of seeing Richards and Bialik taking over full-time. And it’s worth noting that we don’t have ratings data for David Faber or Buck just yet, so Burton may not end the season as the worst-rated guest host. But what is clear is despite Burton being the talk of Twitter in the aftermath of the hiring decision, his presence actually hosting the show did little to move the needle in the ratings.

[via Newsweek]