MSNBC’s The Ed Show has had a rough year.  

On March 13th, Ed Schultz announced that his show was moving to weekends; his time slot would be given to Chris Hayes. Ed abruptly left the air the next day after his show. Then, for several weeks, there was no news at all. Many of us wondered if Ed was off the air for good, with nobody wanting to say so.  Finally, nearly 2 months later, Ed returned to the air on May 11 to begin his weekend run.  He was given the 5pm slot, a time traditionally filled by the “Mr. Hyde” portion of MSNBC’s split personality (the news shows playing the role of Dr. Jekyll).

It seemed Ed was destined to remain on the weekends, but once again MSNBC spun the wheel, and Ed returned to the weekdays, this time at 5pm, with his first show on August 26.  With the proviso that it’s only been a few weeks in the new slot, and that the labor day weekend happened right in the middle of his return so far, let’s take a look at how Ed’s been doing.

I think the most instructive chart is this from the beginning of the year:

Trust me, you want to click this to see the large version…

We can see is that, right up until the announcement of his move to weekends, Ed was averaging about 22,000 mentions per week, or around 4,400 mentions per hour of show time. Then, Twitter went radio silent while Ed was off the air.  When Ed returned to the weekends, he averaged around 11,000 mentions per week, or around 5,400 mentions per hour of show time.  After 8 weeks in limbo, Ed’s audience still wanted to talk to him — they just had 2/5ths of the time to do so. 

Ed just switched back to weekday television on August 26th, and his mentions have risen back up to 21,000 mentions per week — virtually unchanged from where he left off in March. (For comparison purposes, All in, which is in Ed’s old slot, has garnered about 9% more mentions than Ed, but has a better time slot and two repeats in the overnight hours.)

What I find amazing is that Ed Schultz can have his show essentially cancelled for 8 weeks, revived in a limited format in a time slot everyone thought was horrible, return to a weaker time slot on weekdays, lose two repeats in the overnight hours in the process, and still come out just as strong.  It’s a testament to the man, his audience, and to his team which works social media as good as anyone in broadcast news. The Ed Show doesn’t need to get to work: they never quit.