Jen Psaki’s New MSNBC Show Already Lost Half of Rachel Maddow’s Audience.

Jen Psaki debuted a new 9 p.m. primetime show on MSNBC last Tuesday, following Rachel Maddow’s return to her cushy Mondays-only schedule.

“The Briefing with Jen Psaki” averaged 1.1 million viewers in its first week on-air. For context, Maddow averaged 1.98 million viewers during the first quarter of 2025 and 2.1 million in March.

The sudden 50% drop is consistent with how Alex Wagner fared in the time slot since 2022, when Maddow first scaled back her role from daily to weekly. MSNBC canceled Wagner’s program earlier this year.

While it’s just a week, the early returns are concerning. The debut episode of Psaki’s show drew 139,000 viewers in the key demographic of people aged 25 to 54, but dropped to just 65,000 the day after.

But concern has almost nothing to do with Psaki. She’s not the problem. MSNBC’s brand is the problem.

For years, the difference in viewership between Maddow and anyone else at MSNBC has been around 1 million viewers. Such a dropoff from one specific host is unheard of in television today.

Say what you will about Maddow’s politics and propaganda, but no one is more valuable to their respective television network than she is.

Fox News has bigger stars, but has several of them – Jesse Watters, Sean Hannity, Greg Gutfeld, Will Cain and Laura Ingraham. While Stephen A. Smith is important to ESPN, its business model is dependent on live games. As for CNN, when you don’t have any stars, no one is all that valuable.

At MSNBC, it’s Rachel Maddow and everyone else. Hence, she convinced MSNBC to pay her $25 million a year to work just once a week. She’s worth it.

But that doesn’t solve MSNBC’s dilemma. You can’t run a 24/7 television network with only one highly rated hour a week. And that dilemma raises questions about the future of the entire channel, especially as parent company NBCUniversal plans to spin off its cable assets, such as MSNBC.

There’s also a question about the demand for a cable network like MSNBC in this convoluted media climate.

As broadcast networks like ABC, NBC, and CBS shift further to the left, there is less of a need for MSNBC or CNN. Those networks are no longer all that unique if shows like “The View,” “GMA,” “Today,” and even “60 Minutes” push the same talking points.

Moreover, the agenda is exhausting. Unless you suffer from a severe case of TDS, like Jimmy Kimmel, how much unjust racial hysteria and Trump-is-a-Nazi talk can you take?

MSNBC rarely offers anything original or thought-provoking. It’s the same content, buzzwords, and talking points day after day, after day.

MTV realized in 2015 that showing music videos for eight hours a day was no longer a feasible business. Running an entire network built around liberal political talk in 2025 might not be, either.

As much as we’d like to blame the little red liar, it’s not her fault. Jen Psaki is no different from the other commentators already struggling on MSNBC.