Sun News cancels Doug and Rob Ford’s TV show, Ford Nation, after only one broadcast

Sun News cancels Doug and Rob Ford’s TV show, Ford Nation, after only one broadcast

(Image: Sun News/screen capture)

Well, that didn’t last long. Less than a day after its first episode, Ford Nation—the current affairs show starting Doug and Rob Ford—has been yanked from the air by Sun News.

The Globe and Mail is reporting that Ford Nation was a huge ratings success, pulling in about 155,000 viewers—that counts as a success for Sun News, which reaches only 40 per cent of Canadian homes—but is being binned anyhow because of “the Fords’ relative inexperience with the medium.” Apparently, yesterday’s episode took whopping five hours to shoot and another eight hours to edit. That’s a huge amount of resources for the fledgling Sun News Network. The economics just couldn’t support keeping the show on the air.

“It’s by far the most successful thing, from an audience perspective, the network has ever done,” Kory Teneycke, the vice president of Sun News, told the Globe. But Ford Nation will not be produced again. “For the Ford brothers, we welcome them back on our network, as we do all newsmakers, to be part of our programming as a guest on another show.”

Those interested in seeing yesterday’s episode of the show can check it out here. Rest assured that not all five hours of production time is shown. The video runs exactly 16:29 (the aired version of the show clocked in at about 40 minutes).