Toronto Mayor Rob Ford attends a council meeting as councillors look to pass motions to limit his powers in Toronto on Monday Nov. 18, 2013.
Less than 24 hours after its debut on Monday night, Ford Nation is getting axed, the Globe and Mail reports. Conservative cable news channel Sun News has canceled its much-promoted talk show with Toronto Mayor Rob Ford and his brother, city councillor Doug Ford, despite record ratings for the network.
Sun News announced the show just last week. It was essentially the successor to a radio show co-hosted by the brothers. Though Ford Nation pulled in 155,000 viewers, it reportedly took five hours to record and another eight hours to edit thanks to Ford’s inexperience with TV. That made the show too expensive to continue to produce.
“It’s by far the most successful thing, from an audience perspective, the network has ever done,” said Kory Teneycke, the vice president of Sun News. “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.”
Nearly six months after a video surfaced in which Rob Ford was allegedly smoking crack cocaine, the Toronto mayor admitted to having done so in early November. Since then, the city council has systematically stripped him of most of his power, although he retains the title of mayor. Despite the scandal, Ford has repeatedly stated that he will not resign from office.
At least one marketer has already distanced itself from the show. The official Canadian Tire feed tweeted Tuesday, “We’ve learned that a manufacturer(s) using our logo ran an ad on Ford Nation last night. We did not place the ad or target the show.”