Larry King says he isn’t all too broken up about Piers Morgan’s failure at CNN.
Morgan, who replaced King in 2011 in CNN’s 9 p.m. ET time slot, was taken off the air by the network in March due to low ratings. Appearing on Howard Stern’s radio show Wednesday, King admitted when pressed that he had “mixed emotions” by Morgan’s misfortune.
“The best definition of mixed emotions: Your mother-in-law goes over the cliff in your new car,” King joked. “The mix was I thought they made a mistake in the Piers hire. I thought it was a mistake, one, to hire a Britisher in prime time and, two, I thought that he made himself too much part of the show.”
“Too much ‘I,'” King further explained. “I always said, if you turn on an interview show on television, 95 percent of the time you should see the guest. If 95 percent of the time you see the host, there’s something wrong with that.”
“That may be the way it works today or maybe things have changed,” King added. “So it wasn’t my kind of show. He was nice to me. I went on his show two or three times. He wasn’t unfriendly to me. It just wasn’t my type of show.”
During his tenure at CNN, Morgan became known for angry and often incoherent diatribes against gun rights.
King also said he thought CNN should have hired American Idol host Ryan Seacrest to replace him in 2011 and that he has not approached his long-time employer about returning, despite previously stating that he would be open to the idea.
“Colin Powell told me, ‘When the train gets to the last stop, get off,'” King said.