What are Gayle King and Charles Barkley doing on CNN?

Charles Barkley was angry about the ratings for his new weekly show on CNN with Gayle King — or, rather, he was angry at the company that tabulates the ratings.

“I want to tell my team, ‘Man, these Nielsen people are the biggest clowns in the world,’” Barkley said on his podcast last week, using the f-word twice to insult the company that measures television viewership using hardware in people’s homes.

The Nov. 29 debut of “King Charles” — billed as a “freewheeling” conversation about the week’s big stories — attracted 501,000 total viewers, according to Nielsen, compared with 1.62 million for MSNBC and nearly 2 million for Fox News in the same time slot.

The second episode did worse last Wednesday, averaging just 466,000 viewers, including 115,000 in the 25- to 54-year-old demographic prized by advertisers — down from 139,000 from the debut episode. (The show also airs on the streaming service CNN Max, which does not release viewership data.)

It’s a lackluster start for a prime-time show hosted by two heavy-hitters with built-in fan bases: King, once known mostly as Oprah Winfrey’s best friend, became a dominant and versatile TV presence as co-host of CBS’s weekday morning show, which doubled its viewership within five years of launching in 2012. Barkley, a basketball superstar of the ‘80s and ‘90s, fashioned a second career as a quick and hilarious sports commentator.

CNN noted that the debut of “King Charles” attracted a younger median audience than the competition and secured more viewers in the key demo than did MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell — a feat it was not able to replicate in week two.

“Anybody who knows anything about television knows that these things take time,” said Ryan Kadro, CNN’s senior vice president of content strategy, in an interview. “It’s a young show and we’re really excited about its potential.” The runway, though, is finite: “King Charles” is only slated to run until spring 2024, because the hosts have jobs at other networks.

The show is meant to be light, with the hosts sharing jokes and opinions while seated in bright-colored chairs. “I love the bubble-gum pink,” said rapper Fat Joe after a segment about whether prosecutors should use a performer’s lyrics in building a criminal case against them.

Kadro said the show’s producers are working to “unlock” the co-hosts’ dynamic, which he said is a genuinely affable one. The show can also delve into heavy news; King and Barkley interviewed Secretary of State Antony Blinken for the second episode, on Dec. 6.

A former longtime CNN producer, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to talk candidly, said the show seems muddled. “It’s not clear what this is in any way, shape, or form,” the person said. “Is it supposed to be a cultural show? Is it supposed to be a politics show?”

It’s supposed to be all of the above, according to the hosts. King told viewers on the debut episode that “some [of it] will be serious and some will be silly and some will be both, because frankly we think that’s sort of life.”

“We’re going to have fun,” Barkley added. “We’re going to give opinions. We’re not going to be opinionated.”

King also offered something of a tagline for the show: “We are not a show of record. We are a show of interest.”

The man who was supposed to help generate that interest was former CNN CEO Chris Licht, who worked with King at CBS and helped conceive “King Charles” as a show that would offer “culturally relevant programming and unique perspectives.” It was meant to be emblematic of his programming style, which prized watchable chitchat rather than straight-news reportage. While Licht was ousted in June, a month and a half after he announced the show, the network decided to move forward with it under new chief executive Mark Thompson.

Jon Klein, who ran CNN in the United States from 2004 to 2010, said that King and Barkley are “immensely talented in different ways,” adding that “Gayle is such a deft broadcaster that she could help steer things and play the point guard, so to speak, to Charles’ power forward.”

Klein also noted that the show presents a corporate synergy; Barkley is a star commentator on basketball for TNT, which, like CNN, is owned by Warner Bros. Discovery.

While “King Charles” comported with Licht’s aborted vision for the network, the show is a somewhat awkward fit for Thompson’s vision for CNN, which prioritizes hard news — rather than personalities — across digital, traditional television and other platforms.

Kadro demurred when asked whether the show could provide a template for future CNN programming, but said it’s part of a broader effort to bring new audiences, including more young people, to cable television. “It’s an approach to news that I don’t think you get in a lot of places on cable now,” he said.

Because the show will usually be pretaped, King and Barkley cannot easily pivot to breaking news. The digital publication Puck noted that the show debuted on Nov. 29 “just as tenuous hostage negotiations were cratering in the Middle East and war raged in Eastern Europe and [Henry] Kissinger obits were hitting the presses.”

The second episode of the show, however, was newsy, leading off with the pretaped interview of Blinken — whom King noted rarely does prime-time interviews — and then comedian Billy Crystal talking about the death of Norman Lear one day earlier.

Also that episode, Barkley offered a forward-looking message: “We hope you all like the show. And we hope like hell y’all got Nielsen boxes.”