Things don’t look good for Dennis Miller, whose gabfest on CNBC continues to post some pretty disappointing ratings. He was down to just 132,000 households in May, which is awful.

Personally, I love his show on CNBC. People knocked Miller when he did Monday Night Football for sounding too intellignet. While his schtick didn’t work well for football, I think the stuff he does on CNBC is excellent. He’s smart, funny, and willing to bring on guests you wouldn’t find anywhere else. It’s got a definite Hollywood does politics feel to it.

The main problem, as I see it, is that he’s on CNBC, for crying out loud. CNBC is primarily a daytime viewing channel. It’s watched by people in the financial industries. That’s the brand. It’s not primarily a news or political channel, except when news or politics affects the market. Consequently, that audience disappears when the market closes because CNBC stops airing financial programming, for the most part.

The prime-time schedule on CNBC is a graveyard, because the normal audience has been trained to tune out. No other viewers will tune in because they perceive CNBC as being a financial channel, so why even surf?

That leaves Dennis Miller to waste away between Tim Russert and Louis Rukeyser. No wonder no one is watching. Why would they put Miller on CNBC? I’d much prefer to see him get bumped over to MSNBC and take Deborah Norville’s slot. I don’t know what her ratings are, but I know that I’ve never seen her program. They have a pretty solid line-up on MSNBC right now, with Matthews at 7pm ET beating CNN, followed by Olberman who is doing well right now also. To me, Norville is too CNN to work on CNBC. She’s too much about reporting and not enough punditry, especially for prime-time. I say swap her for Miller, and exile her on CNBC.