I'm Thinking That This Is How He Gets Fired

Stranger Than Fiction?

If you regularly tune in to Countdown with Keith Olbermann on MSNBC, you may remember that Olbermann was mysteriously absent from the show for three days at the end of April. But Olbermann didn't just "have the night off," as David Shuster, his fill-in, said on the air three evenings in a row. According to a source inside MSNBC, it was a bizarre temper tantrum on Olbermann's part that led him to storm off the set in protest. Even stranger: The drama was all Ben Affleck's fault.

Olbermann was not scheduled to take a vacation at the end of April. But he ended up missing three shows: Friday, April 17; Monday; April 20, and Tuesday, April 21. It's what happened on April 16, though, that prompted Olbermann to exit MSNBC's studios in such a rage.

According to a source at the network, Olbermann was livid when he learned that Rachel Maddow had booked Ben Affleck as a guest on her show. Olbermann, it turns out, had been interested in having Affleck on his show, too, and when he heard that Maddow's producers had secured the actor instead, he demanded that the interview be switched from Maddow's nine o'clock broadcast to his own an hour earlier. Maddow and her staff have been known to politely give in to Olbermann's whims in the past—it was Olbermann, after all, who helped bring Maddow to the network. This time, however, they didn't budge. ... Olbermann took the matter to senior management at MSNBC and NBC Universal and asked that they step in and "correct" the situation. That didn't happen, though, and Affleck went on Maddow's show as scheduled on Thursday, April 16. And Olbermann's three-day protest commenced the next day.

Olbermann's temper—and tendency to hold grudges—is nothing new. When Dan Abrams was the host of the 9pm broadcast, Olbermann famously refused to "toss," or introduce, Abrams on the air, as he now does with Maddow. At Olbermann's insistence, five seconds of footage of the exterior of 30 Rock appeared between the two programs instead. What did Abrams do to earn Olbermann's enmity? Nothing, really, although one popular rumor floating around MSNBC at the time was that they'd both asked out the same woman a number of years ago and she'd accepted Abrams's invite instead of Olbermann's.