Larry King Returns: New show kicks off on Hulu Tuesday

You can suspend those suspenders for only a while.

Seventy-eight-year-old TV interview legend Larry King will make his return from a two-year retirement Tuesday with a new half-hour interview show debuting in the early evening on Hulu and Hulu Plus.

His first guest: Family Guy and Ted creative mastermind Seth MacFarlane.

New installments of Larry King Now will debut around the same early East Coast evening time each evening Monday thru Thursday.

Also read: World’s richest man launches online video network … with Larry King!

The show will also run on Ora TV, the channel backing the interview show and funded by Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim Helu. King’s signing with Ora TV was widely reported on in March.

“‘Larry King Now’ will take advantage of the flexibility and freedom available with Hulu, while staying true to Larry’s unique brand of insightful and entertaining talk and discussion,” said Jon Housman, CEO of Ora TV, in a statement.

King’s zeitgeist-tracking interview show Larry King Live ran on CNN from 1985 to 2010, helping to build Ted Turner’s small Atlanta channel into a cable news power house.

King retired in 2010 with his show’s ratings having slipped significantly in recent years — which is probably not an indictment on what he still has left in his tank, given CNN’s overall ratings collapse.

As King explained to Hulu’s blog, the itch to return to the interviewer’s chair became overwhelming in May 2011, when the news of Osama bin Laden’s killing broke.

“Had I been working, I would’ve been running in that night to do interviews,” he said. “I realized then, ‘God, I miss this.’ I want to be in the hunt.”

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