Kudlow & Cramer was a CNBC

CNBC

CNBC is a satellite and cable television business news channel in the U.S., owned and operated by NBCUniversal. The network and its international spinoffs cover business headlines and provide live coverage of financial markets. The combined reach of CNBC and its siblings is 390 million viewers...

 American business and politics television program

Television program

A television program , also called television show, is a segment of content which is intended to be broadcast on television. It may be a one-time production or part of a periodically recurring series...

 with conservative Lawrence Kudlow

Lawrence Kudlow

Lawrence "Larry" Kudlow is an American economist, television personality, and newspaper columnist. He is the host of CNBC's The Kudlow Report. As a syndicated columnist, his articles appear in numerous U.S. newspapers and web sites, including his own blog, Kudlow's Money Politic$.-Early...

 and liberal Jim Cramer. The program initially replaced Hardball with Chris Matthews

Hardball with Chris Matthews

Hardball with Chris Matthews is a talk show on MSNBC, broadcast weekdays at 5 and 7 PM hosted by Chris Matthews. It originally aired on now-defunct America's Talking and later CNBC. The current title was derived from a book Matthews wrote in 1988, Hardball: How Politics Is Played Told by One Who...

, which moved to sister channel MSNBC

MSNBC

MSNBC is a cable news channel based in the United States available in the US, Germany , South Africa, the Middle East and Canada...

, for the 8 p.m. Eastern Time

North American Eastern Time Zone

The Eastern Time Zone of the United States and Canada is a time zone that falls mostly along the east coast of North America. Its UTC time offset is −5 hrs during standard time and −4 hrs during daylight saving time...

 slot, but later moved to the 5 p.m. slot.

The show replaced the short-lived CNBC show America Now, which began with a rotating set of hosts and ended with Kudlow and Cramer as the two co-hosts. CNBC then created a show specifically for the two; the ordering of the name was picked via a coin toss at the end of the last America Now episode.

Kudlow & Cramer had high TV ratings in comparison to other CNBC shows, after CNBC's TV ratings went down because of the negativity of the dot-com bubble

Dot-com bubble

The dot-com bubble was a speculative bubble covering roughly 1995–2000 during which stock markets in industrialized nations saw their equity value rise rapidly from growth in the more...

 burst and the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the U.S.

The program last aired on February 11, 2005, before it was split into Kudlow & Company

Kudlow & Company

The Kudlow Report is a news television program about business and politics hosted by Lawrence Kudlow, that airs on the CNBC television channel at 7pm ET. The show began airing on January 26, 2009. It is a successor to Kudlow & Company, which aired from 2005 until October 2008...

, which first aired February 14, and Mad Money

Mad Money

Mad Money is an American finance television program hosted by Jim Cramer that began airing on CNBC on March 14, 2005. Its main focus is investment and speculation, particularly in publicly traded stocks...

, which replaced Dylan Ratigan

Dylan Ratigan

Dylan Jason Ratigan is an American television host primarily covering financial markets, the global economy, and politics. He is host of The Dylan Ratigan Show which airs weekday afternoons on MSNBC. He is also a frequent contributor on The Huffington Post.- Early life :Ratigan was born in the...

's Bullseye on March 14 of the same year. A first rift had occurred when Kudlow called Cramer 'sweet potato bull macho' on the air on October 17, 2002.