CNN’s newly resurrected “Crossfire,” featuring Newt Gingrich, Stephanie Cutter, S.E. Cupp and Van Jones, improved on the channel’s time slot performance but still lagged behind its cable news competition, TheWrap.com reports.

“Crossfire” attracted 581,000 total viewers in the 6:30 time slot for its Monday night premiere, the story reports. “Compared to the previous four Mondays in the 6:30 p.m. time slot for CNN, ‘Crossfire’ improved 44 percent in total viewers and 21 percent in the demo,” the report notes.

The piece adds: “While the highly promoted and anticipated ‘Crossfire’ performed favorably compared to CNN’s previous performance in the time slot, in the grand scheme it still failed to match the competition by nearly all measures. In total viewers, Fox News’ first-place ‘Special Report’ quadrupled ‘Crossfire,’ drawing 2.402 million.”

In the key news demo of viewers 25-54, "Special Report" was No. 1 in the time slot with 384,000 viewers, followed by "Crossfire" with 171,000. MSNBC’s "Politics Nation" was third in the demo with 116,000 — but "Politics Nation" eclipsed the CNN show for second in total viewers with 617,000, according to the report.