So it is not surprising that he might have felt slighted, underappreciated and ignored at MSNBC. In a sense, Olbermann talked himself into something. He left Jean Sage, his longtime agent, for a crew from I.C.M. and proceeded to make demands for a renegotiated contract and an extension that he had to know MSNBC would not meet. He also built his own gallows, cultivating and encouraging both Rachel Maddow and Lawrence O’Donnell to the point where they became viable hosts and made MSNBC think it could survive without him. (The ratings have been fine since he left.)

But mostly he may have underestimated how fed up MSNBC was with his antics. There were times when he threatened not to come to work because of something someone said at his own station or in the press. It made for some tense moments, with substitute hosts on standby and very senior people spending hours talking him off a ledge and into the Town Car that would take him to the studio. And when he wasn’t threatening not to show up, he was threatening to quit. Olbermann explained to me that both his parents fell ill and died in his later years at MSNBC, and he took time off to care for them. Because he wrote most of the show himself — he was essentially a five-day-a-week op-ed columnist who performed his work live every night — it was only natural he would need a break now and again.

Olbermann said that his previous employer had all sorts of motives for making him seem more difficult than he is, but admits there’s something in it. “I made those situations difficult, so I’m not even at the mea culpa stage on this stuff,” he said. “But I tend to kick up, not down. . . . When I know I’ve done something wrong, I bleed over it, and I try to make it up to the people who are involved.” In the end, though, the rifts became impossible to repair. “Night after night, there would be this huge struggle just to talk him into sitting in the chair,” said one longtime executive at NBC, who asked not to be named because of the nondisclosure agreement. “It was such a grind and so pointless. Once he sat down, everything was fine, great even, because he is so talented. But after eight years, people just decided, ‘Enough.’ ”

Current TV was founded on the premise that user-generated content was the next big thing. It was an innovative idea that faltered because people who watch television generally prefer to watch people who are good at being on television — people like Olbermann.

Gore and his co-founder, Joel Hyatt, who is the chief executive of Current, seem to believe that Olbermann’s fiery version of nonwimp liberalism will pull the channel into the middle of the conversation by veering to the left of everything. As business plans go, this is not completely far-fetched: twice in his career, Olbermann was brought into enterprises in search of an identity (ESPN and MSNBC) and hosted shows (“SportsCenter” and “Countdown”) around which big businesses were built.

Over lunch, Hyatt said he and Gore were well aware of Olbermann’s work history. “We accept that that is part of the package that you get with Keith,” he said. “It will be a roller coaster. He’s a provocateur. He provokes people into anger, to love, to action.”

Olbermann does have his defenders. Rick Kaplan, formerly president at MSNBC, a veteran of cable and broadcast news who now produces “This Week With Christiane Amanpour,” thinks his unmanageability is vastly overstated. “In the four years that I worked with him, we had a great relationship,” he said. And Gore believes that the lack of corporate ownership at Current means Olbermann’s allergy to the suits who run the place won’t be triggered.