Megyn Kelly is a talented, experienced television anchor. She is also an arrestingly glamorous presence on air. And coming off a year of highly personal confrontations with Donald Trump, she is certainly a well-known name to most Americans.
What she is not, however, is Oprah.
For reasons perhaps only understood by the management of NBC News, the network seems intent on trying to turn Kelly, whose chief claim to fame was her frequently sharp and steely questioning of mostly political figures on her old Fox News prime time show, into a Winfrey-esque empathetic emblem of empowerment.
Evidence: In the heavy-rotation promos NBC has broadcast for Kelly’s new show over the past months, the promise has been that viewers will see a kinder, gentler version of Megyn Kelly, one looking to do no less than bring together an “incredibly divided” nation. “My hope is that the show can be a unifying force,” Kelly says in one especially gauzy promotion, a show “with courage, that can at times be provocative,” a show that is “also fun and uplifting and empowering and can make people feel like: fists in the air at the end of it.”
Did I mention Oprah?
NBC’s plan for Kelly is to change the usual group-schmooze format of the four-hour-long daily “Today” show franchise–which Kelly will be joining with her 9 AM show, starting Monday morning–into the old-fashioned daytime show format: solo host talking to a live audience, mostly about family, work and “lifestyle” issues, and interviewing celebrities. That format, usually tried in syndication, has not worked in many recent tries, from Anderson Cooper to Katie Couric.
For that and several other reasons, Kelly is running head on into a din of doubting voices as she launches her rebranded career on NBC. Perhaps the most significant of the other reasons: her Sunday evening interview show—with newsmakers and celebrities–was a conspicuous flop this past summer. The ratings for “Sunday Night With Megyn Kelly” were weak and the reviews were brutal.
But Kelly is also drawing skeptical comments because in style (elegant, toney) and affect (coolly intelligent, unflappable) she seems a less than ideal match, at least going in, with some of the fundamentals of morning television. The chief of those: appeal to women. In the morning hours, especially on network TV, ratings success among women is the…
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