Though Megyn Kelly has offered few specifics about what her NBC morning show will be like, she is happy to try a few analogies.
“If a news show and a talk show had a baby, that’s us,” she said of “Megyn Kelly Today,” which starts Monday, in an interview from her fifth-floor corner office at Rockefeller Plaza. “It’s newsy, and it’s talky.”
Ms. Kelly, the former Fox News prime-time host, then compared her 9 a.m. show to a cocktail.
“Hoda and Kathie Lee love wine,” she said, referring to NBC’s 10 a.m. hosts, Hoda Kotb and Kathie Lee Gifford, who are indeed no strangers to wine. “The ‘Today’ show is mostly coffee. I would say if you had to put a drink on my show, it would be a mimosa. There’s stuff that’s a little naughty. Stuff in there that’s good for you. Some stuff in there that’s fun and sweet.
“But,” she continued with the following italics certainly emphasized, “with some effervescence.”
The question is, who’s buying?
The premiere of the much anticipated morning talk show effectively begins NBC’s Great Megyn Kelly experiment. The daily show will be part of the ultra-lucrative “Today” franchise and one that many people in the TV news world are convinced will not work.
There are reasons for this: Many TV stars before Ms. Kelly — Katie Couric, Jane Pauley and Anderson Cooper among them — have taken a stab at solo daytime talk shows and failed; Ms.
Kelly’s Sunday evening show courted controversy and generated middling ratings; her competition, Kelly Ripa and Ryan Seacrest’s “Live,” is formidable; daytime audiences are significantly more diverse and female-driven than the audience for her Fox News show; and, well, people in the television industry like to sharpen their knives when a big personality tries something new. A recent Vanity Fair article was headlined “Has Megyn Kelly’s Star Already Been Eclipsed?”But Ms. Kelly does not care about the swell of skepticism, certainly not after weathering an election in which she found herself for a time as the No. 1 foil of the man who would become president.
“I don’t feel this is a risky proposition, because I know myself and know what I can do,” she said. “And I know that I’m about to launch the show that I was born to do. This is what I was meant to do.”
Ms. Kelly, 46, did provide some details about the show. She said she did not plan to talk all that much about politics. Her show will have a mix of celebrity guests — Robert Redford, Jane Fonda and…
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