“Our Metric Isn’t Rachel’s Numbers or Bust”: Can Alex Wagner Keep the Maddow Faithful Tuned In?
About a month ago I was speaking with MSNBC president Rashida Jones, and I asked what her plan was for filling the critical 9 p.m. slot now that Rachel Maddow had scaled her anchoring back to one night a week, and also if she was worried about finding someone who could live up to the preternaturally high bar Maddow had set for the hour. “Rachel has been a huge player for us, in prime time in particular, but we have an incredible bench,” Jones told me. “I’m not looking for someone to come in and mimic Rachel’s performance or success. Rachel has been doing this for a long time, and it takes time to build an audience in that way. Our metric isn’t Rachel’s numbers or bust. It’s more about: How do we continue to add to the conversation? How do we get unique new voices to add to the conversation?”
The voice Jones ultimately landed on to step into Maddow’s shoes on Tuesday through Friday nights is Alex Wagner, as MSNBC announced on Monday, alongside stories in Variety and The New York Times. (The announcement had been scheduled for later in the day, but as these things inevitably go in the gossipy TV-news world, word started leaking out and everyone had to scramble.) Wagner will host a yet-to-be-named 9 p.m. show premiering August 16 and airing four nights a week, while Maddow will continue holding down Mondays with The Rachel Maddow Show, in addition to pursuing a slew of ambitious slow cooker projects. MSNBC noted that today Wagner “becomes the only Asian American to host a prime-time cable news program.” Here’s Wagner’s statement: “I’m honored to be anchoring a key hour of television in such a critical time for American democracy. In many ways, the stakes have never been higher, and there’s no better place to explore this moment than MSNBC. I’m thrilled to be coming home.”
Like Maddow and various other MSNBC personalities, Wagner, 44, is repped by WME. (Her agent there is Henry Reisch; Maddow primarily works with Mark Shapiro.) She had worked at MSNBC as a political analyst and daily host starting in 2010, but her show, Now With Alex Wagner, was canceled in 2015 amid a broader network shake-up. She later joined Showtime’s The Circus in 2018, hitting the road and jawing about politics with John Heilemann and company. “She did a really good job at Showtime,” someone who knows her told me. “I think it was a period where she got to spread her wings a little bit.” She was also a special correspondent for CBS News and cohost of CBS This Morning: Saturday. Earlier in her career there were stints at The Atlantic and HuffPost. She rejoined MSNBC this past February as a senior analyst and substitute anchor. “She’s certainly progressive,” another knowledgeable source said, “but she has a different voice, and maybe that brings in a different audience.”
About that audience: On the nights Maddow’s not on the air at 9 p.m., the ratings generally go down, down, down. She was an immediate sensation when she first moved into the time slot 14 years ago, beating Larry King and quickly establishing herself as a natural heir to then superstar Keith Olbermann, who ended up getting bounced a couple years later. Wagner’s clearly got a tall order in front of her, but back to Jones: “I think it’s an unrealistic expectation,” she said when we spoke last month, emphasizing the changing TV landscape, the multiplatform streaming future, and all of that. “The universe is very different from when Rachel joined the cable news spectrum. My focus is less about: How does this one hour perform in this one space?” Maddow, for her part, seems thrilled by the choice of successor. “Woooooooooot!” she tweeted. “Fantastic news! Let’s do this!”
