Review: 'The Alec Baldwin Show'

Hosting an interview show is much tougher than it looks. It's like writing - everyone can write on some level and it's easy to convince yourself that means you have the skills to overcome a complete lack of experience or knowledge of the craft. And it's that way when it comes to conducting an interview. You might know the person, you might be comfortable speaking in public and have a solid enough ego that allows you to believe an audience would want to listen to you ask questions. But the art of interviewing - like most skills in this life - is less about raw talent and more about the ability to successfully rein in your worst instincts.

This is a battle I am very familiar with in real life. In the late 1990s, I went from spending more a decade as a stand-up to doing a syndicated radio talk show. It was a brutal learning period and I still am astounded I wasn't fired after the first week. I had plenty of experience as a guest and that, combined with many years as a stand-up, convinced me I could transition to asking the questions. But interviewing is so much more than that and it was a tough skill to learn.

As a talk show host, you have to walk that line between being interesting to the audience while staying out of the way of the person being interviewed. You need to remind yourself that your questions are simply supposed to open up doors for the guest to walk through. They're not an opportunity to show off your knowledge or talk about yourself. You are there to be a conversation facilitator, not the central character of a televised conversation.

All of those traits don't come naturally to people who are accustomed to being in front of the cameras. Being a star means being convinced at some level that you are always important enough to be part of any conversation. And that tendency runs counter to everything that makes a successful talk show host. I once read an interview with Johnny Carson where he was asked what the hardest lesson he had to learn as a talk show host. He said it was to let the guest get the punchline. He talked about how his natural inclination was to always say the line that gets the laugh in any conversation. And he realized early on that his job was to make it easier for his guest to seem clever and interesting. And by doing that, he would look good as well.

I mention all of this because it's really an explanation of why the new ABC primetime talker "The Alec Baldwin Show" is a self-indulgent disaster. Convincing any primetime broadcast television audience to watch a sit-down one-on-one interview show in 2018 is a challenge. And while I'm not sure why ABC thought Alec Baldwin is the person to bring back this endangered television genre, it's clear pretty quickly the decision is a 1980s Cubs-level disaster.

To be blunt, while Baldwin might be capable of handling his interview podcast, the expectations of a podcast listener are very different than those of someone watching a television interview show. And if you've spent any time listening to Baldwin's previous interviews, you've realized that he never says one sentence when he can ramble through a paragraph of setup. He also seems genetically incapable of divorcing himself from the interview process, which leads to these awkward questions that are essentially three paragraphs of Baldwin & his beliefs, ending with an open-sentence along the lines of "so, do you agree with me?"

Baldwin's first two guests are Robert DeNiro and Taraji P. Henson and while neither interview is quite a flaming trainwreck, there are plenty of meandering bumpy spots along the way. The conversations seem oddly edited and I can't tell if the erratic jumping around from topic to topic is the result of the production process or of Baldwin's unique way of seeing the world.

The ironic thing about the first episode of "The Alec Baldwin Show" is that for all the times Baldwin inserts his life into the story, he dodges the best opportunity to really open himself up and bring some personal context to his interviews. In both the DeNiro and Henson interviews, he mentions several times that he has four young children and discusses the challenges of simultaneously being an actor and a father.

Here's the thing. Baldwin has five kids. He had a daughter, Ireland, with actress Kim Basinger in 1995. Their marriage was contentious and their divorce even more so. He's discussed it at length in other interviews and even wrote about the experience at length in his autobiography. He's even said the arguments and stress had him considering suicide. So the fact that he wouldn't even acknowledge Ireland when he talks about his children, even to say "yes, it can be tough to be a father, etc., is odd. Even De Niro, who has a range of kids from different relationships mentioned his now grown-up children, albeit in passing. It's one thing to gloss over your personal life if you're David Letterman and your brand is being an aloof host who rarely shares his private life on camera. But if you're Alec Baldwin and you endlessly prattle on about everything BUT the most on-point facts of your life, you're not being an especially effective talk show host.

I have no idea how well "The Alec Baldwin Show" will do in the ratings. It seems like an unlikely idea for 2018, but perhaps audiences will find Baldwin's self-assured absorption to be charming. 

I will not be one of those people.