Review: 'All In With Chris Hayes Live'

Reinventing the familiar cable news channel format is not an easy task. Whether you're watching "Sean Hannity," "The Situation Room With Wolf Blitzer" or "Hardball With Chris Matthews," the overall parameters of any cable news show are very similar. A host (or perhaps two co-hosts) read a script that recaps some hot button issue of the day, maybe they run a bit of film that supports the story and then they talk to a panel of Beltway reporters, analysts and paid network contributors. This is the format that you find on literally 90% of the live news shows airing on cable television.

There are a couple of reasons for this and none of them involve making the experience more enlightening for the viewers. These segments are relatively easy to write and the structure of the segments is built to bring out conflict and social media-friendly "moments. And to be honest, these segments are also much easier to book and produce on a day-to-day basis. Most of the guests are known quantities & in many cases the shows would have the same guests whether they were talking about the Space Force or Climate Change. And the anchors are able to deliver predictable segments, using scripts that allow them to focus on their primary task of keeping everything moving in a coherent and somewhat entertaining fashion.

One of the few exceptions to this cable news channel format trope is Rachel Maddow. It's not just that she's wicked smart & a politics junkie (although she is). It's also that she has built a very distinctive show that plays to her strengths. And in the process has created a unique take on what a cable news show should look like. 

Her show typically opens with a 20-minute plus A-block segment, often one that uses some obscure historical moment to frame an important story from the news of the day. She seldom has more than one guest on at a time on her show and the guests that she does have tend to be a specific reporter who has just helped to break a story or some newsworthy minor politician or civilian. It's a wonderful format, but it is also one that is almost impossible for anyone else to recreate.

One MSNBC anchor who has always seemed poised to make his own vision of what a cable news show should look like is Chris Hayes. He joined MSNBC in September 2011 as host of the weekend morning talker "Up With Chris Hayes" and even early on it was clear that he wanted to carve out his own vision of a cable news program. "Up" did have a panel of guests, but they (and Hayes) were sitting around a table and you could see Hayes trying to figure out a way to make his show distinctive. I'm not sure the show was ultimately what he was working towards, but it was impressive enough that by 2013 he was moved to his own 8:00 p.m. primetime show.
"All In With Chris Hayes" has always seemed to me to be the cable news equivalent of "Waiting For Godot." As you would expect from someone who was an editor at "The Nation," Hayes is passionately wonkish and you are often left with the feeling that he knows more about the subject matter being discussed than his guests. But the show has often seemed to be an uncomfortable fit for Hayes' skillset. The more traditional segments of the show aren't the best use of his talents and I have long been waiting for him to find a version of the show that is as distinctive to him as the one carved out by Rachel Maddow. I've enjoyed his show over the years, but it always seemed like a bit of a holding action while he searched for that perfect intellectual fit.

Everyone has been changed by the Trump Presidency and for Hayes it seems to have brought a new attitude to his show. His A-blocks have been filled with more outrage and calls for moral clarity. And his interviews have often been sharper and more focused on calling out the absurdities of the times we live in.

Given all of that, it's not surprising that his three-week experiment with doing a live Friday show has been a wildly successful effort. It's a format that plays to his strengths and it's the first time I've seen him do a show where I've thought to myself, "I can't imagine anyone else doing the show in quite this way."

The show is done in a studio that has housed everything from late night talk shows to daytime talkers and the result is that "All In With Chris Hayes Live" feels more like a late night talk show than a traditional cable news attempt to do a live town hall episode. Each of the three episodes has opened with a long A-block that begins with a part-monologue, part historical dissection of some core news item from the week. There are jokes and plenty of graphics and as Hayes strolls back-and-forth across the stage it feels more like a TED talk than a news program. But this is a format that suits Hayes well. He has a wry sense of humor and a good feel for how to connect-the-dots in a way that makes sense in front of a live crowd. It's the type of television he was meant to do and it gives the rest of the slightly more traditional show a distinctive feel.

The rest of the show has tended to be two or three one-on-one interviews, most of them live in the studio. The final segment is Hayes along with three other guests, discussing some novel look at the news of the week. That final panel tends to be more diverse and a bit less reliant on familiar faces and that often results in some really enlightening moments.

And if I have a complaint about the three live shows he's done, it's that I'd like to see a wider range of guests and points of view. Hayes sometimes has a tendency to draw from people he knows and/or people whose work he follows. And sometimes that can lead to some segments that sound entirely too much like the conventional wisdom you hear on other shows.

But that's a minor qualm compared to the impressive work that Hayes and his staff have done over the past three weeks. If the live shows were an experiment, it's one that should be considered a success. I don't know that it's possible to successfully do five live shows a week, but I'd love to see the Friday shows remain live. I've long been a fan of Chris Hayes and watching him do these live shows is a bit like watching Bruce Springsteen early in his career introduce "Born to Run." There are moments in everyone's career when you think "this is what they were meant to do." And that's certainly been the case with these live shows from Chris Hayes.