NBC poached Fox News star Megyn Kelly primarily for a new morning companion for the Today show, locked in a fierce ratings race against Good Morning America and the growing CBS This Morning.
But before the hour premieres this fall, Kelly will make her first appearance on NBC in a new summer newsmagazine, Sunday Night With Megyn Kelly, due June 4 (7 ET/PT). She'll anchor the show and report some of its three weekly segments, while others will be tackled by NBC News correspondents including Harry Smith, Kate Snow and Cynthia McFadden.
Kelly promises "a mix of hard-hitting pieces that are somewhat explosive and news-making with more inspirational longer-form profiles and stories," and says the combination represents "a new form of journalism for me."
She left Fox News (which fought to keep her) in January, and won't elaborate on the discussion in her book Settle for More on the network's late chief Roger Ailes, or the fallout from his ouster — and later Bill O'Reilly's — amid sexual harassment charges.
Kelly earned a reputation (and high ratings) there as the hard-charging host of The Kelly File: She confronted Karl Rove on election night 2012, when he claimed Barack Obama's re-election was uncertain, and sparred with Donald Trump in a 2015 presidential primary debate, leading him to call her a "lightweight" and remark "there was blood coming out of her wherever." But in May 2016, critics complained Kelly fawned over the candidate in a Fox broadcast-network special, seen as a template for a new role for which she viewed Oprah Winfrey as a model.
"In some interviews I’ll be hard-hitting," she said last week, "but I’ve been amazed at the number of times I’ve cried already in doing these sit-downs, and that's another form of me that I think people are less familiar with."
Kelly, 46, is in Russia moderating a Friday discussion with President Vladimir Putin at the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum, portions of which will air June 4; another segment sends Smith to Kenya to explore a new effort to stop elephant poaching using anti-terrorist techniques. Also in early episodes are Kelly sit-downs with Fox Sports reporter Erin Andrews and J.D. Vance, author of 2016 bestselling memoir Hillbilly Elegy, a chronicle of his white working-class Appalachian upbringing that echoed a core group of Donald Trump supporters.
Andrews, a former ESPN reporter and the victim of a stalker who secretly videotaped her nude through a hotel peephole, is "an amazing person with an incredible story," Kelly says. "I was amazed at the connection I felt with her by the time that thing was over, and uplifted by it because it’s rare in our jobs … that you feel something powerful" in an interview. And she called her conversation with Vance "an incredible exchange. He’s got his rap down; he knows what he wants to say about the Rust Belt and the working class, but this interview breaks through all that."
But Kelly says Sunday Night won't be celebrity focused, and David Corvo, senior executive producer of prime-time news, says Kelly's experience as an interviewer will differentiate the hour: "She has a distinctive style and rapport with the audience," he says. The format "was something she wanted; she felt like this was a kind of journalism she had not done in her career," apart from occasional profiles like the one she did of the Duggar family in 2015.
The newsmagazine, which joins the long-running Dateline NBC, will air for 10 weeks this summer, competing against reruns of 60 Minutes, until the NFL season begins in late August. NBC expects to return it to the schedule in March, after the Winter Olympics, though it "will be a challenge" juggling with the morning show, Corvo says.
And this fall will bring Kelly's new morning show, due at 9 a.m. ET/PT, that she's planning with her longtime Fox News producer Debra Murphy. Kelly describes it as an "empowering, inspiring, entertaining, informative mix that doesn’t take itself too seriously but also brings people the news they need to know."
