Former Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly’s daytime talk hour premieres Monday, snugly sandwiched between the 7 - 9 a.m. hours of Today led by Matt Lauer and Savannah Guthrie and the more light-hearted 10 a.m. hour helmed by Kathie Lee Gifford and Hoda Kotb.

As the launch date grows closer, NBC is working hard to show audiences that the hard-nosed Kelly they know from Fox News has another side.

Kelly, 46, came to fame by embodying everything that Fox News of her era represented: the former lawyer is blond, beautiful, smart and aggressive. She didn’t retreat when then-Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump attacked her during the 2016 campaign, but she did ultimately elect to leave Fox News, revealing in her November 2016 book, Settle for More, a hostile environment of sexual harassment.

When it became known that Kelly wanted to leave, suitors came calling. Ultimately, she jumped to NBC, which gave her a Sunday night magazine show, a daytime talk show, a much larger platform and a reported annual salary of $17 million.

The Sunday magazine show premiered over the summer to less-than-vibrant ratings. Her biggest episode came with her opening-night interview with enigmatic Russian President Vladimir Putin on June 4, with 6.1 million viewers tuning in and a 1.2 in the key news demographic of adults 25-54, but fell off after that. An interview she did with conservative conspiracy theorist Alex Jones was received with scrutiny, criticism and low ratings: the June 18 episode averaged only 3.53 million viewers.

Sunday Night with Megyn Kelly ended two weeks earlier than planned, and was replaced with original episodes of Dateline, with NBC saying that it had never set a fixed number of episodes. Still, the show’s lackluster performance caused TV observers to wonder if NBC had made an expensive mistake by hiring Kelly.

“It’s not going to be perfect on day one, and we’re not going to be in first place on day two – but I’d rather be holding our cards than anyone else’s,” NBC News Chairman Andrew Lack told NBC affiliates at a meeting in May, according to reports.

On Monday, her daytime show premieres. Kelly told the New York Times in May that the talk show is a show she was “born to do,” But daytime is a very challenged TV daypart. Whether Kelly can make it there remains to be seen, although airing in the middle of NBC’s Today morning block is about as cushy as it gets.

Still, Kelly will go up against another Kelly — Kelly Ripa — and her new co-host, Ryan Seacrest, in New York and some other markets around the U.S. But Live with Kelly and Ryan is syndicated, which means it doesn’t air in the same time slot across the country, while Megyn Kelly Today will air at 9 a.m. in all markets.

Headed into the new show’s debut, NBC has launched a marketing campaign intended to show the softer side of Kelly, reports Variety. Promos are airing in some of the network’s most popular programs, including Sunday Night Football, America’s Got Talent and the NBC Nightly News.

Billboards of Kelly are plastered across New York and Los Angeles, showcasing her doing friendly things such as offering an unseen friend a cup of morning coffee.

And Kelly has been showing up on Today throughout the summer, most recently with a segment on ten years of the Kardashian clan featuring all the family’s famous women.

The show’s social media feeds kicked off this summer, showing Kelly meeting with NBC affiliates in such cities as Denver, Houston and Raleigh-Durham, N.C..

In this last week before the show goes on the air, @MegynTODAY has been counting the days before launch with a series of countdown videos:

And also some get-to-know-you spots:

Now it remains for Kelly herself to convince daytime audiences that she’s someone they want to spend their mornings with.

READ MORE: Variety

Tags:


  Save as PDF