A few hours ago Daily Beast editor-at-large Lloyd Grove published a deliciously scathing review of MSNBC's new Up Late that premiered Friday.
From the very first sentence, readers could tell he wasn't impressed: "This is a terrible and surprising question, but is Alec Baldwin really that boring?"
"After watching him chat sedately with New York mayoral candidate Bill de Blasio," Grove continued, "I can’t help asking...Baldwin’s debut as a TV talk show host didn’t do him or his audience any favors."
Ouch.
First, Grove expressed disappointment with giving an hour to a mayoral candidate who's likely only interesting to people in New York. But that wasn't the only problem:
Baldwin, who to his credit acknowledged that he’s a de Blasio partisan, never challenged his guest; he simply agreed with him. When the conversation threatened to get interesting or affecting, as during a brief discussion of de Blasio’s tumultuous upbringing by a single mother after his parents’ divorce, Baldwin seldom missed an opportunity to steer it back to “policy.” He decorously neglected to ask the candidate about the impact of his father’s suicide—which is the polite thing to do in a social situation, but malpractice in a television interview.
Meanwhile, Baldwin persistently referred to de Blasio as New York’s next mayor until the candidate—admittedly the prohibitive frontrunner as a Democrat in an overwhelmingly Democratic city--reminded his host that first there must be an election. The existence of de Blasio’s Republican opponent, Joe Lhota, went unmentioned.
Has Grove never watched MSNBC? The is the Democrat News Network.
As Baldwin referred to his guest as the next mayor, why would he consider mentioning that de Blasio has an opponent?
Given Baldwin's support for the guy, the whole point of the interview was to give de Blasio an hour-long commercial that didn't cost the candidate a dime.
But Grove still wasn't through with his criticisms writing, "[C]ommercial interruptions, signaled by the welling-up of the show’s jazzy film-noir theme music over the dangling conversation, almost came as a relief...unless MSNBC intends to retitle its new program Up Late and Dozing Off with Alec Baldwin, somebody needs to--as they say in those ubiquitous low-testosterone commercials—'turn it up.'”
Wow!
Makes you wonder if Grove knows how Baldwin treats his rivals.
He'd be well-advised to not walk alone in Manhattan for a few weeks.
