Meet the Chuck aka Meet The Press has a new format and it is incredibly awkward. Despite its official name, Meet The Press, the guests don't actually Meet The Press. Instead, host Chuck Todd conducts the interviews while the panelists sit uselessly at a table in the background. Yesterday's show was notable because one of the panelists sitting at the table in the background while Todd was hogging the interviews, was the NBC news anchor for over 20 years, Tom Brokaw.
So how did Brokaw like being relegated to being just another panelist in the background as Todd conducted his interviews? Well, judging from this video clip (and below) he wasn't pleased at all and expressed his displeasure by pointedly ignoring Todd when he returned to the "kiddies table" after his first interview.
Although this segment was followed by Tom Brokaw interviewing former Secretaries of State Henry Kissinger and James Baker, it was a pre-recorded interview and not conducted on the Meet The Press set. One upside to that interview was that there was no table of panelists sitting in the background to distract the viewer.
Apparently NBC News president Deborah Turness has broken her promise last August of returning to the original Meet the Press format and is instead allowing it to become Meet The Chuck complete with the awkwardness of a useless panel sitting in the background:
Her new vision for “Meet the Press” includes adding a regular panel of journalists who will question guests, something of a return to the venerable show’s original format. “The show needs more edge,” she said. “It needs to be consequential. I think the show had become a talking shop that raked over the cold embers of what had gone on the previous week. The one-on-one conversation belongs to a decade ago. We need more of a coffeehouse conversation.
So if the one-on-one conversation belongs to a decade ago, why is it still missing? That panel sitting uselessly in the background only emphasizes that Meet The Press is in reality Meet The Chuck.
Exit question: How long before one of the useless panelists expresses his or her displeasure at being excluded from interviews by making funny faces in the background while Chuck Todd questions a guest solo?
