Abby Phillip’s Wild Primetime ‘NewsNight’ Gains Steam at CNN

On the set of CNN’s “NewsNight,” guests may not be certain whether they should shake hands or ball them up into fists.

When the cameras are off on the set of anchor Abby Phillip’s program, the atmosphere matches that of a nice dinner party.

Before the 10 p.m. show even got on the air one night last week, producers offer panelist Ana Navarro a pillow to sit on so the diminutive commentator seems like she’s matched — at least optics-wise — with her neighboring guests Olivia Nuzzi and Bryan Lanza. And in the middle of one commercial break, conservative analyst Scott Jennings is heard to remark that he’s found a new friend — the progressive figure Nina Turner — in a declaration that surprises the producers who work on the program.

When the cameras start transmitting to viewers at home, however, it’s time to get real.

Navarro doesn’t soft-pedal her disdain for recent remarks former President Donald Trump has made about immigrants eating dogs and cats — just one of the hot topics Phillip and a shifting ensemble of pundits, reporters and experts tackle each weeknight. Jennings, one of CNN’s most vociferous analysts, goes atypically silent after Navarro asks him if the remarks are racist. Finally, he looks right at Navarro and responds: “I’m not going to sit here and answer for somebody. I don’t talk to Donald Trump about what the motivations are,” he says, adding: “And I don’t answer you, either.”

Let’s take a breath. “It’s one of the shows you have to wind down from after you do it, because it’s intense,” says Bakari Sellers, the former South Carolina politician and veteran CNN contributor.

No one would blame Phillip, a soft-spoken anchor whose primary expertise is politics, not professional wrestling, if she decided to ring a bell to mark the end of one of the sparring sessions. On “NewsNight,” CNN producers appear to have set the network’s signature “Crossfire” on a date with Fox News Channel’s “The Five” — and sent them out for bottomless glasses of Red Bull.

“I feel like I need a degree in psychology,” Phillip confides in a recent interview, “because so much of the show is about just understanding our guests at the table, understanding where they are coming from and what they might say and how they might interact with one another.” If her guests get loud, she says, well, so do people at home when they have their own conversations about politics and headlines.

“NewsNight,” which launched in the aftermath of the terrorist attack on Israel in October of last year, looked at first like most other programs on CNN and its main rivals, Fox News Channel and MSNBC. Phillip sat alone on set, always spoke directly to the audience and interviewed experts, analysts and newsmakers about the most important headlines of the day. Earlier this summer, CNN remade the program — which shares its title with a primetime show anchored by Aaron Brown on the network in the early 2000s — and it has quickly become the loudest thing on the schedule. The program operates at a volume that has almost become unrecognizable in these days of ownership under risk-averse Warner Bros. Discovery.

Since Discovery snatched the former WarnerMedia from AT&T in April of 2022, CNN’s tone has moderated. Gone are shows like “New Day,” which counted on morning co-anchors like Alisyn Camerota or Chris Cuomo to put newsmakers on the morning grill, and vanished are anchors like Don Lemon, who finished off the CNN schedule with hot talk about topics such as racism. Under the new corporate parent, Warner Bros. Discovery, CNN has frowned upon anchors displaying passion, offering a personal view on the news or raising up the holy cause of journalism against those who might thwart it. New corporate overlords feared such stuff gave CNN the perception of having a liberal bias — and made it unattractive to viewers with conservative leanings.

In recent weeks, however, the network has seemed to be on the verge of rekindling its inner Zucker. CNN re-hired Brian Stelter, who anchored the long-running but now defunct “Reliable Sources” media-criticism program and became a CNN fixture under former president Jeff Zucker, who managed the network with significantly more flair during the Trump administration. CNN this past weekend launched a satirical comedy show that analyzes the week’s headlines, giving comedians Roy Wood Jr., Amber Ruffin and Michael Ian Black license to drop a few f-bombs during a Friday-night taping –- and letting them survive the editing room.

Could the strategy be working? Viewership for the retooled “NewsNight” is on the rise. To be sure, the overall audience for the program is small compared to its rivals, part of a broader decline in CNN’s ratings in recent years. The “NewsNight” crowd remains under 1 million on most nights, while both Fox News’ “Gutfeld” and MSNBC’s “The Last Word with Lawrence O’Donnell” handily break that mark. Since launching in late July, however, the new format has sparked an 82% increase among viewers between 25 and 54 — the demographic most coveted by advertisers in news programs — when compared to its performance in June. More noticeable, perhaps: In September through the 11^th, “NewsNight” had the second-highest viewership among the 25-to-54 crowd on CNN — only Anderson Cooper’s 8 p.m. hour won more.

The new format is one of the first tangible things to emerge on screen since CNN made longtime producer Charlie Moore, a veteran of Cooper’s program, its new vice president of primetime programming. The move was a sign that the network, which has, under CEO Mark Thompson, focused intently on developing a new digital strategy, understands that it can no longer cede the battle to win viewers on TV. The fees and ad revenue Warner Bros. Discovery collects from traditional CNN have diminished but remain substantial. Running primetime shows that can’t win a million viewers per night is like allowing termites to keep nibbling away at the wood that undergirds a stately home.

News networks often use moments of critical import — such as an election cycle — to test new concepts. ABC News’ “Nightline” sprouted up in the middle of the Iran hostage crisis in 1979 as a means of giving U.S. viewers a late update on developments. MSNBC’s “The 11^th Hour” initially launched in the fall of 2016 as what founding anchor Brian Williams called a “pop up show” that would air nightly “from now until Election Day, when we will cancel ourselves.” It has stayed on the schedule well beyond his exit in 2021, with programmers seeing an opportunity to give viewers a look at stories that break in the evening and might affect the news cycle come sun-up.

Each weekday evening on “NewsNight,” a shifting panel that has included contributors such as Kara Swisher, Gretchen Carlson, Cari Champion, Jemele Hill and Rep. Nancy Mace of South Carolina gets vocal about issues, largely because each grouping includes people from a variety of backgrounds. There may be a former Trump adviser on set alongside a protégé of Senator Bernie Sanders. People may hail from the worlds of sports, culture or politics. And the panels often look nothing like the typical cable-news coterie, which has long been stocked to bursting with white men noodling over policy in Washington.

On some nights, Phillip says she has had to use the commercial breaks to warn the assemblage that viewers can’t make sense of the discussion if everyone talks at once.

There have been some, well, moments. Producers make them even more heated by setting up a split-screen graphic that appears to pit one speaker against another. A July broadcast featuring Mace, professor Michael Eric Dyson and Democratic strategist Keith Boykin turned dissonant, with the three failing to find common ground and Mace refusing to pronounce Vice President Kamala Harris’ first name as the two other panelists insisted. In August, columnist LZ Granderson and political analyst Tara Setmayer got more and more offended by things uttered by conservative commentator Reihan Salam – and vice versa.

Still, guests are instructed to speak their minds. “I was familiar with the tone of the round table before appearing as a guest, so I knew it was free-flowing and conversational,” says Hill, who appeared recently on the program. “But a few minutes before we stepped out on set, a producer told me that I didn’t have to wait for Abby to direct a question toward me, that I could just jump in when I had a point and just to treat it like a regular conversation. That was it. There were no guardrails that were put on me.”

Such stuff is key. “I just encourage people not to leave their authenticity at the door,” says Phillip. “We need that for this to work.”

If “NewsNight” strikes people as unusual for CNN, that means it’s succeeding, says Eric Hall, the show’s executive producer. “We made a concerted effort to differentiate this show compared to everything else you’re seeing,” he notes.

He thinks this sort of conversation is the sort viewers want to see later at night. They’ve had a full day of following the headlines, and now they just want to blow off some steam. Sometimes, on “NewsNight,” they might even find resolution. “If you have open dialogue, and open debate, and the host succeeds with everyone feeling a safe space to let it out, we agree more than we disagree,” he says.

No matter how torqued members of the panel get, Phillip never lets her temper rise. “I would be lying if I told you that there were not times when I’ve wanted to,” she says, but “I don’t think that’s helpful for an audience for me to add to the cacophony of sound.” Her refusal to raise her voice seems to have lent her more authority. Panelists generally don’t challenge her when she refutes a line of argument with facts CNN has reported. “People should know that I’m always trying to make sure that if I hear something that isn’t right and I know something isn’t’ right, I’m going to say something about it,” she says.

“NewsNight” offers contributors something they may not get elsewhere: a chance to speak beyond soundbites (if they can muscle through the other guests). Jennings says most shows have in-studio guests arrayed alongside a flat table, as if they were in Leonardo DaVinci’s panting of the Last Supper. “It’s a little hard to make it feel like you are having what would be a normal, quick back and forth,” he says. On “NewsNight,” the panelists face one another, not the camera, and they need to rise to a different occasion. “You have to show up prepared to talk for most of an hour, and you can’t — you really can’t — show up with just talking points that someone handed you.” What’s more, he says, “you have to listen” to the other guests.

Now the only question is whether CNN will keep “NewsNight” boiling. The network has committed to maintaining the panel format thorough the 2024 election, according to both Phillip and Hall. “Basically, it exists because we are trying to respond to what’s happening in the news, and create a space for that,” Phillip says. “We are going to see what the news is and go from there.” And yet, it’s hard not to keep an eye on the ratings.