Alex Wagner speaks to VF’s joepompeo about Trump-era accountability, her previous breakup with MSNBC, and stepping into Rachel Maddow’s shoes: “I am very aware of the mantle.”
Wagner’s nearly four-year-old weekday afternoon show. Now she’d been handed the keys to the network’s most valuable piece of real estate, making Wagner, who is half Burmese on her mother’s side, “the only Asian American to host a prime-time cable news program,” as MSNBC put it in its press release.
The stakes are high. Maddow, who now anchors 9 p.m. only on Monday nights , had established herself over the years as a singular talent and MSNBC’s perennial ratings champ. You can’t follow that act without a whole world of pressure and expectations, even if your bosses swear it’s not about the numbers and that they
to “come in and mimic Rachel’s performance or success.” And let’s not forget that Maddow is still very much performing one night a week before Wagner jumps in.I wanted to know what it’s been like stepping into Maddow’s shoes. “I am very aware of the mantle,” she said as the waiter politely interrupted to take our food order. “I remember getting thepush alert” that Maddow was stepping away from daily hosting “and thinking, Wow that’s gonna be a really tough job for whoever has to fill it.
Was there any part of her that thought, Maybe I don’t wanna do this? “It’s ongoing, the feeling of, like, this is really hard,” said Wagner. “But the opportunity, the responsibility, the sense of urgency to be given that platform at this time—I mean, it was not really much of a question.”, not so distant from the 2.5 million or so who might tune in to Maddow on a typical night. Since then, the totals have fallen a bit farther from Maddow’s reliable heights.
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