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Watching TV As America Descends Into the Abyss
I spent eight hours with two broadcasts that felt like stage plays from alternate realities.
Peacock’s nifty new Multiview election feature built on its 360-degree Summer Olympics coverage with three simultaneous screens: the NBC News stream, a rotating window of results, and its patented Steve Kornacki live cam, which gave the country the opportunity to observe every second of the nerd king shuffling papers, drinking coffee, and crunching data. The Peacock and Prime Video options felt like a decent enough compromise: the comforts of a traditional Election Night experience (correspondents reporting, analysts opining, anchors announcing results) packaged in a way that nodded toward the destabilizing future. In many instances, the dry comedic persona he tested out in 30 Rock cameos and might well have honed had his career not been derailed by an embellishment scandal poked through: “We’re getting the old team back together, some people coming out of the Witness Protection Program to join us tonight, and for that we are grateful,” he table-set early in the night.
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