Friday, October 25, 2013

UP LATE WITH ALEC BALDWIN

This new MSNBC show, at ten on Friday nights so it competes with Bill Maher's HBO show (but obviously can be watched in repeats or on demand or etc.) is like a better Charlie Rose show for me (and yes, full disclosure Alec is a friend, but I'd still prefer his questioning to Rose's even if he weren't).

So far I've been enlightened and entertained by his discussions with guests like Bill De Blasio and Debra Winger. Both those shows were revealing in ways I've never seen on other interview shows. As was the one tonight with Chris Matthews, who I thought I'd had enough of but saw in his exchanges with Alec what made Matthews a media force in the first place, the insight and analysis based on his political experience seemed much more accessibly intelligent instead of egocentrically belligerent or dismissive as he sometimes can seem on his own show.

I learned some things and had a few laughs and actually got some clarity on a few issues I was a little fuzzy on. So I look forward to more of the same. The show is kind of like this blog in the sense that it swings from the entertainment business to the arts to politics, and all based on personal experience and interests. Go Alec.

2 comments:

-K- said...

I've definitely have had enough of Chris Matthews so when I saw he was on, I turned it off. But even if I was a fan and if he had a hundred new things to say, to see Baldwin interviewing him just came off as lazy.

But because I like Baldwin so much in "30 Rock" (I've just started watching it in reruns), I'm willing to believe that they booked someone else who got drunk or stuck in traffic. It happens.

Lally said...

I hear ya K, and it may have been influenced by the desire to boost Matthews' audience and vice versa, but that said, it looked to me like simply an older Northeastern Irish-American man being interviewed by a younger Northeastern Irish-American man (not a huge age difference but a decade or so I'd guess, and PA & NY) and asking questions he wanted insight and a personal perspective on, and he (Baldwin) got it. In the process, so did I.