“I will tell you something that you already know,” Vladimir Putin, the Russian president who has found his way into many U.S. political stories in the last year, told Megyn Kelly on the debut episode of NBC's Sunday Night with Megyn Kelly. Putin was ostensibly answering a question about his role in the U.S. election, but he may as well have been referring to a salient theme of this highly-publicized sit-down.
Kelly, a ratings juggernaut at Fox News, left the cable channel last fall for an eight-figure paycheck and the promise of her own morning program and this type of serious weekend capper. Kelly, after all, had spoken publicly about her desire to challenge herself with a sit-down interview format that has long been the domain of Barbara Walters, Oprah Winfrey, and Charlie Rose. But the broadcaster’s early foray on Fox last year was met with skepticism. The reviews for her prime time sit down with Donald Trump were withering; she was neither warm enough to fill the shoes of Winfrey and Walters, nor as genially discursive as Rose. And, strangely, Kelly seemed to cast aside the prosecutorial interviewing style that helped her succeed on the cable channel.
Kelly evidenced some of these traits in the debut episode of Sunday Night with Megyn Kelly. She asked Putin about whether or not he and his associates meddled in the election, and when he denied it and subsequently flipped the conversation to mention that it is the U.S. that actively interferes with campaigns in other countries, Kelly responded with a smile, “That sounds like a justification.” One suspects that the old Kelly, from Fox News, would have gleefully litigated the point. But the challenge with booking major news figures for prime time is that the interviewer often only gets a single shot. Quickly, the two moved on.
Putin, for his part, was reliably dismissive. Predictably, he shot down Kelly’s question about his relationship with General Michael Flynn, Trump’s former National Security Counsel advisor, who was fired from his post for not fully detailing the extent of his communications with Russian officials. (Flynn is part of a federal and congressional investigation into the campaign’s ties to the Kremlin.) He told her that she had a closer relationship to him than he had with Flynn. Again, without much of a follow-up, the conversation moved on.
Putin pulled the same trick when Kelly asked about Jared Kushner’s meeting with Russian ambassador Sergey Kyslyak. “I’m being honest with you,” he told her. “Do you think I have time to talk to every ambassador around the world every day? “That’s complete nonsense.” Kelly followed up about the reported proposal Kushner made to set up a secure, secret communication channel between the Trump team and the Kremlin, but Putin denied knowing anything about the proposal, ever asking about the proposal, or being interested in the proposal. “You created a sensation about nothing. You people are so creative over there. Your lives must be boring.” Again, Putin was right. This was boring.
There is no question that a sit-down with Putin this week, as federal investigators circle the sitting U.S. president’s inner circle, is a get for Kelly in her big debut. But getting the U.S.’s biggest antagonist is meaningless if you simply go through the motions once he’s there. Many media observers were skeptical when Kelly announced her ambition to do long-form interviews with famous guests. But they may not have been belittling her talents so much as casting doubt on a medium, the newsmagazine show, that seems anachronistic in 2017. Kelly is unquestionably one of her industry’s most prized talents, but it is unclear how much she can add to the format. Meanwhile, in its final commercial break, Showtime advertised for its upcoming four-hour Putin interviews with Oliver Stone. Undeniably, Sunday night did nothing to spoil the appetite for that.
(The author is also a contributor for CNN.)
