After a two-week delay, HBO’s nightly news program VICE News Tonight will finally premiere tonight at 7:30 p.m. ET on HBO. Premiere week features VICE CEO Shane Smith interviewing former Speaker of the House John Boehner, VICE News Tonight reporter Antonia Hylton on the Alabama prison strikes, and VICE News culture correspondent Dexter Thomas looking at the rise of a deadly new drug.
VICE prides itself on being an outside of the box brand, and its version of the nightly newscast promises to be “a modern, flexible-format news show that helps our audience understand the world,” Josh Tyrangiel, VICE evp of Content and News, said to a small group of reporters at the VICE headquarters in Brooklyn last month.
The newscast, which will air weeknights from 7:30 – 8 p.m., will forego the traditional nightly newscast formula of having an anchor sitting at a desk reporting the news. It will instead have multiple on-air correspondents as well as voice-overs/narrations of stories. VICE News Tonight won’t stray too far from the original HBO series in that it will include taped long-form pieces examining a range of newsworthy topics, including the economy, U.S. policy & politics, civil rights and civil liberties, world news, climate, tech, and culture, both popular and global. That said, it is still a nightly newscast that will have the capability to go live if a big breaking news story happens. Viewers watching VICE News Tonight on a phone or tablet can also learn more about a story by actually touching the screen, making the nightly newscast viewer experience far more interactive than what one would find on broadcast.
Here’s a sneak peek at the series premiere: