Variety’s Andrew Wallenstein gives his take on Ronan Farrow, the prolific tweeter and newly-minted MSNBC daytime host, concluding that while Farrow is “awesome on Twitter,” the show’s format makes him “awful on television”:
But concluding that the kind of personality that succeeds on Twitter is just a totally different animal than the type conducive to good TV would be wrong. Because it’s actually MSNBC that needs to fall on its sword for failing Farrow; the network put him in a format that doesn’t capture the essence of his Twitter persona.
Cable news basically has two different types of personality-driven shows. The first is where the anchor takes a backseat to the commentator he or she is interviewing. The job is to tee up the topic at hand and ask intelligent questions, but to otherwise get out of the way and let the news be the star. That’s the format MSNBC gave Farrow, and it’s the wrong one.
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