Brian Williams held our hand and allowed us to check out from cable news — and the election

For a little while on Tuesday night, “Election Night with Brian Williams” was the breaking political news equivalent of a meditation app. As CNN’s John King and MSNBC’s Steve Kornacki pointed to states and districts on their respective touchscreen maps, Williams calmly engaged in polite conversation about the election from the center of a giant Los Angeles soundstage.

Behind him stretched a digital backdrop that, from a direct camera angle, made him look like his desk sat in the middle of a freeway strewn with American flags.

Two muscle cars were parked in the blanket of prairie brush over his shoulder. Elsewhere, a long table populated with party strategists, consultants and media figures like Puck’s founding partner Baratunde Thurston and “The View” alumna Abby Huntsman discussed the merits of red and blue mirages in front of a classic red barn.

In another part of the set—which again looks like the inside of a warehouse—several experts were quietly relaxing on sofas that looked like they had been sourced from another Amazon warehouse. Elsewhere in the room, Meta public affairs director Erin McPike circled states and finger-painted numbers on a television touch screen that looked like something you’d find in any corporate boardroom.

When you don’t have a Decision Desk breaking your flow, as Williams assured his audience at the top of the streaming broadcast, you don’t have to worry about such things. The clumsy team at “Election Night” kept tabs on everything for us — meaning Williams received updates from other networks’ decision-making boards on his phone.

“Election Night” brought the longtime NBC and MSNBC anchor back to the desk for a marathon night of talking politics. Politely. So what if it looked a little better produced than a local TV station’s public affairs program? It’s just an experiment in what passes for nonpartisan coverage, possibly helping Amazon figure out how to gain a foothold in live, non-sports streaming events, where Disney and Netflix have always made inroads.

Williams opened the night with a voiceover narration of a letter to the nation’s first leaders. “Dear Founding Fathers, first of all about the more perfect union thing. We’re not quite there yet, but we’re working on it.” That’s one way of saying it. From there, Williams went through everything we achieved and had yet to achieve, game-wise including the recognition that some of America’s first heroes enslaved the ancestors of black people, which, against all media hype, showed up in force.

Along the way, Williams neglected to say the words, “Oh, and a bunch of people who support the Republican presidential nominee started a riot on January 6, 2021,” because it wasn’t that kind of jamboree.

Instead, he put it this way: “The last time we did this, it was far from the peaceful process you imagined. No one ever said that striving for a more perfect union would be easy.

“Whatever happens tonight,” he concluded, “we will have a republic tomorrow and the day after that.”

Who says live election coverage (on a platform founded by Jeff Bezos) can’t be upbeat?

Prime Video made “Election Night” freely available, even to users without a subscription to Amazon Prime. For cable news junkies, it was a reunion of stars who left the company by choice or force, including former Fox anchor Shepard Smith, former CNN host Don Lemon and CNN’s longtime chief political correspondent Candy Crowley.

On the left was James Carville, hanging out in his polo shirt, looking increasingly somber as the evening wore on. From the conservative side of the fold were people like Kristin Davison of Axiom Strategies.

Most conspicuous, however, was the absence. “Election Night” was free of blingy graphics, screaming chyrons and doom-soaked gongs and bells at the top of each hour. There was some of that every time a result was called, which was not as often as MSNBC, Fox News and CNN stated through their broadcasts.

Its calls lagged behind their establishment news counterparts. Still, given the overall hesitancy to call most races aside from the obvious deep red and blue states, and Fox’s early call for the entire race for Donald Trump, there wasn’t a great sense that we were missing something. Eventually, Democrats and those who voted with them realized their doom was upon them—but since it was, why rush into it?

Coming into this election night, it was natural for one’s brain to feel . . . distorted. Within months, the Democratic presidential campaign transformed itself from President Joseph Biden, who withdrew because his party believed he could not win over Vice President Kamala Harris, who, according to popular and misguided thinking, could not lose.

Anyone who feared another four years of Trump vacillated from hopelessness to euphoria to quiet fear. The joy rose again a day or two before the election when Iowa pollster J. Ann Selzer spotted a blip in the data that put Harris three points ahead in the Hawkeye state.

Still, all indicators pointed to a race looking close to a panic-attack-inducing degree. That feeling is not conducive to a night spent with an information delivery system designed to keep audiences on edge. Some viewers live for this stress.

NBC News National Political Correspondent Steve Kornacki (William B. Plowman/NBC)Kornacki had an entire online cheering section recalling his participation in the election night campaign on social media, marveling at his delicate dancing and monologue around the big board.

Even that had its limits. A few hours after Kornacki did what he does best, TV writer Sierra Ornelas wrote on X what I and probably many others were thinking. “I’ve reached the point where I want to kiss Kornacki and I want to hit him too,” she said. “Does that make sense?” The post has since disappeared.

The cable news landscape has long been a site of information overload, which only accelerated during Trump’s first presidency. Election night coverage on the three major cable news networks further highlighted how sharp the divide has become between left-leaning reporting on MSNBC and Fox’s right-leaning coverage.

On MSNBC, Rachel Maddow and her polling team were happy with the Democrats’ odds, reflecting the sunny side of the polls, which once again misjudged several key factors, including the degree to which Latinos and Gen Z white men were rooting for Trump. On Fox, Jesse Watters called Elon Musk, Tulsi Gabbard, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and Megyn Kelly for “a murderer’s row of intellects” supporting the former president.

As for their take on Harris as the night began, Fox star Greg Gutfeld had this nugget of exit poll insight. “It’s interesting that 70% say this country is headed in the wrong direction. Isn’t it ironic that it’s the woman who refuses to ask for directions?”

CNN’s expected position in all of this is supposedly front and center — and King and Jake Tapper certainly did their narrow best to lead us into a patently unexpected turn of events, fattened by terms like “sliding” and fluffed by interrupting gongs heralding “for close to ringing” non-alarms.

Within that ranking, “Election Night” was the perfect combination of check-in and check-out. Many, including me, described it as lo-fi and decidedly lower budget, like the lovely dive down the street that says it offers food but actually has a nearby shared takeaway menu and a willing bar back to pick up your order.

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But honestly, spending time with Williams’ news den jamboree wasn’t terrible. With polling analysis from Nate Silver and FiveThirtyEight completely smashed and social media echo chambers evolving from steady to utterly stunned as the evening wore on, Williams’ election information missile silo was a bastion of calm.

There were no gleeful chuckles or smiles masking discomfort, only respectful discussion between people on both sides of the political fence, or straddling it, about what this result tells us about who we are and how we as a nation should treat these results.

If November 5 ends up representing the grand finale of American democracy – then “Election Night” will be remembered as the strange companion holding our hands as the first glimmers passed on the distant horizon. It may end up being a one-time affair. But if it does come back, I hope it doesn’t change anything other than, maybe, a screen upgrade.