Watching TV As America Descends Into the Abyss

On the night of the closest American presidential election ever, which was also the third successive contest with existential stakes, I spent the country’s descent into the abyss toggling between two very different streaming television experiences. Peacock’s nifty new Multiview election feature built on its 360-degree Summer Olympics coverage with three simultaneous screens: the NBC News stream, a rotating window of results, and its patented Steve Kornacki live cam, which gave the country the opportunity to observe every second of the nerd king shuffling papers, drinking coffee, and crunching data. Then there was Prime Video, the streaming arm of the tech giant Amazon, which produced a ten-hour pop-up election-cast extravaganza pitched as a more streamlined alternative to its rivals and anchored by NBC émigré Brian Williams.

This bouncing back and forth corresponded with what felt like the first truly decentralized election in the increasingly Choose Your Own Adventure nature of reality. I could have stuck with the traditional broadcast-media experience, but staying glued to CNN or MSNBC felt incongruous after a campaign season that took place more effectively on bro-wing podcasts like The Joe Rogan Experience and This Past Weekend With Theo Von. I could have gone right-wing voyeur and rode it out with Fox News or NewsNation, but am I really that masochistic? I could have blasted off into the strange new galaxy of livestreams organized by digital-first outlets like The Young Turks, The Free Press, and even the British outfit The Rest Is Politics, but I’m not quite ready to abandon the old world just yet. The Peacock and Prime Video options felt like a decent enough compromise: the comforts of a traditional Election Night experience (correspondents reporting, analysts opining, anchors announcing results) packaged in a way that nodded toward the destabilizing future.

At the top of the night, around 6 p.m. ET, both platforms needed runway to settle into themselves. Call it the awkwardness of the pregame: Peacock’s Kornacki cam didn’t work for about ten minutes, and every hour or so, the Multiview feature would crash, reflecting the instability of the streamer’s new infrastructure. But soon enough, the whole thing came to life with a feeling of pleasant clutter. There’s comfort in the illusion of control that comes with being able to see multiple views at once: footage of Jacob Soboroff reporting on voting lines in Philadelphia juxtaposed with a results screen rotating through empty electoral maps on top of live footage of Kornacki conferring with a producer. I had something to fixate on whenever the NBC News stream threw to commercial break.

But for the newest player on the block, Prime Video, there was a striking amount of throwback. Williams always had the style of a sleazy ’60s nightclub owner, but the minimalism of this production emphasized it in unsettling ways. In many instances, the dry comedic persona he tested out in 30 Rock cameos and might well have honed had his career not been derailed by an embellishment scandal poked through: “We’re getting the old team back together, some people coming out of the Witness Protection Program to join us tonight, and for that we are grateful,” he table-set early in the night. But Prime Video’s election-cast felt so simplified it never quite emphasized the gravity of the night. Doing away with the constant loud noises and exploding infographics of its traditional competitors, the broadcast was so chill and sparse it flirted with amateurism. Like a fallen god trying to make the best of his new mortality, Williams relayed the latest election information from his producer by reading it off his phone. When the results finally started to come in, the guy repeatedly got steamrolled by race calls, and in multiple instances, he tried to transition to a commercial break only for dramatic music to blare in, completely overriding his flow.

By the time Election Night was in full swing, around 8 p.m., Peacock’s stream had me in its thrall. The Kornacki cam was incredible; when the first of the races were called, with many of the expected red states kicking off the Trump tally, you could see the guy’s face light up as he barreled through his folders and screens to provide the corresponding context. Kornacki brought a humanizing contrast to Lester Holt & Co. over on the NBC News stream, who maintained their steely demeanor even as the grim reality began to settle in. At this stage in the evening, animated activity feels good, the results screen populating and the numbers flowing. An influx of information is more or less what I need in moments of great anxiety — as a person who’s afraid of flying, I live in the flight-information screen, particularly when turbulence starts to kick in — and by 10 p.m., the plane was shuddering.

An hour later, the Prime Video election-cast was making me lose my mind. Some of the problems were expected kinks from a first-time production, like awkward handoffs — tossing to meteorologist Jim Cantore: “Jim, we can’t see you yet, but I’m told you’re close” — but its lack of structure felt like a fundamental deficiency. Interviews and discussions ran longer and looser, and since the set itself was so quiet, these talky segments emphasized the unsettling absence of background noise. At one point in a Zoom interview with Pennsylvania congressperson Madeleine Dean, Williams tried to transition out with a choppy back-and-forth over the best cheesesteak joint. There was a lag between his joke and Dean’s being able to hear it, and he kept the interaction going a few beats too long. It was like watching a bit thud on the floor and die, then being forced to witness its decay. The silence surrounding the pair was deafening.

But by 1 a.m., as the night grew grimmer, the minimalism and ramshackle nature of the Prime Video election-cast steadily became more appealing — or rather, the busyness of the Peacock Multiview feature began to grate. When seven hours of Election Night viewing turns into eight and nine, your brain starts to melt into a puddle; by the time 1:30 rolls around, there’s only so many rotations into “too close to call” screens one can take. Now that the writing was on the wall, the pastoral quality of the Williams-cast was like a balm to my ears.

Close to 2 a.m., I watched Williams toss a brief clip of Fox News calling the race for President Trump, who will become the country’s first felon president. As the panelists jockeyed to explain the momentous development in this cavernous studio that was quiet as all hell, the scene had the feel of a strange stage play. I saw Baratunde Thurston, a comedian and writer for Puck, try to reach for profundity as he sought to make sense of the success of Trump’s rhetoric. By now thoroughly exhausted and eye-strained, I couldn’t quite register the specifics of what he said. Indeed, through a haze of fatigue, it felt like I was watching a theater company playact a version of reality in which the news media and American democracy were healthy. I turned off the screen and went to bed.