Prime Video took over a soundstage in Los Angeles Tuesday for its first live election special — but despite the expansive space and technology on display, the telecast’s opening hours didn’t feel much different than the multitude of other election night options.
Election Night Live began with anchor Brian Williams reciting a voiceover addressed to the founding fathers, noting what they established for the nation (along with the fact that many of them were slaveholders) while asking for “the strength and wisdom to see our way through this.”
The special originated from a Volume stage (the same kind of high-tech facility used on shows like The Mandalorian). Most of the time, a series of images from across the country was projected behind Williams, with a huge, swooping “Live News Alert” banner taking over the screens when there was a result to report.
The special did a lot of run-up before any results came in, laying out the issues at stake and the way groups of voters might be leaning for a full two hours (the bane of any election night broadcast is filling time before and between reporting of vote results). The show featured two panels of pundits: Abby Huntsman, Baratunde Thurston, political strategists James Carville and Mike Murphy, former Trump press aide Erin Perrine and historian Douglas Brinkley behind a long table (which Williams turned to more often in the first few hours) and journalist Jessica Yellin leading conversations in a lounge area with ex-CNN correspondent Candy Crowley, former Trump aides Kristin Davison and Sarah Matthews and former Ohio Rep. Tim Ryan.
Erin McPike, a former journalist and political consultant (but currently a public affairs executive at Meta) ran the electoral map. Shepard Smith was at Harris headquarters, and the New York Post’s Lydia Moynihan was at the Trump HQ. Puck‘s Tara Palmeri, who has covered the Trump campaign, was in the studio, telling Williams she had been de-credentialed from the election night festivities. (All three of them were absent for several hours after their introductions in the pregame portion.)
Williams also noted that the operation did not have a decision desk and would be reporting when other news outlets made calls. He did that, noting reports from CNN and his old home at MSNBC, but it was unclear what Prime Video was using for its calls of states for Donald Trump or Kamala Harris. In general, it seemed to be cautious in calling states — even as Williams announced that reliably Democratic states like Illinois and New York would go to Harris, those projections didn’t go on the board. That mirrored a few other news organizations, including ABC, CBS and MSNBC, while Fox News, The New York Times and The Washington Post were quicker to put states’ electoral votes in either column.
What there wasn’t, at least in the first few hours, was much vocal disagreement among the panelists. Everyone took their turn speaking, and there wasn’t much back and forth between panelists. Williams may have set the tone for that, saying early on that political consensus in the country was “dead, gone, buried, done, dusted” and praising bygone days of bipartisanship.
In that and other aspects, Election Night Live was very much the Williams show, though, as the former NBC and MSNBC anchor dominated screen time and did remote interviews with officeholders and reporters, including former Sen. Al Franken, Don Lemon, New York Rep. Ritchie Torres and others. Huntsman handled a couple of them and Yellin very few.
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