“If it bleeds it leads,” runs the old saying about local news. Family of five killed in crack-fueled home invasion on Long Island. Gang violence on the South Side. Of course, no one watches local news anymore—except, of course, the millions of people the right-wing, Trump-friendly Sinclair stations reach every day. Everyone—meaning everyone but the demographic undesirables watching local news—is watching cable news: Fox News, CNN, MSNBC. A cable-network group head recently moaned to me that his demographically desirable female viewers had, en masse, ditched daytime viewing for MSNBC. As reality TV supplanted soap opera, so now cable news has supplanted reality TV. Thanks to the mix of pre-meditated and accidental outrage emanating hourly from the White House (leavened, albeit less so every day, by entertaining incompetence), cable news is where you go to tap into that need to watch stuff happen—in this case, watch our democracy implode in real time. Had Hillary won, none of this would be here. Sure, Fox News would’ve stuck around for a while, but eventually its viewers would have died off, one by one, pitching forward into their bean casseroles as Tucker Carlson made “I’m a moron” faces at them through the tee vee.

But MSNBC is now challenging Fox News for ratings supremacy. Its main anchor, Rachel Maddow, sometimes out-rates Minister of Propaganda Sean Hannity. Maddow is nominally a straight-news anchor. She does not opine openly; she doesn’t need to. She has become so intertwined with her audience, so intimately in sync with her viewers, that we look for clues in the pitch of her voice, the ratio of her funny-ha-ha faces to her funny-weird faces. Critics like to point to her showman’s over-reliance on storytelling, her long, entertaining multi-block narrative detours—achieving a level of oral folk narrative akin to Russian skaz— as a failure to just give us the facts already. But as Michael Kinsley used to point out: there are plenty of facts; the trick is making them make sense. Maddow is uniquely skilled at pulling in historical antecedents, drawing obscure connections, and smartly distinguishing among known knowns, known unknowns, unknown unknowns. And she is almost alone in understanding the urgency and danger of this moment.

Photos by Heidi Gutman/ABC/Getty Images (Maddow), by Roy Rochlin/FilmMagic (O'Donnell).

MSNBC intuited the nature of the resistance early, quickly promoting its cadre of young, competent, but also, it must be said, unusually winsome reporters to host slots throughout the day. Kasie Hunt, 33, whose excellent Sunday-night show, Kasie DC, is often promoted with a quick AC/DC flare-up, cocks her head slightly to the left and offers a shy smile before delivering the daily horrors. Capping a daytime run of women anchors is fact-based Republican Nicolle Wallace, whose palpable outrage is tempered by “Isn’t this all absurd?” laughter. Heading into the evening hours, the network promoted secret fourth Beastie Boy Ari Melber to the six-o’clock hour and installed guy-your-sister-should’ve-married, Maddow protégé Chris Hayes in the eight-o’clock slot. Melber and Hayes, both shy of 40 and both shockingly smart and well read, port a bit of daytime’s just-back-from-Coachella vibe to the evening hours, providing a counterpoint to Maddow and the slightly world-weary sangfroid of MSNBC’s well-cured inside-the-Beltway alpha males, Chris Matthews (the bumptious one), Lawrence O’Donnell (the mordant one), and Brian Williams (the just-starting-to-age-into-avuncular one). Oddly, perhaps, given that MSNBC is signaling “We got next” millennial optimism, there are only three regular nonwhite hosts: Ali Velshi, a Muslim of Indian extraction; the very un-millennial civil-rights warhorse Al Sharpton; and Joy Reid, who gets to host the weekend early-morning slots previously held by an earlier MSNBC African-American host, Melissa Harris-Perry.

Morning Joe, with its host fiancés, Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski, is a soap opera of its own. This is not just because of the danger, danger, high-voltage courtship of its co-hosts but also because of their multi-year ménage à trois with Donald Trump, whose self-love loomed over the proceedings each morning during the campaign, phoning in (from bed, it seemed) to goof off live on early-morning TV. When Joe and Mika finally, inevitably, turned on Trump last year, he responded like a spurned lover, describing Brzezinski as bleeding from plastic surgery. Morning Joe has been a masterpiece of triangulation: after competing with CNN to give Trump uncritical airtime in 2016, it has morphed into the smartest critique of Trump and Trumpism outside of Maddow.