Anderson Cooper the daytime talk show host does not look all that different from Anderson Cooper the disaster reporter. He is still boyish, still earnest, still reliably clad in a button-down that accentuates the blue of those sympathetic eyes. Yet much of the new show’s media coverage has harped on the apparent contradiction between the two Coopers: windblown Anderson in a flak jacket vs. spruced-up Anderson ministering to celebrities on his talk show couch. “Anderson Cooper offers another version of himself on talk show ‘Anderson,’” announced The Washington Post online. “Here’s the intrepid CNN reporter getting all soft-feature personal,” said The Los Angeles Times. Cooper himself has made it clear that he intends for this show to reveal a different, lighter side of his character, entirely apart from his primetime duties. “People see anchors on a news program as one dimensional,” he told The Wall Street Journal. “This show is a chance for me to show more of my personality.”

But even as an anchor, Cooper’s personality has always been on full display. He established his career reporting from disaster zones with a combination of a war correspondent’s grit and a daytime talk show host’s conspicuous empathy. “I want you to be able to get home and get out of here quickly. The winds are starting to pick up,” he told a guest on Anderson Cooper 360 in Joplin. “Too many kids have already died ... and none of it had to happen, none of it was preordained, that’s the frustrating thing,” he said in Somalia. And most famously, of course, he demanded of Louisiana senator Mary Landrieu after Hurricane Katrina: “Do you get the anger that is out here?” The hallmark of Cooper’s broadcasts is his own investment in the action. He doesn’t just report on what he sees; he tends to victims and stares down bureaucrats and fights through the pathos of it all. So his venture into daytime TV—with its choreographed human dramas playing out before an empathetic studio audience—is hardly a surprise.

In one episode of Anderson, Cooper interviewed two women who had been respectively abandoned as babies and adopted into devoted families. “[In disaster zones] you see strangers digging people out of earthquakes and saving lives,” he said. “But here in America you see that everyday with foster families ... people who change others’ lives.” It was a stretch of an analogy, to be sure, and one that exemplified a central feature of Cooper’s style: the tendency to sentimentalize everything equally, whether it is a village wrecked by a storm or a marriage wrecked by infidelity, a hospital full of starved Somali children or a missing pet. This is largely the source of Cooper’s everyman appeal—the sense that he is not above sharing the various ways in which he is affected by what he sees, and that he is concerned with petty issues as much as lofty ones as normal humans tend to be. But applying the same sentimentality to everything can also be a way of clouding the boundaries between what is truly significant and what is not. Cooper’s interminable heart can have a leveling effect. “I think all of us remember where we were ... when we heard the tragic news that Amy Winehouse had died,” Cooper said during his premiere, the day after the anniversary of 9/11.

Jonathan Klein, the former president of CNN, has called Cooper the “anchorperson of the future.” And Judy Muller, an associate professor of journalism at USC, recently told The New York Times that Cooper “is a different kind of journalist, one for the future. He is transparently who he is.” Much has been made of the changing of the journalistic guard from the Cronkite model of august credibility to a new species of TV emoters, from impersonality to cults of personality. Disaster reporting, in particular, has traditionally required a certain steeliness: chronicling the extent of devastation, citing death tolls, making sense of large-scale disorder. But Cooper is a journalist for whom all news is filtered through an intensely personal lens, an anchor who is physically and emotionally embedded in the topics he reports on. And his taste for both pop culture fluff (AC 360’s the RidicuList) and schmaltz (his annual television special, “CNN Heroes” about “everyday people changing the world”) is well-documented. So both Anderson and AC 360 coexist quite peacefully within the persona of Anderson Cooper. The talk show doesn’t undermine his hard-news background so much as shed light on the form it has taken all along. Cooper has built his brand by addressing all topics, high and low, serious and frivolous, with the full brunt of his compassion and concern. So perhaps this is indeed the model for the “anchorperson of the future”: half disaster correspondent knee-deep in rubble, half daytime talk show host coaxing revelations from the guests on his couch.

ANDERSON IS EVERY BIT as cheesy and overheated as the daytime programs that came before it, though more along the lines of the group therapy sessions of Oprah and Dr. Phil than the human dogfights of Maury and Jerry Springer. Recently, a teenager scheduled to appear on the show—allegedly encouraged by the producers to record his reckless behavior for an episode about the science of the adolescent brain—fell while doing skateboard stunts and ended up in a coma. Cooper’s guests so far have ranged from the Real Housewives of Beverly Hills to a pair of conjoined twins. According to its website, the show is currently seeking representatives for topics including: “Is your daughter a Mean Girl?” “Spouse’s double life?” “Could your ex have been ‘the one’?” Like its predecessors, Anderson sometimes feels a bit like emotional pornography, so graphic and unambiguous that it overloads the feelings. Its slogan is “real, raw, ready,” and its premium is on baring souls and extracting revelations. All sorts of disturbed bonds—romance, kinship, friendship—get probed and then patched up with Cooper as mediator. During peak moments of drama, the camera pans across the rows of concerned faces, all glassy eyes and knitted brows. As with Oprah, Dr. Phil, and Ellen, all of whom Cooper has cited as influences, Anderson’s adhesive is the sense of community Cooper works to generate among himself, the guests, and the studio audience. “Do you have any words of encouragement for Maria here?” he asked Amy Winehouse’s parents, referring to an audience member who had confessed that her daughter was addicted to drugs. “You’re the sweetest girl, I wanna protect you,” he told a young guest who had been bullied in school.