“It’s not the darkened room and table, but we want to say this is a different show,” Mr. Shapiro said. “We, as TV producers, labor over them, but people don’t watch the set. They watch the host and the guest.”

The centerpiece was a glass table, which seemed not to thrill Ms. Amanpour.

“What is this New York woman kind of desk?” she asked.

“Like Fox News!” a producer replied, drolly.

It turned out that Ms. Amanpour wasn’t exactly joking. In a later interview, she said, “I never like the idea of sitting under a transparent desk so my legs could be the object of interest.”

Ms. Amanpour’s castmates sounded sanguine about the prospects for a new show that is heavy on talk. Ms. Martin, the NPR host, said: “Think about the popularity of podcasts. What are podcasts? Uninterrupted conversations, really. And the fact that people love them so much — they love the conversation, they love being able to carry a thought from one minute to the next without having to stop and revisit something.”

Mr. Isaacson said the segments would move beyond the latest bit of ephemera to light up social media. “It’s going to have a broad range, which is important in an era in which we’ve all gotten a little too hyper-focused on crises of the moment,” he said.

While Ms. Amanpour has had a long run as the host of a CNN International show, she has yet to prove herself as the anchor of a long-lasting program in the United States. When ABC made her the host of its Sunday morning public affairs show, “This Week,” in 2010, she said her main mission was to “make foreign news less foreign” and found herself out of the job in little over a year.

Mr. Zucker blamed the failure partly on Ms. Amanpour’s not quite fitting a morning television genre that demands plenty of inside-the-Beltway talk.