The new host of ABC’s Sunday morning news program, renamed “This Week With Christiane Amanpour,” tried to get a rise out of Nancy Pelosi, the House speaker.

Leaning forward, waving her reading glasses for emphasis, Ms. Amanpour, a former CNN correspondent, pressed a circumspect Ms. Pelosi to give her opinion about the war in Afghanistan. “But what does your gut tell you?” Ms. Amanpour asked. She made her guest recoil and look away when she brandished the Aug. 9 cover of Time magazine, which shows a young Afghan woman whose nose was cut off by the Taliban. “Is America going to abandon the women of Afghanistan?” Ms. Amanpour asked.

Ms. Pelosi, though startled, gave fractured, politic answers on Sunday. Those questions were a better gauge of what Ms. Amanpour, animated and at times impassioned, may be like as the show’s host. Her questions to her second guest, Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates, were well informed, but they weren’t very different or any better than those posed by David Gregory, her rival host on NBC, to Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Over all, however, Ms. Amanpour proved more direct and challenging. Mr. Gregory also brought up the Time cover, but he didn’t confront Admiral Mullen with the disturbing image; NBC flashed it on the screen.

And that’s a noticeable, and even striking, change.

The Sunday talk shows are a rare oasis of calm in a television landscape that is increasingly crammed with high-strung opinion mongers and fake populists on cable news. Network hosts are chosen for their experience and their air of calm detachment. Ms. Amanpour’s predecessors, George Stephanopoulos and, in an interim capacity, the ABC correspondent Jake Tapper, were Washington insiders who had a smooth and knowing way with their guests; even confrontational questions were posed in a collegial tone. That is also the case with Mr. Gregory, who took over “Meet the Press” after Tim Russert’s death in 2008 and is an expert at softening tough questions with button-down congeniality.