Later, after swapping her on-air blazer for a fleece zip-up, Ms. Maddow speculated that some viewers were gravitating to the show to feel part of a broader movement across the country.

“There is this surge in civic interest and engagement,” Ms. Maddow said as she sprawled in a chair in her cluttered Rockefeller Plaza office, where the tip of an Emmy Award poked out of a metal beer pail. “It feels like a spontaneous, organic, pretty broad-based, heterogeneous, energized, constructive force, and it’s been interesting to me to see it happen everywhere.”

Still, Ms. Maddow smiled when told that some viewers say they turn to her as a source of sanity. “My standard response to that is, ‘That is a gossamer thread — you need to work on that in your life!’” she said, laughing. “I’m a TV show, and you shouldn’t depend on me. Anything can happen. Build up other sources of sanity.”

In some ways, television is the last mass medium that Americans turn to en masse in uncertain times. “It is a place where we congregate,” said Martin Kaplan, director of the Norman Lear Center for media and society at the University of Southern California. “We all gather around that hearth to know what’s going on out there, and be comforted by the people who come on our screens to say, things will be all right.”

Last week, outside a taping of Samantha Bee’s TBS comedy show, “Full Frontal,” Stacie Bloom, 44, said she was finding television “cathartic.”

“Maddow, I love her,” said Ms. Bloom, a scientist who lives in New York. “It’s reinforcing to watch. It’s the same reason I marched in the women’s march: It’s because I believe in it, and I want to be surrounded by other people who believe in it, too.”