For a little while Tuesday night”Election night with Brian Williams” was the breaking political news equivalent of a meditation app. That CNNis John King and MSNBChis Steve Kornacki Looking at states and districts on their tactile maps, Williams calmly held a polite conversation about the election from the center of a gigantic Los Angeles soundstage.

Behind him lay a digital backdrop that, from a right camera angle, made it look as if his office sat in the middle of a freeway strewn with American flags.

Two muscle cars were parked in the carpet of prairie brush above his shoulder. Elsewhere, a long table populated with party strategists, consultants and media personalities such as founding partner Puck Baratunde Thurston and “view” graduate Abby Huntsman debated the merits of red and blue mirages, in front of a classic red barn.

In another section of the set—which, again, looks like the inside of a warehouse—several experts lounged quietly on sofas that looked like they were sourced from another Amazon warehouse. Elsewhere in the room, Erin McPike, Meta’s director of public affairs, circled states and numbers painted with her finger on a television touchscreen that looked like something you’d find in any corporate boardroom.

When you don’t have a decision office interrupting your stream, as Williams assured his audience at the top of the stream, you don’t have to worry about such things. The ragtag team at “Election Night” watched it all for us — meaning Williams got updates from other networks’ decision offices on his phone.

“Election Night” returned the old NBC and MSNBC anchor to the office for a marathon night of political talk. Polite. What if it looked a little better produced than a local TV station’s public affairs program? It’s just an experiment in what passes for nonpartisan coverage, perhaps helping Amazon figure out how to get a foothold in the live, non-sports streaming space where Disney and Netflix have always made inroads.

Williams opened the evening with a voice-over narration of a letter to the nation’s early leaders. “Dear Founding Fathers, first, on that more perfect matter of union. We’re not there yet, but we’re working on it.” That’s one way of saying it. From there, Williams went through everything we had accomplished and still had to accomplish, and brilliantly included the recognition that some of America’s first heroes enslaved the ancestors of black people who, against all media hype, they showed up in force.

Along the way, Williams neglected to say the words, “Oh, and a bunch of people who support the Republican nominee for president staged an insurrection on January 6, 2021,” because this wasn’t that kind of jamboree.

Instead, he put it this way: “The last time I did this, it was far from the peaceful process you imagined. No one ever said striving to be a more perfect union would be easy.

“Whatever happens tonight,” he said in closing, “we shall have a republic tomorrow and the day after.”

Who says live election coverage (on a platform founded by Jeff Bezos) can’t be upbeat?

Prime Video has made “Election Night” available for free, even to users without an Amazon Prime subscription. For cable news junkies, was a reunion of stars who left the business by choice or force, including the former Fox host Shepard Smithformer CNN host Don Lemon and CNN’s longtime chief political correspondent Candy Crowley.

On the left was James Carville, commanding in his polo shirt and looking increasingly glum as the evening wore on. On the conservative side of the group were people like Kristin Davison of Axiom Strategies.

The most visible, however, were the absences. “Election Night” was devoid of flashy graphics, blaring chirons and reckoning-soaked gongs and bells at the end of each hour. There was some of it whenever a result was called, which wasn’t as often as MSNBC, Fox News and CNN rang throughout their broadcasts.

Its calls were slightly behind their news counterparts. However, given the general reluctance to call most races outside of the obvious deep red and blue states and Fox’s early call of the entire race for Donald Trumpthere wasn’t much of a feeling that we were missing something. Ultimately, the Democrats and those who voted with them realized that their fate was upon them – but since that was the case, why rush it?

Coming into this election night, it was natural for one’s brain to feel . . . mixed. Within months, the Democratic presidential campaign had recovered from President Joseph Biden, who resigned because his party believed it could not win a nomination for Vice President Kamala Harris which, the popular and mistaken thinking went, could not lose.

Anyone who feared four more years of Trump swung from despair to euphoria to quiet dread. Joy rose again a day or two before the election when Iowa pollster J. Ann Selzer saw a problem in the data that put Harris three points ahead in the Hawkeye State.

Even so, all indicators pointed to a race that seemed close to a panic attack-inducing degree. This feeling is not conducive to a night spent with an information delivery system designed to keep the audience on edge. Some viewers live for this stress, grant it.

NBC News National Political Correspondent Steve Kornacki (William B. Plowman/NBC)Kornacki had an entire online cheering section recall his election night entrance on social media, marveling at his delicate dancing and monologuing around the big board.

Even that had its limits. Hours after Kornacki was doing what he does best, TV writer Sierra Ornelas posted on X what I, and surely many others, were thinking. “I got to the point where I want to kiss Kornacki and I also want to punch him,” she said. “Does that make sense?” The post has since disappeared.

The cable news landscape has long been a place of information overload, which has only accelerated during Trump’s first presidency. Election night coverage on the three major cable news networks further highlighted how stark the divide has become between MSNBC’s left-wing reporting and Fox’s right-wing coverage.

On MSNBC, Rachel Maddow and her polling team were upbeat about the Democrats’ chances, reflecting the sunnier side of polls that again misjudged several key factors, including the extent to which Latinos and Gen Z white men broke for Trump. At Fox, Jesse Watters was calling Elon Musk, Tulsi Gabbard, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and Megyn Kelly “a row of intellectual criminals” supporting the former president.

As for their view of Harris earlier in the night, the Fox star Greg Gutfeld had this number of exit poll statistics. “It’s interesting that 70% say this country is going in the wrong direction. Isn’t it ironic that the woman is the one who refuses to ask for directions?”

CNN’s expected position in all of this is central, one assumes — and certainly King and Jake Tapper have done their best to lead us into a patently unexpected turn of events, smeared with terms like “slippage” and puffed with gongs interrupted that announces “too close”. to call” non-alerts.

In that ranking, “Election Night” was the perfect combination of check-in and check-out. Many, including myself, have described it as lo-fi and definitely lower budget, like that cute little dive down the street that says it serves food but actually has a takeout menu of to a nearby restaurant and a barback willing to pick up your order.

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But honestly, spending time with Williams news, cave, wasn’t terrible. With polling analysis from Nate Silver and FiveThirtyEight in full blast and social media echo chambers going from stable to downright freaked out as the evening wore on, Williams’ election intelligence missile silo was a bastion of calm.

There were no gleeful giggles or smiles masking malaise, just respectful discussions between people on either side of the political fence, or straddling it, about what this result tells us about who we are and how we should, as a nation, let us process these results.

If November 5th ends up being the grand finale for American democracy – then “Election Night” will be remembered as that strange companion holding our hand as the first flashes of light burst on the distant horizon. It can end up being a unique business. But if it comes back, I hope it doesn’t change anything except maybe a screen upgrade.