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“The only reason you’re going to need that sometime if you fall through the ice,” said Rachel Maddow, standing next to her pickup truck on an empty boat on an overcast winter day. She threw me what looked like a cross between a bicycle lock and a telephone cord and told me to put it around my neck: safety picks. At worst, you’re supposed to take things apart with the orange handle, stab through the ice ahead of you, and fight your way back to solid ground. “There’s 20 inches of ice here, you’re not going to fall through,” Maddow promised. “But just in case.”
It was a Monday in early February on Maddow’s home turf in Western Massachusetts. We met in the parking lot of a frozen lake surrounded by low mountains, Maddow in a buffalo check, a baseball cap emblazoned with the YUM fishing lures logo, and tortoiseshell Coke bottle glasses that people back home don’t get to see when she’s put on makeup for the cameras. The temperature had dropped to about 12 degrees over the weekend, but was now in the mid-30s, perfect for our fishing trip: more than enough ice to minimize the risk of freezing to death, warm enough to protect your hands from fall excluded. Maddow lives for these things, even as someone who grew up in sunny Castro Valley, California. Before we left, she showed me the cozy lakefront fixer-upper she’d purchased weeks earlier with her longtime partner, photographer Susan Mikula, about 30 minutes from the couple’s 164-year-old farmhouse. We stopped by her bait shop, in the garage of a home that boasted tattered Trump flags, where Maddow stocked up on rose-red minnows and medium shiners. Then we stuffed ourselves into our snow pants, strapped medieval-looking spikes onto our boots, and hit the lake with a sled full of gear. “It might be a little slushy,” she said, “but I promise it’s good.”
A week earlier, Maddow broke 2.4 million viewers. “I’m going to take a break for a little bit,” she said, broadcasting on a laptop from her home rather than her nearby studio because she had just been exposed to COVID-19. (It was Mikula’s, who already had a scary bout with the disease in the fall of 2020.) Maddow said she has several projects in the works outside of her nightly duties — including Ben Stiller — and Lorne Michaels — directing an adaptation of her podcast series. from 2018, bag man, about the Nixon-era Spiro Agnew bribery scandal — and that she needed time and space to work on it. She said she would reappear with special coverage as warranted, such as the State of the Union or “other major news events.” (Europe’s largest land war since World War II, which would briefly interrupt Maddow’s hiatus, was not what she had in mind.)
A few days later, on Thursday, Maddow recanted The Rachel Maddow Show for the last time until her scheduled return in mid-April. That Friday she called me to go ice fishing. And on Monday, out on the lake, as we drilled little holes and played with our tilt traps and Vexilar probes—it’s a more high-tech sport than you might think—it occurred to Maddow that this was the first Monday in 13 years that she it wouldn’t be live on the air five nights a week with no end in sight. “Today is day one,” she said.
Maddow was embarking on a new chapter in her career, a foray into the wilds of our multi-platform media future where her success and influence would no longer be quantifiable. Over the next few months, we’d talk a lot about what was at stake—her health and well-being and career trajectory, her continued cultural relevance, and the network that has long depended on her massive late-night audience. But right now there was fish to catch. We wound up the first one not long after. “thatMaddow said, holding up our trophy, “it sucks. It’s like a typical size, perfect pixel. She dropped it back into the hole. “Bye! See you! aah That was it great. God and country, thank you very much.”
Maddow is highly regarded The 9 p.m. show — long the crown jewel of MSNBC’s primetime, if not the entire network — debuted on Sept. 8, 2008, with a show hosted by then-superstar Keith Olbermann, whose subsequent defenestration elevated Maddow to queen bee status. The program, known as much for its historical wonder and sweeping monologues as for its left-wingers, was an immediate success. But it also turned out to be a huge problem. Maddow is extremely hands-on, and opening any show—the “A-block,” in cable news parlance—requires an intense level of preparation on short notice. (Someone described it to me as “a bunch of people who hunker down for finals every night, like in a library, frantically studying.”) Over the years, Maddow usually wrote the A-block monologue herself, on the heels of a full day of research. In October 2010, after a particularly loud broadcast from a historic Delaware tavern where The Maddow Show covered a Senate showdown between Chris Coons and Christine O’Donnell (remember her?), an exhausted Maddow remarked to a colleague, “You only get to do this job for five years.”
As if. Maddow, 49, has been behind the desk for nearly a decade and a half. She’s been doing the job long enough to mess up her back, which now has seven herniated discs, or bulging discs, that she’s managing with physical therapy. Long enough that when she had a melanoma scare within months of Mikula ending up on the brink of death with COVID, it sank in that she didn’t want to work 60 hours a week until she retired. Long enough that she had begun to worry as she explained to me between bites of the pickerel below that she was “losing her ability to have the energy and intellectual bandwidth to do other kinds of work.”
So Maddow decided it was time for a change. Last fall, she negotiated a jaw-dropping megadeal — a reported $30 million a year no to be on the air five nights a week. Starting at some point in 2022, she’ll be able to do a lot less news cycle chatter and a lot more premium long-term projects: podcasts, specials, documentaries, film adaptations, etc.
Such is the power of Rachel Maddow that it was better for the company to lose her four nights a week than not have her at all. Industry talk is that NBCUniversal gave Maddow a huge raise only to drop her in the key prime-time slot that remains incredibly vital to ratings, advertisers and cable subscriptions. Words that get thrown around in my conversations with industry professionals—most of whom think Maddow is great, by the way—include “ridiculous,” “so crazy” and “dumbest deal ever.” NBCUniversal News Group chairman Cesar Conde strongly disputed those characterizations, telling me in a phone interview: “We only do things that make sense for us strategically or financially. The main focus for us was how to come up with a structure for what we need and want from Rachel, and also what she needs going forward.” Phil Griffin, the former longtime president of MSNBC, who remains one of the most Maddow’s close advisers, admitted it was hard to lose her every night, but said: “The way she works is so demanding, we were lucky to get 14 years out of her. “
After Maddow’s nine-week leave, she returned to The Rachel Maddow Show on April 11 and made it official for her viewers: They’d have her four nights a week for the rest of the month, and then, starting in May, “I’ll be here every week. I’ll be here Monday night.” Thus began Rachel Maddow’s next act, whose power was undeniable even to her naysayers – of which there are many. As Maddow critic Eric Wemple noted in his The Washington Post blog, “Rachel Maddow Can Do Whatever She Wants.”
It’s hard to have overstated Maddow’s value to MSNBC over the past 14 years. After Olbermann’s firing, she became the face of the network’s primetime roster, “the touchstone of everything we do,” as her colleague Joy Reid puts it. The other jewel in MSNBC’s crown, Good morning, Joe, is the network’s center of power, controlling influence in the establishment corridors of New York and Washington. Arguably, Maddow sets the ideological agenda for the network, meaning for the entire MSNBC brand. Her broad progressive appeal and unique approach to anchoring — story-driven monologues that last up to 30 minutes, connect dots you never knew existed and drag viewers down any number of rabbit holes — have made her MSNBC’s number one celebrity and perennial ratings champ, the only cable news figure outside of Murdoch who can play in the same sandbox as the fire-breathers at Fox. At times, she has bested rival Sean Hannity while keeping CNN’s rotating lineup of 9pm hosts in third place — often by a long way — ever since. The Rachel Maddow Show started going regularly Larry King Live more than a decade ago. During the first week of her hiatus last February, the 9pm audience plummeted 26 percent and stayed down for weeks before rebounding to over 2 million following her return on April 11. According to data from MoffettNathanson, Maddow’s share of the 2021 ratings — 11 percent of MSNBC’s total ratings — is higher than that of any other solo anchor in all of cable.
This popularity naturally made her a target. At the extreme end of the spectrum are hate mail and death threats, which she says haven’t abated even though it’s not as often on TV anymore. Then there are the requisite accusations from the right, who treat her with the same contempt that liberals harbor for figures like Hannity and Tucker Carlson. But even among non-enemy fighters, it’s not as if Maddow is universally loved. Typical criticisms are that she can be mean, unpleasant, pedantic. On a practical level, her utterly complex monologues just aren’t for everyone, and the payoff doesn’t always justify the termination. In March 2017, Maddow received backlash for touting what appeared to be a holy grail-level scoop on Trump’s taxes, which she teased in a tense 20-minute opening. She finally released a two-page federal payment from Trump’s 2005 declaration obtained by her guest that night, journalist David Kay Johnston. (To be fair, the much maligned segment was the spark that ignited the landmark New York Times investigation which I did manage to reveal the main vein of Trump’s tax returns, as times reporter Suzanne Craig explained during an appearance on Maddow’s show the following year.)
Whatever her detractors think, Maddow remains a sui generis star in the media firmament, which explains the breathless interest in her career machinations. Intrigue began swirling last summer when word leaked that Maddow was considering leaving the network for new opportunities. It wasn’t long before news broke that Maddow, after months of discussions fueled by her superagents at Endeavor, would remain with NBCUniversal after all. She had secured a new multi-year deal to deliver projects in a wide range of formats, from documentaries and streaming specials to films and books, all under the banner of her newly formed independent production company, the name of which I can now reveal: Surprise Inside. Maddow will conceive the projects and NBC will get first right of refusal. The Rachel Maddow Show it will eventually go weekly and she will continue to do specials for the network, but will have a lot more flexibility. It was the Daily Beast that pegged her annual compensation at $30 million.
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