Up with Chris Hayes Is Officially No Longer Cool

All hipster phenomena face that crucial moment when their street cred is threatened by their own success, when their fans begin to catch their parents whistling the tune to Creep as they rake leaves, or setting up their own profiles on the hot social media platform of the moment. MSNBC’s Up With Chris Hayes faces such a moment now, as host Chris Hayes and his show have now been featured in the 21st Century equivalent of the bulletin board at your parents’ work, the print edition of Entertainment Weekly.

Once upon a time, Up with Chris Hayes was the sole province of a ragtag band of viewers called #Uppers, who expanded the show’s playing field to the social media universe that is Twitter (the #Uppers get a shout-out in EW), and forward-thinking media websites like Mediaite. The combination of Hayes’ own good-faith approach to political discussion, a production team that consistently performs the alchemy that results in panels that can sustain a two-hour conversation on a limited number of topics, and a knack for unintended provocation have grown the show from cult favorite to the cusp of pop culture crossoverdom.

This may seem like a bit of an overstatement, but Entertainment Weekly is the only print magazine that I still read (and subscribe to) precisely because it is a great one-stop shop for everything that’s popular outside of the world I cover here, and it’s exceedingly rare that they overlap. Yes, they’re adept at identifying trends, but not relative to the grassroots hipsters who would gladly give their lives to walk on lava before it was cool. And it’s the print edition, which is like a website, but stuck on pieces of paper. The magazine has a weekly circulation of around 1.8 million, 1,799,994 of which are being read by people who probably don’t watch Up, but might just give it a try now. The horror. Next thing you know, we’ll be watching a Very Special Up Wedding episode.

The full-page spread by EW‘s Melissa Maerz doesn’t break a lot of news, but serves as a primer for the uninitiated, who, for example, might be thrown by the combination of wonkery and old-to-middle-school rap references. There’s at least one nugget I was shocked to find out: Up Executive Producer Jonathan Larsen “wrote for the same Batman comic as Lost scribe Damon Lindelof.”

That might help explain Larsen’s knack for putting together the panels that keep viewers coming back, made up not just of cable news talking heads, but of characters. Eli Lake and Rula Jebreal may not be household names, but when they’re on an Up panel together, they make magic.

Maerz also gets a glowing quote from Rachel Maddow, who says “Chris is a rare combination of aggressive and lovable. He is uncompromising in his reporting and cold, hard analytic capacity, but there is something so earnest about the way he does those things, he earns your affection as much as your respect.”

One of the pitfalls of trying to do something different is that, as soon as you enjoy a little success, The Suits always want to mess with what you’re doing, but there’s not mich danger of that here. The success of Up is due, in no small part, to number one fan Phil Griffin, who kind of thought up some of the quirks that make Up tick. The show’s success has changed the MSNBC landscape on weekends. For several week now, the network has been running Friday editions of The Last Word With Lawrence O’Donnell, followed by repeats of the primetime lineup, instead of the prison documentaries we’ve all become used to turning off. While that’s mainly due to the election and O’Donnell’s surging ratings, it doesn’t hurt that MSNBC now has a news beachhead on Saturday mornings  for them to lead into.

The final nail in Up’s indie-cred coffin, though, is that Maerz pegs Up‘s audience at 472,000 viewers, which is more than just “good for a Saturday morning show,” it’s more than weekday mainstay Morning Joe draws some days, and in a much more advertiser-friendly demographic.

As if things weren’t bad enough, Hayes is also going to be plastered in the November issue of GQ, another collection of pieces of paper (which is not actually a “quarterly” anymore), in a feature by the excellent Reid Cherlin, who calls Hayes “The Liberal Host Even Conservatives Watch.”

That’s great, and all, but is it cool?

This is an opinion piece. The views expressed in this article are those of just the author.