‘Everyman Guy’ Gets a Talk Show

Phil Donahue makes his comeback to daily TV tonight on MSNBC, but it’s only one of many changes at the cable news network. Another talk-oriented addition at 4 p.m. Pacific time, preceding Donahue’s show, features Jerry Nachman, who is also MSNBC’s new editor in chief and a self-proclaimed “exhibitionist.”

Nachman says he wants to be the “Everyman guy who got a TV show” and hopes viewers will say, “He asked the question I would ask if I were in his job.” His boss, MSNBC President Erik Sorenson, says Nachman “looks at the world as an outsider.”

But in many ways, Nachman is the insider’s insider--a former editor of the New York Post, news director at two New York TV stations and executive producer of ABC’s “Politically Incorrect With Bill Maher.” He says he won’t call guests he’s known for “25 or 30 years by their last names. That would be disingenuous.”

The topics on his show, he says, will probably center on “cops, crime, courts, racial politics, the media, media criticism and popular culture issues,” promising above all to be “counterintuitive.”