ABC News abruptly flop-sweats Biden interview to primetime on Friday night

For no reason whatsoever, ABC News announced it's airing Joe Biden's upcoming interview with George Stephanopoulos on Friday night primetime, instead of Sunday

By William Hughes | July 4, 2024 | 1:59am

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ABC News abruptly flop-sweats Biden interview to primetime on Friday night

President Joe Biden Photo: Justin Sullivan

ABC News announced tonight that it’s changing its plans for an upcoming interview with President Joe Biden, which has now been moved up, from a leisurely Sunday morning broadcast, to primetime on Friday, July 5—a move that we would never even dream of suggesting implies that all involved are flop-sweating so hard that they could collectively fill a small wading pool, one y0u probably then wouldn’t want to ever use for wading again. Similarly, we’d never suggest that the upcoming interview with George Stephanopoulos is being positioned as a sort of emergency national wellness check on the Commander-In-Chief, or joke that Biden will be asked to do a small booklet of Sudokus or word searches in front of a watching nation, in the grim hopes of dispelling the worries generated by his performance at last week’s debate.

It definitely doesn’t have anything to do with multiple high-profile Democratic donors in the entertainment industry—notably The Leftovers’ Damon Lindelof and Netflix co-founder Reed Hastings—making very loud noises today about how Biden should step down, with Lindelof in particular employing nigh-lethal quantities of tired sports metaphors to try to make his point. And, look, this isn’t really the point of this article, but if we had to choke down the following paragraph of athletic pablum from the Lost co-creator, so do you:

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His teammates are right there next to him. If they can be compelled to walk over to the mound, not just one or two of them, but the manager and the catcher and the entire infield… maybe, just maybe, he will hand them the ball. And we can get our reliever in.

Inspiring.

Anyway, obviously, none of that is why ABC News has abruptly opted to move an interview between Biden and an inherently sympathetic Stephanopoulos to the middle of prime broadcast hours on Friday, where he can demonstrate for a watching nation that he can go for multiple entire sentences without making the words “rictus” or “oh no” float through a viewer’s consciousness. The scheduling move is simply good business sense: American TV viewers love spending time with their Paw-paw on Friday night, when the interview will air, first as part of World News Tonight and then in a primetime special that will go out at 8 p.m. Eastern. (The full interview will still also air on Sunday, along with the release of a full transcript.)

[via Variety]