Cable news is raiding the podcast industry, and the latest heist just landed on MS NOW’s weekend lineup.
The newly rebranded network (formerly MSNBC) announced a deal with Crooked Media to launch “Crooked on MS NOW,” a weekly compilation show pulling highlights from the progressive podcast empire’s biggest shows.
The program will debut Saturday, February 28 at 9 p.m. ET, replacing what had been a Rachel Maddow re-air in the timeslot, with its first episode built around coverage of the State of the Union address.
The deal is both a smart play and a telling admission about where audiences actually live in 2026.
What The Deal Actually Looks Like
Each Saturday episode will feature curated clips from across Crooked Media’s podcast roster: Pod Save America, Pod Save the World, Strict Scrutiny, Lovett or Leave It, Runaway Country with Alex Wagner (who is already an MS NOW contributor), Hysteria, Assembly Required with Stacey Abrams, Offline with Jon Favreau, and What A Day. The Pod Save America hosts, Jon Favreau, Jon Lovett, Dan Pfeiffer, and Tommy Vietor, will tape intros and outros for each episode to give the compilation some narrative structure.
Think of it as the podcast equivalent of a greatest hits album, repackaged for the cable audience that still prefers their politics served through a television set.
MS NOW President Rebecca Kutler framed the deal in the expected corporate-positive language, saying she’s “long admired” what Crooked Media built and calling their shows “credible, quality content.” Crooked CEO Lucinda Treat emphasized the mission alignment, pointing to shared values around “freedom, equality, compassion, and the rule of law.” Translation: the audiences overlap heavily, so this is less about discovery and more about cross-pollination.
The Numbers Behind The Move
Crooked Media’s podcast lineup generates over 30 million monthly downloads, with the flagship Pod Save America pulling more than one million listeners per episode on its own. The company, founded in 2017 by former Obama administration staffers Favreau, Lovett, and Vietor, has racked up more than 80 awards and nominations, including a Peabody nomination and Tribeca Honors recognition.
On the MS NOW side, the network reaches roughly 11 million Americans weekly on television and reported 3.8 billion YouTube views alongside 140 million audio downloads from its own podcast slate in 2025. That in-house slate is already substantial: 20 original podcasts and 22 “showcasts,” including Rachel Maddow Presents: Ultra (which earned a 2025 Edward R. Murrow Award), Rachel Maddow Presents: Burn Order, MS NOW Presents: Clock It, and The Best People with Nicolle Wallace.
Adding Crooked’s content doesn’t just fill a Saturday night hole. It gives MS NOW access to an audience that has increasingly drifted away from traditional cable but hasn’t abandoned progressive media consumption. That’s the real prize here.
Cable News Has a Podcast Problem (And This Is The Fix)
Here’s the context that makes this deal matter beyond its own specifics: cable news networks are in an arms race to absorb podcast talent, and nobody wants to be the last one to figure out the model.
Fox News fired the starting gun last July when it struck a licensing deal with the conservative Ruthless podcast, hosted by a crew of GOP operatives who’d built a loyal following among younger conservative men, a demographic that barely touches cable news otherwise. That deal was explicitly positioned as Fox’s answer to the audience migration away from pay TV. Just this week, Fox expanded the strategy further by announcing “Hang Out with Sean Hannity,” a twice-weekly podcast launching March 3 from Hannity’s Florida studio.
CNN has been in the space longer with Anderson Cooper’s “All There Is,” though it hasn’t made the same aggressive licensing plays. MS NOW had been testing the waters with its own podcast productions before pulling the trigger on this Crooked deal.
The pattern is clear: cable networks are becoming podcast distributors because the alternative is watching their relevance erode one canceled cable subscription at a time. The cord-cutting trend that media executives spent years dismissing as an exaggeration has now reshaped the entire business model. When your median viewer age keeps climbing and younger audiences get their political commentary from earbuds rather than set-top boxes, you either adapt or become background noise.
The Versant Factor
This deal also carries the fingerprints of MS NOW’s new corporate reality. The network is now part of Versant Media Group after Comcast spun off its cable assets in January 2026. Under the Versant umbrella, MS NOW relocated from its longtime home at 30 Rockefeller Plaza to new studios at the former New York Times Building on 229 West 43rd Street, complete with three studios and an LED volume built out in just three months.
The Comcast divorce freed MS NOW to operate more independently, and “Crooked on MS NOW” is being promoted as part of Versant’s push for more original programming. When you’re no longer under the protective but constraining wing of NBCUniversal, you need to move faster and take bigger creative swings. Licensing a popular podcast network for your weakest night of programming is exactly that kind of swing.
MS NOW is also planning to launch its own direct-to-consumer streaming service later in 2026, which is expected to include live channel streaming, exclusive events, and community features. The Crooked partnership looks like an early test of what that broader digital-first strategy might eventually become.
Will It Actually Work?
The honest answer: maybe, but probably not for the reasons MS NOW hopes.
Saturday night at 9 p.m. has never been cable news prime real estate. The audience that loyally tunes in to Rachel Maddow or Nicolle Wallace on weeknights doesn’t necessarily show up on weekends. If “Crooked on MS NOW” is meant to be a ratings mover for linear cable, expectations should be modest.
But that’s probably not the real play. The value here is in cross-platform reach: clips from the show going viral on YouTube and social media, Crooked’s existing audience discovering MS NOW’s broader programming, and both brands building the kind of ecosystem that can survive the inevitable further decline of traditional cable distribution.
The Fox News/Ruthless comparison is instructive. That deal wasn’t really about Saturday night ratings either. It was about building a media ecosystem where talent, audiences, and content flow between platforms. Fox is doing it from the right. MS NOW is now doing it from the left. Both are essentially admitting the same thing: the future of political media isn’t any single platform. It’s the ability to meet audiences wherever they happen to be consuming content at any given moment.
For Crooked Media, the upside is straightforward. A cable distribution deal exposes their shows to an older demographic that might never find them through a podcast app but will absolutely sit in front of a television on a Saturday night. It’s audience expansion without the creative compromise of building something new from scratch.
The Bigger Picture
The Crooked/MS NOW deal is one more signal that the wall between “podcast media” and “television media” is dissolving faster than anyone predicted. The talent pipeline has reversed: instead of TV stars launching podcasts (which was the 2018-2022 playbook), podcast stars are now getting pulled into television. The economics of cable might be declining, but the reach is still unmatched for certain demographics.
The real question is whether these deals evolve into something deeper than Saturday night compilation shows, or whether they remain what they currently are: a clever, low-cost way to fill programming holes while signaling that you understand where the media business is heading.
Either way, “Crooked on MS NOW” premieres February 28 with State of the Union analysis. If you’re already a Pod Save America listener, you’ve heard the takes. But now your cable-subscribing parents can hear them too, and that might be the whole point.