How MSNBC is repackaging weekday content for weekend shows

MSNBC has been bundling segments from its weekday programming to create two weekend offerings.

“The Beat: Weekend” typically airs Saturdays at 4 p.m. eastern and features “best of” clips from “The Beat with Ari Melber.” 

Sundays, meanwhile, feature “Prime: Weekend” that takes a similar approach but pulls from most of the MSNBC afternoon, evening and primetime schedule, including “Deadline: White House,” “The Beat,” “The ReidOut,” “All In With Chris Hayes,” “Inside with Jen Psaki,” “The Rachel Maddow Show,” “Alex Wagner Tonight,” “The Last Word With Lawrence O’Donnell” and “The 11th Hour with Stephanie Ruhle.” 

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On Sundays, the hour opens with an animated open that briefly spotlights each show, combining a cutout photo of each anchor, an on-set or action shot and the show logo. 

Each of these scenes is tinted to match the show’s branding and imagery also features an animated textural edge and an inspiring bed of music plays in the background. 

The order of hosts doesn’t appear to follow much of a pattern in terms of timeslot, alphabetical by host name or some other factor, with the exception that the two Monday-only shows, “Maddow” and “Inside” both appear next to the show that runs the rest of the week in that spot.

After the sequence of host photos, the screen transitions to a control room-inspired image used as a collage to showcase scenes from the collection of shows content is culled from.

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The center of the screen features a large rectangle with space for the MSNBC logo and “Prime Weekend” underneath, with both elements set in NBC Tinker. The on-screen logo notably does not have the colon that’s used in MSNBC’s official listings.

“Prime: Weekend” should not be confused with “MSNBC Prime,” a name that the network used starting in May 2022 after “Maddow” switched to its once-a-week format, leaving a hole at 9 p.m. Tuesday through Friday.

“MSNBC Prime” was eventually replaced with “Alex Wagner Tonight” four days a week.

For the core content of the “Prime: Weekend” offering, MSNBC is editing in anchor intros and outros that were taped solely for this program.

For example, an anchor will appear on-screen greeting viewers to “Prime: Weekend” and transitioning using a line such as “let’s get to the week’s top stories,” after which a segment from earlier in the week runs.

Segments are likely selected using a variety of factors, including viewer interest, how well the story aged and to provide a mix of hosts. It’s likely that stories involving breaking news or rapid-changing information are left out to avoid presenting inaccurate or outdated information by the time the weekend rolls around. 

After each segment, the same anchor who introduced the previous segment appears on camera saying something to the effect of “Prime Time Weekend continues ahead with my colleague (anchor name).”

There’s then a tease taken from the show whose segment is going to be featured next.

MSNBC hasn’t been using a taped “Prime” intro when the show returns from a commercial break, instead just picking up from the start of the segment as originally aired.

The cycle then continues until the final block of the show, though not all segments have a “coming up” VO tease.

Segments use lower thirds that match the showing or segment branding and retain each show’s logo below the MSNBC logo instead of featuring the current time or a live bug.

At the end of the hour, whatever anchor is featured last appears on-camera again, saying something similar to “This has been Prime Time Weekend; I’m (hostname)” before then encouraging to tune in to their timeslot. 

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The show also makes use of an animated wipe inspired by the control room look title card that helps “hide” that the hour is being pieced together from multiple clips. There’s also times when the small portions of the original audio is muted at the beginning or end of a segment, likely to avoid any comments that wouldn’t make sense within the context of a compilation show. 

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It seems likely that MSNBC has canned clips of each of its primetime anchors reading both the generic intro and variations of outros tossing to different anchor names. This would allow the network essentially piece together the entire show without having to record any new video. 

Because of this, anchor clothing, hairstyles and makeup don’t match how they current look, which is unavoidable. 

The pre-taped anchor intros and outros also notably refer to the show as “Prime Time Weekend” despite the show technically being called “Prime: Weekend” (not all of the shows featured on the compilation hour air during primetime).

“Prime: Weekend” does not feature a story from every show featured in the open.