Wearing a pink pussy-bow blouse, her hair no longer slicked back in the trademark power bob of her later Fox News days, Ms. Kelly declared that she was “kind of done with politics for now.” Rather than politics, she explained, her new show would focus on, well, emotions. “Have a laugh with us, a smile, sometimes a tear, and maybe a little hope to start your day,”
.. It was the antithesis of the woman who was once willing to give up the support of her conservative audience to speak truth to power. The former Megyn Kelly came to slay, whether you liked it or not. The new Megyn Kelly is “so excited — so excited” and “also a little nervous; bear with me, please!” With every gesture, every word, every look, the new Megyn Kelly seems to be trying to convey one thing: Like me.
.. It’s one of the bitterest ironies in television that it was at Fox News, network of blond bombshells and chronic sexual harassment, that Ms. Kelly was given the breathing room to become that most unusual of unicorns: an unlikable woman on television.
.. Even as he was commenting on her bra choices, Roger Ailes himself was giving Ms. Kelly savvy advice that was, in a way, progressive. As she notes in her book, Mr. Ailes told her at the beginning of her career “to not try so hard to be perfect” and to show “who I really am.” Who she really was turned out to be smart, aggressive and impossibly quick. A former lawyer, she developed an adversarial approach that made her something of an anomaly among talk show hosts: Whether she was sparring with Anthony Weiner over President Barack Obama’s tax policy or with Donna Brazile over the Democratic National Committee’s hacked emails, Megyn Kelly was not there to make friends.
.. With time, in fact, she assumed a style that had hitherto been the exclusive province of men: a charisma that comes from dispensing with the need to be liked. And in featuring her, Fox News was doing more to break female stereotypes than any of the more mainstream networks.
It’s true that Ms. Kelly developed her signature style while perfectly coifed, with obligatory blond streaks. And it’s true that she developed her brand of magnetic unlikability while outfitted in Fox’s ubiquitous jewel-toned dresses, her legs exposed beneath the obligatory glass table. But Megyn Kelly’s power came not from her beauty but from her sharp-wittedness, her familiarity with the issues, and her willingness to ask tough questions and demand answers — the same traits that were on full display in the infamous Republican debate when she took on Candidate Trump.
.. Instead of unleashing her, NBC has attempted to transform Megyn Kelly into one of the nice girls of mainstream media, another Kelly Ripa, Savannah Guthrie or Katie Couric... Why did Fox News have more room for this charismatic, difficult woman than NBC? It’s hard to say. Mainstream talk shows — morning shows in particular — have never had much of an appetite for difficult. And at a time when our country is so divided, it was always likely that a network like NBC would try to cast as broad a net as possible, meaning that politics would be off the table for someone like Ms. Kelly... a cautionary tale to all women: You will have to be likable if you want to go mainstream.