MSNBC’s Katie Phang Debuts Her New Miami-Based Show—Twice: ‘Welcome To My World’

Katie Phang gets to launch her new show twice. The longtime legal analyst for MSNBC and NBC News debuted The Katie Phang Show on MSNBC early Saturday morning, and she’ll do it again later this week on the Peacock streaming platform. “So you can imagine it’s the same show, but potentially different audiences,” Phang told me by phone from Miami, where the new show is being produced at the sprawling Telemundo Center, the Spanish-language network’s global headquarters. “Telemundo is a part of the NBC Universal family, but to have an MSNBC and Peacock show, out of Telemundo, it’s totally different.”

And sure enough, Saturday’s first show featured a segment with Telemundo host Admari Lopez showing Phang around the building. “This place is crazy how big it is,” Phang told Lopez, who hosts Telemundo’s morning show, hoy Dia.

Fittingly for a show based in South Florida, among Phang’s first guests were Marc Caputo, long one of the best-wired journalists covering politics in the Sunshine State, and Charlie Crist, the former Florida governor who’s hoping to get his old job back and oust Governor Ron DeSantis. “Of course there’s going to be a Florida angle to the show,” Phang told me. “There’s going to be some discussion about how Florida either influences what’s happening nationally, and contemplating the roles of leaders down here that may have national implications later.”

For Phang, the new show—live on MSNBC Saturday and Sunday mornings and live on Peacock Thursday and Friday afternoons—is a chance to show that she’s not just a legal analyst. “So this is a really cool opportunity for me to say, ‘welcome to my world,’ right, welcome to my world through the lens of Katie.”

“I’d like to contribute as much as I can as an anchor or as a host when we deal with the legal issues,” Phang told me, “to have that chance to really kind of enjoy that deeper dive with my friends that are lawyers and legal analysts and experts, but then also be able to kind of share those other components of who I am, my personality and my life with the viewers.”

And for Phang, that meant taking a moment to thank her friends and her family, including her late father, who she says she still speaks to every day:

“It’s an amazing privilege to be the first live show of the day, and to be able to say as soon as you turn it on the first live programming is The Katie Phang Show,” she told me. “So I’m definitely not going to squander that opportunity. I’m going to run with it.”