Lloyd Grove of The Daily Beast writes:

How could the deadpan-hilarious prince of SNL and 30 Rock turn in such a boring late-night talk show debut? Lloyd Grove on the deadly television sins the comedian committed.
This is a terrible and surprising question, but is Alec Baldwin really that boring? After watching him chat sedately with New York mayoral candidate Bill de Blasio for the premiere of Up Late with Alec Baldwin, MSNBC’s latest offering at 10 p.m. Friday, I can’t help asking. Baldwin is a gifted actor, a brilliant comic, and a worthy—often volatile—opponent of pushy paparazzi, New York Post reporters, Fleet Street hacks, discourteous Starbucks baristas, bossy flight attendants, and anyone else who has the misfortune of getting on his bad side. He has raised pugnacity to an art form, as when he told me years ago, when I was writing a celebrity column for the New York Daily News and he was having a dispute with famed stylist and costume designer Patricia Field,that she was “a fruit-salad head,” “a whack-job, 24-7,” and “a cranky, miserably unhappy woman.” I probably shouldn’t admit it but that made me laugh. He is also a smart, thoughtful guy, and—on his recently-ended WNYC radio podcast Here’s The Thing, anyway—a compelling and skillful interviewer. All of the above would seem to make for exciting, even dangerous, television. It certainly wasn’t crazy for MSNBC President Phil Griffin to hire Baldwin to freshen up a weekly time-slot previously occupied by the prison reality series Lockup and, before that, Alan Keyes Is Making Sense, starring a voluble, rabidly right-wing African-American politician who, when his show was canceled after six months, went on to lose to Barack Obama in the 2004 Senate race in Illinois.
And yet.
Baldwin’s debut as a TV talk show host didn’t do him or his audience any favors.

The rest here.

I did catch parts of it and also think there’s certainly room for improvement. As much as I disagree with Baldwin’s politics, he is a good actor and could be a good fit for one of these interview shows.