Brian Williams is bringing a video podcast to Netflix, a show called “We’re Back! With Brian Williams” that will put him back in front of newsmakers, actors, musicians, journalists and other prominent figures. Netflix has not set a release date yet.
The new series is designed as a loose, wide-ranging conversation show, with talks that will stretch beyond headlines and into the guests’ work, their lives and the moment the country is living through. Williams said he decided it was time to get into podcasting because, as he put it, scientists are predicting every American will have one by 2030.
He also framed the project as a response to how little room there is for depth in modern news. After 40 years in the news business, Williams said, an in-depth interview gets about 4 minutes of airtime at best, and he wants to spend more time with creative, funny, smart, talented and consequential people — the kind of conversations he grew up watching and listening to. He added that Netflix is “the perfect home.”
The move marks a more regular return to media for Williams than the live election special he anchored for Amazon Prime Video in 2024. Jonathan Wald will executive produce the podcast; Wald previously worked with Williams at NBC and also produced that Amazon special.
Williams spent nearly three decades at NBC, including 11 years anchoring NBC Nightly News, before leaving in 2015 after exaggerations and falsehoods were found in some of his reporting, including accounts from Iraq and from New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. He later moved to MSNBC, where he created and led The 11th Hour, and he left that network at the end of 2021.
This project does not look like a one-off appearance or a nostalgia stunt. It is Williams choosing a format built for length, curiosity and a less rigid kind of conversation, years after the network news chair that made him famous stopped being his home. Whether Netflix becomes the place where he settles back into the public eye now depends less on the platform than on the guests and the conversations he can actually deliver.