‘Bombshell’ Raises a Question: What’s Megyn Kelly Up to Anyway?

An early broadcast of “Sunday Night With Megyn Kelly” sparked criticism after she interviewed the Infowars leader Alex Jones, and the show failed to find an audience. The sunny environment of morning television proved an odd fit for Ms. Kelly’s prosecutorial persona; the anchor initially delivered poor ratings and caused a stir after she offended a guest, Jane Fonda, by asking about her plastic surgery; she later assailed Ms. Fonda on-air as “Hanoi Jane.”

Since “Megyn Kelly Today” was canceled in October 2018, viewership for the hour has gone up 9 percent, according to Nielsen, a noticeable uptick when ratings across the board have gone down.

All the while, Ms. Kelly was attacked from the left for her comments over the years at Fox News, most prominently a segment where she insisted that Santa Claus is white. (The Santa uproar is mentioned several times in “Bombshell.”) Last fall, she stunned co-workers by musing on-air that it was once appropriate for white people to dress up in blackface for Halloween. Days later, her show was canceled.

Ms. Kelly believed that NBC executives had used the blackface uproar as a pretext to fire her because they were uncomfortable with her reporting on the network’s own harassment scandal, involving the “Today” host Matt Lauer, who had been fired after allegations of sexual misconduct in November 2017. On Twitter, she continues to suggest a double standard: Last week, she posted a video from an early-2000s episode of Comedy Central’s “The Man Show” in which Jimmy Kimmel, now the host of ABC’s late-night program, wore blackface to portray the basketball player Karl Malone.

“America’s late night darling Jimmy Kimmel? Who every Hollywood star cozies up to?” Ms. Kelly tweeted. “The very same stars who then lecture the rest of us on woke culture? Whatever could he have done??”

Her attack on Mr. Kimmel is typical of the online persona Ms. Kelly has cultivated over the past year. In between updates on her family life in Manhattan and a newly adopted dog, Ms. Kelly has aimed spiky commentary at the mainstream media, including former NBC colleagues like Seth Meyers and the “Today” host Craig Melvin.

On Mr. Carlson’s show in October, Ms. Kelly faulted NBC for failing to commission an independent investigation of its newsroom culture. Her appearance was a hit: More than four million people tuned in, higher than Mr. Carlson’s average audience and making it the most-watched program in all of cable that night.