Brian Williams is hosting 'Election Night Live,' Prime Video's first crack at live coverage of a breaking-news event. Watch the cold open.

In the era of cable news, election coverage has metastasized into a subgenre of its own — one with narrative conventions that viewers depend on and dread in equal measure. These include projections, of course,

Brian Williams didn’t come to Election Night to break news, but rather to put it all together. The NBC News veteran kicked off an interesting American experiment Tuesday evening by taking to Amazon’s Prime Video to host a live hours-long Election Night special on the streaming giant’s massive platform.