History
In 2005, Bravo expressed interest in airing its own version, with Sam Seder piloting versions for NBC and TBS in 2009 and 2012. The team captains for the NBC version were Michael Ian Black and Greg Giraldo, while TBS hired Black and Sherrod Small as captains. Mulville has stated these networks had declined the show as they wanted it to be more pop-culture and celebrity-based and that one US talent agent had told him the show was "too British" for an American audience. In early 2024, he approached Thompson, who the previous autumn had become the director general of CNN, about making a version of the show for his network. He was receptive to the idea and announced the series while speaking at the Warner Bros. Discovery TV Upfronts week presentation on May 15, 2024, promising "a smart, silly, opinionated, and edgy take on the news of the week". The show was initially commissioned for ten episodes.
In August 2024, the Alabama-raised comedian Roy Wood Jr. was announced as the show's sole host; he had previously been a correspondent for The Daily Show between 2015 and 2023 and had been involved in a prior pilot for the show. Later that month, it was announced that Michael Ian Black would appear as team captain opposite Amber Ruffin, who had hosted several series of The Amber Ruffin Show and been a long-time writer for Late Night with Seth Meyers. She had got her job after auditioning opposite multiple other late-night show presenters, contributors and news podcasters. The trio had not worked together before the show but did film a test episode beforehand. Episodes were recorded on Fridays and broadcast on Saturdays and were an hour long. The series used a bass-heavy remix of the original show's theme tune and followed next-day repeats of HBO's Real Time with Bill Maher, which CNN had begun carrying in March 2024 and which had become their highest-rating show.
The series premiered on September 14, 2024, with Ruffin and Black accompanied for that episode by libertarian writer Matt Welch and comedian and A Black Lady Sketch Show creator Robin Thede. By the following afternoon, extensive outtakes from the show had circulated on the internet. On September 18, 2024, the BBC announced that they had scheduled the first episode for broadcast on BBC Two later that day and would air the rest of the series. Subsequent episodes featured a pre-show disclaimer, "This is CNN. But also kinda NOT CNN."; its next eight episodes featured among others Andy Richter, Mark McKinnon, Ana Navarro, Larry Wilmore, Adam Kinzinger, Anthony Scaramucci, Bomani Jones, and Tim Burchett, while Kara Swisher also appeared that series. Samantha Bee was originally scheduled to appear on the ninth episode, however dropped out as she did not wish to appear with Burchett.
By the third episode, Wood had promoted the show on Sherri and asserted that he had received messages from British people begging him not to perform poorly, prompting him to promise to treat the show "better than they treated Meghan Markle". By that episode, a running joke had developed involving Ruffin saying "Roy" repeatedly in response to his ribaldry. Wood later presented an episode of the British version scheduled for November 8, the week of the US election, on the grounds that the American version had taken a week off as they thought that the result would not be declared quickly enough. He promoted this episode with an appearance on The One Show. During his episode, he struggled with the pronunciation of Worcestershire and the villages Flyford Flavell and Upton Snodsbury; the mention of the latter two prompted the villages' MP Nigel Huddleston to praise the program. He presented two further episodes, one each in 2025 and 2026.
Series two, broadcast in early 2025, included as panellists Richter, Mike Lawler, Tim Ryan, George Conway, Alyssa Farah Griffin, and Representatives Jasmine Crockett, and Ro Khanna. A weekly companion podcast to the show, Have I Got News For Your Ears, hosted by Black, was launched. Further series were broadcast in late 2025 and early 2026; several episodes of the latter were broadcast only on CNNgo due to coverage of the 2026 Iran war and one episode featured British comedian Nish Kumar.
