“The hour is in play now,” a high-level CNN insider told me this week. This person was referring, of course, to 9 p.m., a time slot that has historically been the cornerstone of the cable news primetime lineup and the high-water mark for ratings. For more than a decade, CNN has ceded primetime to MSNBC because it never had a talent who could compete with Rachel Maddow, a formidable, once-in-a-generation progressive hero and cable star who regularly drew 2-3 million viewers to her nightly broadcast, and whose success buoyed ratings across the network. While Maddow occasionally courted numbers on par with those of Fox News, the most-watched channel on all of cable, CNN’s 9 p.m. programming really only bested Maddow when she was on vacation.