“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.

Now that Maddow has curtailed her primetime presence to Mondays—a perk of her $30 million, WME-engineered sweetheart deal—the battle lines have indeed been redrawn. This is not because of any great masterstroke by CNN’s new regime, of course, but rather because of MSNBC’s failure to develop an aggressive strategy for retaining Maddow’s audience in her absence. In June, the network tapped Alex Wagner, a smart and likable cable news fixture, to anchor the 9 p.m. hour on the four nights that Maddow no longer wants.