Lester Holt, who anchored “NBC Nightly News” for a decade before handing the broadcast over in May 2025, unveiled a new project on August 31, 2026 built on a single idea: the instant that divides a life into a before and an after.
“Before & After with Lester Holt” premieres September 14 under the Dateline Originals banner, and NBC News has built it around interviews with people whose lives were upended in an instant. Colin Kaepernick, Jeremy Renner, Gabby Giffords, Adrianne Haslet and Rebecca Scofield are among the announced guests. Dateline Premium, Apple Podcasts and Spotify carry the show, with subscribers getting early access. “I said when I started this new chapter, I wanted to create and exercise these new news muscles,” Holt told People, “and that’s exactly what we’re doing.”
In the same interview, he turned to what happens off camera. “I think sometimes people forget that that’s one of the main components of what we do is not just standing in front of the camera, but it’s the writing. It’s how you tell the story,” he said. He added to People: “I’ve always believed, and I think a lot of people agree, that the Dateline producers and correspondents are really the best storytellers out there.”
Leaving the Evening News Behind
The podcast follows a major turn in Holt’s career. In a memo to network colleagues on Monday, February 24, 2025, Holt said he would give up his post as anchor and managing editor of “NBC Nightly News” at the beginning of that summer, after 10 years at the helm. His final broadcast came Friday, May 30, 2025. “I’ll miss our evenings together, and I’ll miss the team that brings us all together,” he told viewers. Tom Llamas, named his successor in March 2025, took the chair on June 2. Llamas will anchor special editions of “NBC Nightly News” and “Top Story” from Ground Zero as part of NBC News’ September 11, 2026 anniversary coverage. Holt, now 67, stayed at the network full time at “Dateline,” where he had been the principal anchor since 2011, and hosted the podcast “The Last Appeal” earlier this year.
NBC has given Holt a central role in that anniversary coverage as well. He anchors a one-hour documentary on the Friday, September 11, 2026 edition of “Dateline,” revisiting New Yorkers whose experiences NBC News cameras captured on September 11, 2001, and the hour includes never-before-seen NBC footage of the attacks. As of September 3, 2026, NBC News said its 25th-anniversary programming will run across “Today,” “NBC Nightly News,” “Dateline,” “Meet the Press,” NBC News Now and NBCNews.com, including a “Cost of Denial” investigation on “NBC Nightly News” into the ongoing health consequences of 9/11.
Two weeks later comes another milestone. Season 35 of “Dateline” — Holt’s 35th season as part of the franchise — premieres Friday, September 25 at 9 p.m. ET on NBC, and the following day on Peacock. Holt has said the season will feature longer episodes and more in-depth investigations.
When the memo went out, NBC News had not yet named a successor. The network’s executive vice president of programming, Janelle Rodriguez, said Holt had guided NBC News through ten turbulent years. “Quite simply, Lester is the beating heart of this news organization,” Rodriguez wrote in a message to staff.
“Nightly News” was still ranking among television’s top-rated shows each week when the February 2025 announcement came, drawing an average of around seven million viewers. Twice — in 2018 and 2024 — The Hollywood Reporter and Morning Consult had named Holt the “most-trusted television news personality in America.” ABC’s David Muir took the title in the 2025 survey.
The Stories That Defined a Decade
Brian Williams, the longtime broadcaster Holt replaced, had left the show amid criticism that he exaggerated his account of a helicopter attack in Iraq. Holt took over the “Nightly News” chair permanently on June 18, 2015, arriving with eight years of anchoring the newscast’s weekend editions behind him.
The 10 years that followed handed him the assignments that came to define the era. President Donald Trump’s rise in politics, the COVID pandemic, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the October 7, 2023 attack in Israel and the war in Gaza all reached viewers through the network coverage he fronted from the anchor desk. He spent plenty of time out of the studio, too, reporting from towns wrecked by lethal hurricanes, tornadoes, wildfires and mass shootings.
Interviews with heads of state and leading political figures often set the agenda. Trump sat down with him one-on-one. So did former President Joe Biden, former Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Barack Obama, as well as Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and other newsmakers.
From the Police Beat to Network News
Holt started out in radio, covering the police beat in San Francisco at 20. He moved to television in 1981 as a reporter at WCBS-TV in New York, then headed to Los Angeles in 1982 to report for the CBS station there — KNXT at the time, now KCBS-TV. He returned to WCBS in 1983. The afternoon and evening newscasts at WBBM-TV in Chicago then kept him in the anchor chair for 14 years.
NBC News hired him in 2000. He co-anchored “Weekend TODAY” for 12 years and became principal anchor of “Dateline” in September 2011, a job that put him at the center of the network’s true-crime and long-form storytelling. Industry honors for his work include Emmy Awards, and in 2019 he received the Walter Cronkite Award for Excellence in Journalism.
In his note to “Nightly” and “Dateline” staffers, Holt looked back on that arc. “I could never have imagined my career path would unfold in the way it has. What an amazing ride,” he wrote.
Iran, Wildfires and a Newscast for Kids
The assignments Holt took on in the stretch before the February 2025 announcement showed how wide his portfolio had grown. He co-anchored NBC’s election night coverage. An exclusive interview with President Masoud Pezeshkian drew him to Iran, and it aired in January 2025, more than a year before the war. He also anchored a “Dateline” special about the devastating 2025 Los Angeles wildfires.
Then there was “Nightly News: Kids Edition,” a digital newscast built to inform and educate children, which Holt anchored and which was nominated for a Children’s and Family Emmy in 2023 — a reminder that his audience has never been limited to the evening-news crowd.
“Before & After with Lester Holt” offers viewers who followed him through hurricanes, elections and war zones something quieter than the sweep of a national crisis: the single moment that rewrites one person’s life. Holt has spent a career conducting that kind of interview in the middle of chaos. Now it is the premise of a show that carries his name.