‘Hallie Jackson Now’ ready for take two

Hallie Jackson says it’s all systems go for her new NBC News Now show after an unexpected medical snafu temporarily delayed its launch.

“I feel so betrayed by my body,” Jackson tells ITK about picking up a stomach bug while taking care of her 18-month-old daughter. Without getting into the gory details, Jackson says the illness was bad enough to postpone the debut of “Hallie Jackson Now” earlier this week. But now, the show is ready to instead premiere on Wednesday at 5 p.m. on NBC News’s online streaming network.

“I’m so excited. It feels like SpaceX,” the 37-year-old journalist quips.

Her eponymous program aims to “strip some of the formality away from the traditional ‘news anchor’ thing,” she says, while appealing to news junkies.

“It just felt like, let’s be human beings and talk to other human beings like normal human beings,” Jackson says. “We’re hoping to really bring that sense of conversationality to the show, with the correspondents and the teams that we have contributing.”

The casual vibe even extends to her on-camera look.

“I’m going to be in jeans and sneakers every day,” she says. 

“I don’t wear Spanx in my everyday life,” she adds with a laugh. “Let’s try to make this as just ‘normal feeling’ as possible and not quite so formal.”

Jackson, who is already a correspondent for “NBC Nightly News” and “Today,” along with her anchoring duties weekdays on MSNBC, says this new role will be unlike any other. The show could cover everything from Taylor Swift to tech and culture to a regular segment dubbed “The Local” that features news out of NBC’s bureaus.

“I cover politics. I live and breathe politics. I have for many years at NBC News. This new streaming show, this third hat, is totally out of that orbit.”

And Jackson, who on Instagram called her affliction “perhaps the most spectacularly ill-timed sick day of [her] career,” insists she’s feeling “great” a day after her show was slated to debut.

“We couldn’t do it when scheduled, but we’re gonna do it, and it’s gonna be great.”