Moyers & Company

9 p.m. Friday, WTVI, UNCMX

That didn't last long.

Just 20 months after retiring his PBS series "Bill Moyers Journal," Moyers was back in the studio, deep in conversation about moral political psychology with author Jonathan Haidt.

The interview veered from Manichean thinking among baby boomers to the social conservative understanding of karma, all as it related to the roots of the country's political divide.

Moyers worked his way through a sheaf of notes, as the scheduled 90 minutes stretched a good hour longer. ("This is fun," he said to his guest during a pause.) Emerging from the studio, he said he had decided mid-interview that the discussion would probably take up the entire hour on his new weekly program, rather than be a 20-minute segment.

"Bill Moyers Journal" ended in April 2010 because Moyers, now 77, said he needed a break. There's no sign he is easing up this time around.

The new show, which begins Friday on public television stations, has a different name, "Moyers & Company," and a warmer set, featuring a blue-and-green background.

Much will carry over from the old program, including Moyers' thoughtful interviews with thinkers who wouldn't otherwise get much television face time and a focus on the country's most pressing political and economic questions.

"I'm coming back because in tumultuous times like these I relish the company of people who try to make sense of the tumult," Moyers writes on his website, billmoyers.com.

Aided by 30 employees (just over half that of "Journal"), Moyers has banked interviews with former Reagan budget chief David Stockman, former Citibank chief executive John S. Reed and poet Rita Dove (with whom he read "The Hill" by Edgar Lee Masters).

The seeds of Moyers' return were planted several months after his last show ended by Vartan Gregorian, president of the Carnegie Corp. of New York.

When "Journal" went away, "I was very sad," Gregorian said in a telephone interview, praising the host's intelligence and "the respect with which he approached everyone, whether he agreed with them, to know their ideas."

Moyers, he said, helps in "enlightening our democracy" - a Carnegie mission - by putting "before our nation questions that we should discuss."