By Kat Stoeffel 2/01 10:06am

Features

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The Man With Two Brians! Can NBC’s Personality Industry Save the Anchor from Irrelevance?

On a recent post-NFL season Monday night, 7.3 million people watched a remake of Hawaii 5-0. Another 6.7 million watched Castle, a crime procedural that’s safely avoided buzz for four seasons. A crowd less than half that size, 3.2 million, watched an American furniture manufacturer tearfully repent for outsourcing the family business, met a real-life moon colonist, and saw a chimpanzee flip through a children’s book. “They like to look at the pictures,” the voiceover explained.

They had landed on the three-month-old newsmagazine Rock Center, NBC’s prime time bid to recapture an audience for TV news by offering a looser format in which to showcase Brian Williams’s formidable charisma. Mr. Williams’s sensibility is so deeply ingrained in the programming that Rock Center executive producer Rome Hartman likes to say that, when it’s working, it feels like “Brian’s playlist.” Read More

By Nate Freeman 11/23/10 6:41pm

Mergers

Al Franken, Former NBC Employee, Fights For Old Network in Face of Comcast Takeover

Sen. Al Franken announced yesterday that he would be fighting Comcast’s right to retool NBC’s executive structure prior to the merger’s regulatory approval, writing a letter with complaints to the Justice Department that cried “gun-jumping” on the part of the imposing cable behemoth. If the department hears Franken’s claim that the proposed executive Read More

By Chloe Malle 3/26/10 5:45pm

WHAT WOULD JACK DONAGHY DO?

Kabletow—er, Comcast—CFO Buys Hampshire House Co-op for $4.6 M.

“This is an exciting time for NBC; not Seinfeld, Friends, ER exciting, but more like 3D espisodes of Merlin exciting.”

So adaged fictional NBC executive Jack Donaghy on the network’s self-jabbing sitcom 30 Rock. Donaghy, played by Alec Baldwin, was referring to the network’s acquisition by cable conglomerate Kabletown—”with a K.” And while Comcast, Read More

By Richard Siklos 2/09/10 7:54pm

Cable

NBC and Comcast Merge and That’s … O.K.

Let the record show that Al Franken, freshman senator from Minnesota, bears little resemblance to Al Franken, onetime Saturday Night Live funnyman. At an otherwise genteel subcommittee grilling of the top executives from NBC Universal and Comcast over their proposed media mega-merger last week, Mr. Franken had none of the self-doubt of his famously sheepish Read More

By Staff 12/10/09 9:41pm

Will Comcast Deal Move Summer Scene From Hamptons to, Gasp, Jersey?

How might the multibillion-dollar Comcast-NBC deal impact the network’s traditional summer social scene in the Hamptons?

For years, a great diaspora of NBC talent—Jerry Seinfeld, Jeff Zucker, Alec Baldwin, Matt Lauer, Ben Silverman and so on—would spread along the stretch of the planet that runs between Southampton and Amagansett between June and September.

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