Illustration by Dale Stephanos

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.”

“He’s got tremendous personality,” Mr. Hartman said in a phone interview with The Observer. “We wanted to give him an opportunity to show the breadth of his experience, his knowledge, his news sensibility, and the range of his personality.”

Since when do news anchors need a personality?

The previous generation of TV news gods—Dan Rather, Peter Jennings and Tom Brokaw—didn’t have personalities; they had jawlines, which were square, and brows, which they knit when they told us with patriarchal gravity how the country’s day went.

In 2010, network news lost more than 750,000 viewers, according to a report by the Pew Research Center. Although NBC shed the fewest, the report noted that network news is on “a slide so long and gradual that few imagine it can now be abated, except perhaps by moving to new platforms.”

Mr. Williams has a lantern jaw and an expressive brow too, but he also has the comic timing and pop culture antennae that make him the kind of guy you’d want to make you a playlist. These traits, though by all accounts genuine, might have been reserved, in another era, for the anchor’s close friends and off-the-record confidantes. Instead, they’ve been drilled into us in what seems, retrospectively, like a company-directed cross-platform Brian Williams congeniality campaign.

He hosted SNL capably. He skewered himself on 30 Rock and he skewered his medium on Fallon, slow-jamming the news. As part of a roundtable assembled on MSNBC’s Morning Joe to discuss the biggest media story of 2010, Mr. Williams delivered a satiric monologue about The New York Times’s “discovery” of Brooklyn so uncannily pitch-perfect that it felt like watching Skynet (the Terminator’s artificial intelligence overlord) become self-aware. It knows it’s an anchor.

It seems to be working.

“When he got the anchor job, I distinctly remember having zero opinion of him,” Eric Cunningham, a 27-year-old sketch comedian told The Observer. “But then it’s almost like he went out of his way to let people who weren’t news junkies know that he was cool.”

Interestingly, NBC opened up programming space for Mr. Williams’s personality at the same time the ratings of The Daily Show with Jon Stewart were surpassing those of every Fox News host’s except Bill O’Reilly. NBC Universal tried to lure Jon Stewart away from Comedy Central more than once, according to sources familiar with the matter. But judging from Mr. Williams’s 2007 turn as the host of SNL, they didn’t need to.

“Brian was funny before Jon Stewart,” said Alexandra Wallace, a senior vice president at NBC News and a longtime executive producer at Nightly. Ms. Wallace said that his move toward entertainment was organic but that the network opened up to his comedic outings when it saw they didn’t cost him any credibility.

“The news has become more personal,” she explained. “As the viewer, I want to feel more of a connection, and I want to feel that I’m getting to know the person who’s telling the news.”

Some NBC insiders said the laid-back, on-air Brian belies managing editor of Nightly News Brian, who has an assiduous, Type A personality and whose staff abides by a strict code of punctuality and professionalism. Mr. Williams has been through five executive producers in his seven-year tenure (the survivors went on to higher posts at NBC) and has said he wouldn't wish the job on anyone.

“You don’t get where he is without having really high standards for yourself and the people who work for you,” Ms. Wallace said. “I think Brian has a ton of fun, and the staff has a ton of fun but it’s a lot of work. So I’m sure there are some rules. But we might be getting on at 6:45 if there weren’t any.”

Last summer, Mr. Cunningham and some friends started a semi-serious Brian Williams for President campaign. Not because they viewed him as a paragon of trustworthiness and authority, but because he was funny.

The real signal of the anchor’s “indie comedy cred,” he said, was Mr. Williams’s turn on ASSSCAT, a regular improv show put on by the Upright Citizens Brigade.

Mr. Cunningham doesn’t watch broadcast news religiously—especially now that it appears BriWi (a nickname Internet gadabout Rachel Sklar takes credit for) won’t be running for office—but said that he’s seen Rock Center, and likes it. “It’s a lot like Dateline, but if Dateline were allowed to not do stories on cheerleader-murderers,” he noted.

For people accustomed to digesting news through a Twitter stream that contains both CNN breaking news and Onion headlines, it’s no big deal to see the man in the anchor’s desk toggle between hard news and comedy.

“I was talking with a friend of mine about how Brian Williams manages to make you truly care about tragic-but-evergreen stories you hear about nearly every day—in a way that’s hard to pin down,” Mr. Cunningham explained. “Then four minutes later, he’ll do a segment on the ‘Shit Girls Say’ videos and it doesn’t feel weird.”

Given Mr. Williams’s obvious chops as an entertainer, we wondered, does Mr. Cunningham think Mr. Williams is wasted doing the news?

“I would be shocked,” he replied. “He’s got it together up there and is too sharp to be drunk at the desk. No offense to Pat Sajak, but going toe-to-toe with Jon Stewart comedically is a lot harder than remembering which letters are vowels.”

Um, actually, we meant wasted as in, Is his true talent going to waste behind the news desk, reading other people’s words? Mr. Williams reportedly abstains from alcohol.

“Ha, oh man—sorry, BriWi just did a segment on Sajak being drunk last night, so I thought that’s what you were referring to,” Mr. Cunningham replied.

Just because Mr. Williams is allowed to loosen his tie once a week does not mean that NBC executives are preparing for hard news doomsday. Mr. Hartman noted that NBC News’s viewership is up, and Ms. Wallace believes the glut of information online has increased the demand for TV news’s distilled synopses. Still, it would be wise for the network to experiment with repurposing its talents sooner rather than later. In 2002, when Mr. Williams was Mr. Brokaw’s heir apparent, eight out of ten 18- to 29-year-olds got their news from television, according to Pew Research Institute. By last year, more than 40 percent of them had disappeared.

But watching a news anchor pander to a generation of news consumers who don’t remember his Peabody-winning Katrina broadcast can be a little bit painful, like watching someone’s freshly divorced dad try to figure out what he missed while he was off the market.

For example, if the new BuzzFeed is banking on the idea that breaking news is a viral meme, Rock Center is banking on the idea that viral memes are breaking news. Mr. Williams has already interviewed Marcel the Shell With Shoes On and the girl from “Shit Girls Say”—not just the comedians behind them but the memes themselves.

During the Marcel the Shell bit, Mr. Williams asked viewers to look at the number of times the video has been viewed, adding, “A lot of network prime time shows would kill for 14 million plus viewers.”

Mr. Williams comes by his new media interests honestly. He has two 20-something children. The elder, Allison, has been linked romantically with Ricky Van Veen, the College Humor founder, and is a star of Girls, Lena Dunham’s HBO series about emerging adulthood in Greenpoint.

But his apparent awareness of the declining influence of the medium he’s mastered gives his coziness with Gawker a whiff of desperation.

On Jan. 15, Mr. Williams wrote to Gawker owner Nick Denton, a friend, to praise one of the site’s new weekend hires and shoot the shit. “I do wish the main page featured more TV coverage,” he wrote, adding, “Brooklyn hippster [sic] Lana Del Rey had one of the worst outings in SNL history last night — booked on the strength of her TWO SONG web EP, the least-experienced musical guest in the show’s history, for starters.”

Mr. Denton forwarded the email to Gawker’s new editor in chief A.J. Daulerio, who promptly published it.

The post drew hundreds of thousands of viewers for several reasons. It had America’s news anchor piling on Lana Del Rey, a high-artifice songstress whose SEO, if not her record, is gold. It employed the term “Brooklyn hipster.” And it revealed a bit of in-house cattiness—the face of NBC News sneering at SNL’s booking!

But really, like most people who find themselves in Gawker’s inbox, Mr. Williams was asking the site—which attracts more than six million monthly visitors (twice as many as watch Rock Center each week)—for a little attention.

“I do wish the main page featured more TV coverage.”

NBC asked Gawker to take down the email. It declined. Others internally said they thought it was good for Mr. Williams’s image.

“We’re very busy with this show we put on,” was all Mr. Hartman would say of the matter.

In fact, the next week, a team of Rock Center producers were busy invading Gawker headquarters to film an upcoming profile of Nick Denton Gawker Media.

Though some bloggers presumed the segment was a public hatchet-burial, it had been in the works for weeks.

Next week, Rock Center will move from Monday nights to an earlier slot on Wednesdays, going head-to-head with ABC’s Emmy-laden Modern Family, a new Fox reality show about flash mobs and yet another crime procedural, Criminal Minds, on CBS.

“Prime time is valuable real estate,” Mr. Hartman said. “It’s a tribute to NBC News from NBC Universal and the Comcast Company that they have made this valuable real estate available to us.”

Indeed, some sources consider the creation of Rock Center a sop to the news division from the network’s new owners, which were then busily gutting its ranks.

Although the general interest newsmagazine appears to be trying to be everything to everyone, in many ways, Rock Center’s strategy is a concession to the fact that viewers consume news in many, disaggregate forms. At its core, Rock Center its an assemblage of videos in YouTube-friendly lengths that can be dismantled, liked and shared across platforms. Some Rock Center stories are posted online long before they air.

“I aspire to have people sample the program, people who might not be what we consider traditional viewers,” Mr. Hartman said.

With blandly palatable long form content and a host who is, by now, enough of a celebrity to carry even the dullest interviews, the show sometimes feels like an extremely well-placed billboard for Mr. Williams and his NBC News Superfriends like Kate Snow, and, yes, Chelsea Clinton.

But if NBC puts any stock in the notion that Brian Williams’s personality will outlast the waning primacy of the news anchor, the parable of Lana Del Rey might be instructive. In the Internet echo-chamber, even the most finely calibrated persona delivering expertly produced material isn’t immune to the negative impact of overexposure.

On Jan. 23, Mr. Williams moderated a GOP debate under the Rock Center banner. The spectacle was mostly put on by NBC’s politics and special events teams, but as a strategic branding opportunity for Rock Center, it was a triumph, doubling the usual ratings.

The next day, Mr. Williams’s friends at Gawker featured more TV coverage on the front page, deriding the “orange hipster” for overdoing it.

“Williams would not shut up,” John Cook wrote. “He uttered almost precisely the same number of words last night as Ron Paul, who was ostensibly there as a participant.”

If the criticism stung, Mr. Williams shouldn’t feel too bad. Ms. Del Ray has survived much, much worse.

kstoeffel@observer.com

In addition to the massive lease at 30 Rock, NBCU has 475,000 square feet in the studio building on 49th Street and 187,000 square feet at 1250 Avenue of the Americas. Plus, since accounting firm Deloitte signing a 436,00-square-foot lease there in January and because NBCU will have first dibs on any condos, any other tenants will have to vacate the building once their leases are up.

Jones Lang Lasalle vice chairman Scott Panzer repped NBCU.

mcoyne@observer.com

It was an unexpected announcement that ABC suggests had nothing to do the recent Comcast takeover of NBC, while The Times notes that Olbermann is getting the Conan treatment and will not be back on the air for "an extended period of time."

Four Midwestern states lost internet access last night due to major Comcast DNS problems, according to Twitter rage and the morning papers. The outage lasted from about 7:30 p.m. to about 12 a.m.

The Twitter-enabled victims advised each other to use the Google Public DNS 8.8.8.8. Maybe we should take a cue and just Tweet each other the photos of our outfits and cats we would have Tumbled.

But could Franken really just be getting warm and fuzzy for NBC as it stands at the cusp of corporate takeover? The Senator was, after all, an NBC employee while he worked at Saturday Night Live. His tenure at the network began when he was brought on as a writer for the show's first season in 1975, left in 1980 and then returned in 1985. He stayed for a decade.

It remains to be seen whether Franken's lobbying will result in any antitrust violations against Comcast, or whether anyone will attack Franken for conflict of interest. But it's a solid bet that the writers for 30 Rock are scrambling to write a new character into the show: a former TGS cast member, now a senator, who's fighting the Kabletown takeover of NBC. That's how these things work, right?

nfreeman at observer.com |@nfreeman1234

That seems to be the strategy of the cable companies. Last week Comcast reported that it had lost 275,000 subscribers in the third quarter and this week Time Warner announced it had seen 155,000 customers terminate their service.

When faced with these quarterly losses in the past, the cable companies insisted that they have seen no evidence that customers are "cutting the cord," a catch phrase for dropping cable in favor of streaming video over the web. Instead, they blamed the poor economy, the customer, anything to avoid the truth. From The New York Times:

"The customers they are losing tend to be in the bottom half of the economy -- a lot of them appear to be struggling to make ends meet," said Craig Moffett, an analyst at Sanford C. Bernstein & Company,

Mr. Moffett said the image of the cord-cutter had been that of a "cutting-edge technologist" who preferred to bypass cable to watch programming on computers and on an ever-proliferating array of devices. "The reality is it's someone who's 40 years old and poor and settling for a dog's breakfast of Netflix and short-form video."

Unfortunately, a recent study from Strategy Analytics failed to support Mr. Moffet's conclusion. It found that:

• •54% of likely cord cutters are under 40.
• •97% have graduated high school and 69% have or are pursuing higher degrees.
• •91% are employed, full time students, or retired
• •57% make more than $50,000 a year

Who knows -- Mr. Moffet may not be all wrong. Some of these well educated, well-off cord cutters may still enjoy the occasional bowl of dog food while streaming movies from Netflix.

Representatives for GE have vigorously denied the report.

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, the real usurper of NBC Universal, is spelled with a C, almost everything else down to the near identical logos mirrors its fictional sitcom step-sibling.

And now that the deal has been neatly brokered, both on and off screen, Michael Angelakis, Comcast's get-it-done-guy attributed with successfully smoothing over the GE-Comcast carnage over NBC, wants his peacock where he can see it.

The 45-year-old chief financial officer of the Philidelphia-based company currently resides in Gladwyne, Pa., with his wife, Christine, and three children. But it looks like the Boston-born family man may be commuting fairly regularly to 30 Rock; according to city records, Mr. Angelakis recently purchased a $4.6 million two-bedroom at the Hampshire House, Central Park South's deluxe former-hotel-turned-co-op.

Roger Erickson, Sotheby's dapper apartment don, had the listing, but it wasn't always so. In fact, this poor little pied-à-terre has had a shaky history on the market. Originally listed with Halstead at $6.5 million in November 2005, it hopscotched on and off the market until Trump briefly took over the listing in 2009 for a three-month fling. Finally, Mr. Erickson took the reins last fall, decreasing the asking price to $5.45 million, still quite a hopscotch leap from the final transaction price.

So it seems that Mr. Angelakis' new abode was as difficult to sell as NBC was to buy, but, in this instance, as with the network buyout, Angel Michael came to the rescue.

Mr. Angelakis, who worked at Providence Equity Parnters Inc. until his 2007 assumption of Comcast's CFO and executive vice president titles, is considered by many to be the reason the Comcast-NBC deal went through. Late last summer, after a series of headlocks between GE and Comcast, Mr. Angelakis flew up to GE executive Keith S. Sherin's summer home on Cape Cod. He took Mr. Sherin and his wife to dinner, ending the evening shaking hands. The CFO phoned his boss, Comcast CEO Brian Roberts, from the car to tell him a breakthrough had been made; Mr. Roberts later said of the phone call with his No. 2, "It was as if we worked together all our lives." The Cape Cod trip was viewed as essential to the brokerage of the deal.

As to whether Mr. Roberts, as well as other Comcast high-ups, will spread their purchasing power around New York City real estate, no one knows. Comcast's spokesperson told The Observer, "Unfortunately, we do not comment on our employees' personal lives."

According to a source in Hampshire House, Mark S. Siegel, the apartment's former owner, moved out on March 16, when Ms. Angelakis' name replaced Mr. Siegel's on the official apartment directory.

Mr. Angelakis, who is described in one article as "a guy with a mischievous smile and a Boston accent who likes to fly under the media radar" declined to comment, as did Mr. Erickson. So we cannot definitively conclude that the Comcaster will be using the two-bedroom as a pied-à-terre, but it doesn't take Miss Marple to make the jump. The title of the listing is spelled out bold and clear next to the address and unit number: "The Ultimate Pied-a-Terre." In fact, it's pretty much the only phrase in the whole description that is exclamation-point-free; the listing otherwise is frenetically peppered with them throughout. 

The apartment has "one of the best views of Central Park in all Manhattan" and "is minutes from the best the city has to offer," both filling "ultimate pied-à-terre" requirements that "It should have a great 'wow' factor" and "It should be centrally located." (The last two criteria include, "it should be convenient" and "it should be a good investment" in case you're ever in the market and want a checklist.) The living room, dining room and "spacious" master suite all feature "oversize" windows facing Central Park, and the building upholds its prestigious hotel history with hotel-style concierge services and amenities like laundry service and courtesy car included, as well as the swanky Exhale fitness club and spa downstairs.

And, of course, there is the eight-block walk to 30 Rockefeller Center.

cmalle@observer.com

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Turning to Brian Roberts, the CEO of Comcast, Mr. Franken accused him of coming to his office the previous week and spinning him about rules that govern which channels are carried by cable and how consumers access him. It’s an abstruse point, but essentially Mr. Franken thought Mr. Roberts was praising rules designed to protect consumers from mega-mergers like this one while simultaneously challenging the same rules on the basis that they violate the First Amendment. “Looking to get approval for this merger, you sat there in my office and told me to my face that these rules would protect consumers,” Mr. Franken told Mr. Roberts.

“And then, to add insult to injury, I asked you right after you made this assertion in my office whether you were aware that your company had litigated this, and you said, ‘I don’t know.’ And so I said, ‘Well, why don’t we ask one of your lawyers?’ Because you had a number of lawyers there.” And we turned to your lawyer and your lawyer said, ‘Yeah, yeah, we did that; we did this.’”

When Mr. Roberts tried to respond, Mr. Franken cut him off. “Look, I think Minnesotans have their answers. Thank you very much.”

Mr. Franken wasn’t done yet. He then turned to NBC and its chief, Jeff Zucker—“look, we’re friends”—and said he had worked with Mr. Zucker’s “lovely” wife, Caryn, at SNL, “and I loved my time at NBC, I want you to know that.” Those caveats aside, Mr. Franken had a bee in his bonnet about regulatory changes in the 1990s that allowed production studios and TV networks to be owned by the same company, leading to a wave of consolidation and a heavy reliance on studio-owned product despite promises to the commission that independent producers would not be shut out. By 1992, Mr. Franken said, the majority of programming on NBC was its own. Mr. Zucker didn’t come to D.C. to rehash a 20-year-old debate, and suggested that it might be more relevant to talk about “what’s happening today.” In fact, he noted, NBC had just ordered a bunch of pilots for new shows for next year, and roughly 40 percent of them were projects that the network has no financial interest in. Mr. Franken had none of it, invoking the Jay Leno debacle: “I think what you did was put an NBC-produced show on at 10 for five nights a week, is what I think you did.”

It was all over very quickly. A snowstorm was coming, and there will be a year or so of further regulatory grandstanding and wrangling before the NBC-Comcast deal is done. The reality is that there is little basis for regulators to prevent Comcast and NBC from combining. From an antitrust perspective, the two companies don’t really compete.

But Mr. Franken was tapping into a bigger, more ingrained fear: that the bigger these media companies get, the less weight consumers, or viewers, will have in influencing what they do.

That can be hard to argue, though, given that past media mega-mergers have generated very mixed results. Successes like Disney–Capital Cities and Time Warner–Turner are overshadowed by flops like Viacom-CBS, AOL–Time Warner and (as noted last week) Vivendi-Universal. With their merger, Comcast-NBC will control roughly 24 percent of cable subscribers in the country and account for 12 percent of what is viewed on television.

But this merger is really about what television is turning into; Mr. Roberts noted that Comcast is spending $1 billion on a superfast Internet service called wideband—forget broadband!—and in this new era, Mr. Roberts promised the new company would be “reliable stewards for the national treasures of NBC and NBC News.” Apparently, Minnesotans will be watching with a wary eye.

editorial@observer.com

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.

But the Comcast guys, according to early scouting reports, harbor dubious taste in vacations spots.

Brian Roberts, the 50-year-old CEO of Comcast, is said to be a Vineyard guy—disconcerting but not disastrously so. Far more troubling, however, is Comcast COO Steve Burke’s reported love of the Jersey shore. Okay, not the one with the well-gelled mama’s boys flexing their sculpted abdomens currently being exhibited on  MTV. But still, Jersey.

The old boss, Mr. Zucker, has a house in Amagansett. The new boss, Mr. Burke, has a house in Mantoloking, which according to Wikipedia is a small town with nice views and a swell yacht club located on a barrier peninsula approximately 50 miles south of midtown.

According to the author Gay Talese, who was born in Ocean City and still has a home there, the more expensive beachfront communities up and down the Jersey shore are crawling with anonymous Comcast executives and their families vacationing from the Main Line and Philadelphia. “I don’t know who they are,” said Mr. Talese. “But they are around, sunning their toes, warming their fat bellies out on the beach.”

Is it possible that in a gracious act of corporate diplomacy, Mr. Burke might forswear Mantoloking for a proper place on Lily Pond Lane in East Hampton?

Not likely. “Living in Philadelphia, I don’t know that he’s ever spent a whole lot of time out on Long Island,” said Mr. Burke’s younger brother William, a former TBS executive who recently co-wrote a book with Ted Turner. “I once did a triathlon with [Steve] in Sag Harbor called the Mighty Hamptons. So I know he’s at least seen the territory.”

That was 25 years ago.

These days, according to William, if Steve were to succumb to the temptations of another vacation spot, it would likely be well beyond the outer reaches of the jitney. “Increasingly,” said the younger brother, “he’s doing a lot of fishing and that kind of thing out in Montana.” Yes, the second home of anchor–turned–dude rancher Tom Brokaw.