Detective Ivan Marcano, Hilda Miolan and Police Commissioner Ray Kelly.

In the kind of grand-scale symbolism achievable only in this great city of ours, ordinary folks throughout Manhattan might have surmised from the Empire State Building being gussied up in blue, with red and white on the tippy-top (cop car, siren), that the swells who support the New York City Police Foundation were putting on their annual shindig last Thursday.

Police Commissioner Ray Kelly and others posed for glam shots on the red carpet at the Waldorf-Astoria, and on the minds of all those who’d gathered for pre-dinner cocktails—New York’s Finest in their finest, drinking gin and tonics, chardonnay and (yes!) Coors Light—was one pressing question: how would host Jon Stewart top his bravura performance of two months prior, when he had Commissioner Kelly on his show and opened the interview by taking a big gulp from a far-larger-than-16-ounce container, earning a mock stern warning from the commissioner? The soda-ban storm having passed, Mr. Stewart would have to come up with a new shtick—and after the tough-to-follow act of the NYPD’s Emerald Society Pipes & Drums, with its formidable bagpipes, the comedian more than delivered.

Taking the lectern for his introduction of this year’s Hemmerdinger Award winners—Detective Patrick Blanc, central robbery division; Criminalist IV Katen Desai, police lab; Nurse II Mary Gallo, medical division; Computer Systems Manager III Joshua Kaminstein, MISD; and Sergeant Louis Rapoli, commanding officer, school safety division—Mr. Stewart repeatedly asserted that he wasn’t hosting the event for any personal gain, all the while rifling through his vest pocket for his “notes” which, it soon became apparent from their telltale orange, were actually New York City parking tickets. The room exploded in guffaws.

Mr. Stewart went on to jokingly characterize a Hemmerdinger as a physical affliction, clutching his lower back and groaning, “I have a Hemmerdinger. It must’ve been the ice.” (The Transom happened to be seated at the table of businessman and former MTA chairman H. Dale Hemmerdinger, an impeccably gracious man who revealed to us that some 29 years ago, when he was formalizing his award, he received a visit from a young police captain—Ray Kelly himself.) Mr. Stewart also acknowledged the services of the NYPD in preparing his show for a visit from Pervez Musharaf. If there were to be a shooting incident, the police told Mr. Stewart, Mr. Musharaf would be forced to the floor. Asking them what he should do himself, Mr. Stewart joked that he was told, “Duck.”

For his hosting efforts, Commissioner Kelly graced Mr. Stewart with an NYPD bomber jacket, a good look.

After dinner, Charlie Rose and Commissioner Kelly gave the 2013 Honoree Award to real estate developer and longtime police supporter Arnold Fisher.

But the evening’s most dramatic moment came with the presentation of the Cop of the Year Award to Detective Ivan Marcano. The former beat cop’s story was told: last October, while off duty and riding in a car with his girlfriend in the Bronx, Mr. Marcano spied two men robbing a third and interceded, flashing his badge, only to be shot in the chest by one of the assailants. Back in his car, his girlfriend steering him to the nearest hospital, he happened to spot the bad guys in another car, at which point he hopped out of his and they out of theirs, and he was once again in hot pursuit.

Cut to video from a surveillance camera, and all assembled watched as then-Officer Marcano, cradling his injury in one hand as though it were no more than a valise and clutching his gun in the other, having felled one of the assailants, hopped into an ambulance that—no joke—just happened to be parked there. The coda, his promotion to detective, seemed, to the Transom at least, hardly sufficient. Knight the man, for goodness’ sake!

It was truly the stuff of instant legend, the kind of New York cop story that puts the most arresting police procedural to shame.

But the audience hardly had time to digest this tale of derring-do, never mind their tournedos of beef with wild mushroom semolina, because then from stage left emerged an exceptionally well-preserved Chaka Kahn. (“She’s 60,” Mr. Rose, who introduced her, boasted to the crowd.) Bedecked in a glittery, skintight, low-bodiced black body suit, high boots, a sequined red fire-breathing-dragon-emblazoned cape and a voluminous hairdo (how long do you think that took, murmured one of the Transom’s tablemates sotto voce), Ms. Kahn then proceeded to gamely belt out her own and others’ songs, pausing only to compliment the Waldorf’s chef on, in particular, the broccoli.

The Transom had noted earlier that when Detective Marcano received his award, there appeared near the base of the stage a raven-haired young woman with enviable poise and a digital camera. When she ascended the stage for a photo with the awardee, it became evident that this was none other than Hilda Miolan, girlfriend and, on that fateful night, driver to Detective Marcano. Raising our voice over Chaka Kahn, the Transom asked her: what was that night like for you?

“Very scary,” she said. “My adrenaline was going like crazy. But the outcome was great. He got everything he wanted.”

On The Daily Show on Monday night, Mr. Stewart came to the defense of his Middle Eastern alter-ego, host of the Egyptian satirical TV news show Al Bernameg (“The Program”).

Mr. Youssef, who is often referred to as “Egyptian Jon Stewart,” was arrested on Saturday night after being accused of insulting Egyptian president Mohamed Morsi and Islam on his show. Mr. Youssef turned himself in on Sunday morning and was held for questioning for five hours before being released on bail, according to The New York Times.

“Who’s that guy? I bet he’s a terror. What, has he been sabotaging Egypt’s infrastructure? Or harassing Egyptian women on the streets, or un-employing Egyptian people?” Mr. Stewart said on his show, referring to Mr. Morsi’s leadership of post-Arab Spring Egypt, which he sarcastically called “a work in progress.”

Mr. Stewart presented a clip from the contested episode of Mr. Youssef’s show in which the host wore a comically-large version of a hat Mr. Morsi wore at a ceremony in Pakistan. Mr. Youssef also made fun of Mr. Morsi’s “less-than-fluent English.”

“Making fun of the president’s hats and less-than-fluent English? That was my entire career for eight years,” Mr. Stewart asserted, pulling up a picture of George W. Bush in a cowboy hat up on the screen beside him.

After further lambasting Muslim Brotherhood leader and taking the president of NBC down with him, Mr. Stewart softened his mocking tone a bit and moved his chair away from his usual spot.

“Come on. Charging Bassem Youssef with insulting Egypt and Islam? I know Bassem. Bassem is my friend, my brother,” Mr. Stewart said of the heart surgeon-turned comedian, who appeared on The Daily Show in June last year. “By the way, without Bassem and all those journalists and bloggers and brave protestors who took to Tahrir Square to voice dissent, you, President Morsi, would not be in a position to repress them,” he said on a more sobering note.

“The world is watching. No one wants to see Egypt plunge into darkness,” Mr. Stewart added. “Democracy isn’t a democracy if it only lasts up until someone makes fun of your hat.”

From left to right: Kristi Jacobson, Steve Buscemi, Lori Silverbush and Jeff Bridges (Getty Images)

Last Wednesday night, at around 8 p.m., the Transom spotted celebrity chef Mario Batali ambling through the Museum of Modern Art in his bright orange Crocs. But he wasn’t here to see the Munch exhibition. He was en route to the New York premiere of A Place at the Table, a somber new documentary from directors Lori Silverbush and Kristi Jacobson, about America’s widespread--and underpublicized--hunger problem.

And while one imagines Mr. Batali doesn’t know much about being hungry, he was here to learn about the topic. And he wasn’t alone. Lots of star power turned out for the screening of the film—which hit theaters across the country last Friday and is also available on iTunes and on demand—including Steve Buscemi, Jon Stewart and Jeff Bridges, who appears in the movie.

Mr. Stewart left before the screening, presented in association with the Cinema Society, but he had already seen the film, which mostly documents the travails of three individuals who deal with food insecurity. In fact, the film's directors had appeared on The Daily Show the previous night. We had seen the interview and noticed that the dialogue had been unusually straight-faced. No jokes were cracked. Why so serious, we wondered?

Mr. Stewart, who will be leaving The Daily Show for 12 weeks to direct his own movie, let out a big laugh. "I try, but sometimes I don't nail it," he told the Transom, going on to talk about the power of the film. "Sometimes you see something and you get so wrapped up."

We asked Ms. Jacobson how she felt she had fared on The Daily Show.

"I was incredibly nervous," she admitted, "but to be honest, once Jon started talking, it got easy. There are times when the subject doesn't lend itself to making a lot of jokes, but we had fun.”

"It was pretty surreal," Ms. Silverbush said of the encounter with Mr. Stewart, "but I came away from it feeling excited and empowered."

And the directors feel that their film will have the ability to empower hungry people around the country. Ms. Silverbush told us that the reality of hunger in the United States--more than 50 million Americans struggle with food insecurity--hit her on a visceral level when, years ago, she realized that a young girl she mentored was going hungry.

It took three years to make A Place at The Table, whose executive producer is Tom Colicchio, the chef and restaurateur who owns a number of elegant eateries throughout the country and happens to be married to Ms. Silverbush.

And the directors say the movie has a precedent: Hunger in America, a CBS documentary from 1968. That film galvanized the nation, they explained; the government took action by creating a food safety net and helped to end hunger, almost entirely, by the end of the 1970s. During the Reagan years, though, reforms were pushed back, the movie argues.

We asked Ms. Silverbush—who, with her co-director, has unleashed a social action campaign in conjunction with the movie's launch—if she thought her film would have the same effect on the country that Hunger in America had on a previous generation.

"I know that it will," she said, without hesitation.

After the screening, guests headed over to Riverpark, a Colicchio outpost on 29th Street, near the East River, where they were treated to a sumptuous, late-night buffet of wagyu beef brisket, Berkshire pork rack, fried chicken, shrimp, lobster, oysters and more.

In beguiling Gen. David Petraeus, biographer Paula Broadwell joins a select group of ambitious female scribes who have run away—literally—with their subjects.

Ms. Broadwell seduced the exercise-mad general in Afghanistan when she proved she could match his six-minute miles. She sealed the deal with a finished piece of hagiography called—no snickering now—All In, which she then went on to flog in evening dresses that revealed biceps to rival Michelle Obama’s.
Ms. Broadwell is in hiding now, but she’s in good company.

Female scribes may be at a disadvantage when it comes to good assignments and pay, but they enjoy certain benefits vis-à-vis male egomaniacs.

Both male and female reporters carry basic tools in their bag of tricks, including the ability to flatter, cajole, wheedle and bully a subject into answering questions.

But the most effective tool of the female journalist is often her ability to disarm. There’s that delicate, shell-like ear, tuned to him alone. Women are used to kvetching about this and that to their girlfriends. But Great Men have no one to confide in besides their spouses, and when a female reporter turns up with a recorder, while he may have the self-control not to reveal company secrets, the novelty of being listened to by a new woman is often an intoxicant.

If power is an aphrodisiac, the power reflected back to the Great Man through the dictation-taking pen of the female journalist is de facto doubly arousing. A wise Lois Lane knows that with certain subjects, the well-turned stiletto can add a frisson that brings forth the most provocative quotes. The same cannot be said for male journalists covering women, because most American women leaders take an oath of asexuality in order to survive.

Most of the time, though, Great Men aren’t all that interested in actually bedding grubby ink-stained wretches. It takes a particularly bold, adventurous and hot Brenda Starr to throw the subject of an interview under the desk for a shag—an act the general alluded to in emails to Broadwell.

Overachieving soldier-scholar Broadwell isn’t even a career journalist. She doesn’t hail from the same mousy and supposedly objective ranks as the rest of us, but that’s only because she could actually do it all. She grew up in North Dakota, was high school valedictorian, student council president, homecoming queen and an all-state basketball player, graduated from the U.S. Military Academy at West Point with multiple honors, and has held positions in the U.S. intelligence community, U.S. Special Operations Command and FBI Joint Terrorism Task Forces.

A buxom G.I. Jane, done up for recent television appearances in ruffled and silky sleeveless dresses, Ms. Broadwell apparently went way off the rez with anonymous emails to a third woman, Jill Kelley of Florida, who has insisted she is merely a friend, and not another Petraeus paramour.
The general must have known he was dealing with a loose cannon when Ms. Broadwell posted pictures of him with Angelina Jolie in his office on her Facebook page—before the pictures had been made public, which they might never have been, since Ms. Jolie was clearly in a part of the Langley building off limits to civilians.

Initial reports claimed Ms. Broadwell broke up with Mr. Petraeus when he became CIA director a year ago, but others suggest that the two actually started their affair after he was sworn in. Whatever the details, a woman who could match him in pushups and chin-ups must have seemed like his athletic soulmate, even the love of his life.

Those in-depth interviews conducted on endurance runs in Afghanistan, were “the foundation of our relationship,” Ms. Broadwell told Jon Stewart in a publicity appearance on The Daily Show before the scandal broke. She had taken the lead in promoting the book she co-wrote with Washington Post editor Vernon Loeb (a real ink-stained wretch who has been, so far, conspicuously silent on the activities of his co-author.)

It can’t be easy to be a Great Man confronted with a sexy hagiographer with glowing penmanship and a dab of perfume.

There are many such tales and some of them end well. The happily-ever-after standard was set by Suzy Wetlaufer, who was editor of the Harvard Business Review when she profiled Jack Welch, then CEO of GE, whose business wisdom was doled out in a best-selling book lapped up by middle-manager wannabes in airport bookstores across the land.

At the time, Lisa DePaulo wrote in New York magazine that good things almost instantly came to life when these two overachievers crossed paths. Ms. Wetlaufer was then “a vivacious 42-year-old Harvard M.B.A., Baker Scholar, novelist, mother of four, and Sunday-school teacher—with a penchant for Prada and Chanel and fabulous shoes,” Ms. DePaulo wrote.

Ms. Wetlaufer had interviewed most of the nation’s top CEOs, and getting picked up in a corporate jet was all in a day’s work for her. But the 66-year-old Mr. Welch’s charms knocked her off her objective game.

Weeks after the fateful interview, Mr. Welch asked if he could spend the holidays with Ms. Wetlaufer and her four kids. She happily agreed to have the private jet deliver him to her Yuletide hearth.

Mr. Welch’s wife of 13 years, Jane, a lawyer who had ditched her career for the Great Man, angrily confronted Ms. Wetlaufer on the phone. The Harvard Business Review was soon without an editor, and Ms. Wetlaufer and Mr. Welch are, as far as is known, living in connubial bliss to this day.

The benchmark for disaster in the sexy Boswell game was set by videographer Rielle Hunter, who signed onto John Edwards’s campaign, allegedly to document the Great Man in action. The action, of course, continued after the director yelled cut. Ms. Rielle ended up not just sacking Mr. Edwards’s career, but getting him a federal indictment for illegal campaign contributions, conspiracy and making false statements in connection with a cover-up of his affair.

From the other side of the Atlantic, in lands un-encumbered with American Puritanism and J-school objectivity training, the seductive female scribe swaggers through public life, often trailing wrecked high-profile marriages.

Young Anna Wintour, in her salad days as a newspaper editor in swinging ’70s London, once disappeared with Bob Marley for a week, according to biographer Jerry Oppenheimer. Mr. Oppenheimer wrote that Island Records founder Chris Blackwell introduced the fashionista to Mr. Marley and got her a backstage pass to one of Mr. Marley’s shows in New York. She immediately “fell for” the sexy Rastamon. She was “riveted” and acted as if she’d “met God,” Mr. Oppenheimer quoted one friend as saying. While the story is impossible to confirm, Ms. Wintour has never explicitly denied that headboard notch.

The greatest female journalist-seducers prowl deeper in the euro zone, in, bien sûr, Paris, the setting for the romance of Anne Sinclair and Dominique Strauss-Kahn. Ms. Sinclair was an accomplished and beautiful national television journalist when she met the dashing Socialist leader and twice-married (at the time, still-married) DSK in 1989. His advisers had sent him to meet with her not to be interviewed but so that he might pick up some media politesse. According to a report in Time, DSK “fell for her immediately, calling her several times a day.” They kept the affair secret for a while, but married in 1991.

France’s current first lady is former Paris Match journalist Valérie Trierweiler, a Brenda Starr lookalike down to the trench coat and cascading auburn cheveux, who first met socialist François Hollande when she was in her 20s and he was a leather-jacket-wearing, open-married lover of Ségolène Royal, the mother of his four children. By 2005, they were having a secret affair. She now sleeps in the Elysée Palace.

Along the way, her very French exploits have included reports that Mr. Hollande shared her with a Sarkozy government minister while all three were still in other relationships—in a fabulous ménage à six. This year, Ms. Trierweiler engaged in a notorious Twitter catfight with Ms. Royal during the French campaign season.

The French, of course, expect women to be catfighting over Great Men. But no self-respecting French woman over there would have sicced the authorities on an rival, as Ms. Kelley is said to have done after Ms. Broadwell’s threatening emails, kicking off the scandal that accomplished what neither Al Qaeda in Iraq nor the Taliban could engineer.

editorial@observer.com

Jon Stewart (Getty Images)

It’s hard to believe Jon Stewart has time to spare before the presidential election, but for the fourth year running, he’s hosting his Night of Too Many Stars benefit, an apolitical gathering devoted to raising money for autism research. Funny people (Tina Fey, Tracy Morgan, Seth Rogen, Jerry Seinfeld) and, well, untraditional comedians (Julianne Moore, Bill O’Reilly, Katy Perry) are appearing to tape a live sketch show that will air on Comedy Central on October 21 ... Earlier in the day, the Public Theater invites neighbors citywide to an open house to showcase its revamped and refurbished (to the tune of $40 million!) Astor Place home, with sneak peeks at upcoming productions including the Alison Bechdel adaptation Fun Home. Anyone planning on cabbing it, beware: a stretch of Lafayette Street’s closing down for the party!

Night of Too Many Stars, Beacon Theatre, 2124 Broadway, 7:30pm, tickets and information can be found at comedycentral.com/shows/night-of-too-many-stars; Public Theater block party, Lafayette Street between Astor Place and East Fourth Street, 12pm-5pm, open to the public.

Tina Fey, Zach G. in 'Between Two Ferns: A New York Fairytale' (Comedy Central)

Since the launch of Between Two Ferns on FunnyOrDie.com in 2008, people have been clamoring for Zach Galifianakis and Scott Aukermanto turn their short-form experimental interview project into a 30-minute television show. (We certainly wouldn't have minded if Mr. Galifiankis' awkward, confrontational interrogations of celebrities replaced the majority of television interviews.)

Before watching last weekend's Comedy Central's Comedy Awards, fans of Between Two Ferns finally got a taste of what a 30 minute episode of the show would be like, in the form of Between Two Ferns: A Fairytale of New York.

You can watch the full episode on Comedy Central, but here's the bit that everyone's talking about today, featuring 30 Rock's Tina Fey:

 
Some critics are complaining that taking the web show and elongating it for television ruined the jokes. (You know what they say about comedy: It's all about...), though most were content to just to heap on the lavish praise while watch Mr. Galifianakis talk to a variety of famous faces, including Jon Stewart and Sir Richard Branson. What did you think?

(...timing.)

Producers sent a note to audience members yesterday apologizing for the last-minute cancellation and citing "unforseen circumstances."

(Email screencap via Twitter user @benlai91)

An unexpected cancellation is extremely unusual for Stephen Colbert, who has hosted the show with the flu and in a cast. The Daily Show with Jon Stewart has been cancelled on short notice twice, once when Mr. Stewart's child was born and once when a show staffer died unexpectedly. The radio silence from Team Colbert and Comedy Central is ominous, but given Mr. Colbert's past antics, it could also mean he's gotten up to an incredible campaign stunt. Let's keep our fingers crossed.

Update: The Huffington Post reports that Mr. Colberg's mother, 91, has fallen seriously ill.

[via Mediaite]

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

If only if the rest of government worked this way

Bad news first: Stephen Colbert has put an end to his bid for president of South Carolina by disbanding his exploratory committee, as he announced last night.

Good news: He can now regain power of his super PAC, after running through a messy gauntlet with its current gatekeeper (but in no way associate) Jon Stewart.

Even better-best news: According to an F.E.C. filing made at 12:01 this morning, the political action committee--which during the regime change two weeks ago renamed itself "The Definitely Not Coordinating With Stephen Colbert Super PAC" but has since returned to its "Americans for a Better Tomorrow, Tomorrow"...though it's easier to just say Colbert's Super Pac--has raised $1,023,121.24.

The New York Times lists of some of the celebrity and organizations that are named as donors for the committee, though no one, not even Hot in Cleveland star Laura Sangiacomo or former West Wing hottie Bradley Whitford, has confirmed that they put money into the organization that released videos encouraging people to vote for Herman Cain after he dropped out of the race.

While we're glad to have gotten a lesson on how super PACs work, we're wondering where that million plus bucks is going now that it's back in Colbert's control. Though lord knows he fought long and hard for it last night; wresting control from a reluctant Mr. Stewart in a showdown that could only be described with the phrase "We have no words."

Jon Stewart's "Moment of Zen"

Stephen Colbert's response:

And it looks like Mr. Colbert is already taking back control of his Super PAC's website via newsletter:

Dear Super PAC Nation,

For those of you holding your breath for the past few weeks, you may exhale. For those of you who did not survive holding your breath: You did not die in vain. Because I, Stephen Colbert, have regained control of Colbert Super PAC.

Earlier tonight, I confronted Jon Stewart on The Daily Show, and chased him all the way to The Colbert Report, in the most action-packed TV crossover since that time Urkel guest-starred on Full House.

The way I see it, the Supreme Court said that money is speech, and Jon Stewart was hogging all my speech. Now I've taken that speech from Jon, making him like that movie "The Artist": French.

At midnight, Colbert Super PAC will be filing our financial details with the Federal Election Commission. If you're not currently one of the three Democrats or three Republicans on the F.E.C., you can read about it in the press release below.

Now if you'll excuse me, I need to spend some quality time with my money.

Stephen Colbert
Ex-President and President
Colbert Super PAC

And here's the press release:

Colbert transfers his super PAC powers to Jon Stewart

Tonight, Stephen Colbert had some big news to share with America: since he was announced to be polling ahead of presidential candidate Jon Huntsman in South Carolina, he had decided to form an exploratory committee to become president of the United States...of South Carolina.

There was only one hitch.

Back in September, Mr. Colbert's joke-super PAC was real-approved by the FEC. Unfortunately, you can't have a super PAC and run for president, as Mr. Colbert's lawyer told him on the show, because that would be considered "coordinating with yourself." (This was once explained in a Colbert Super PAC Ad featuring Buddy Roemer, but sometimes we need to be reminded how the government works.)

Forced to make a decision, the recent New York Times Magazine cover model handed off his committee to his former coworker (and bagel/travel agency business partner) Jon Stewart, whose first act as president of the Colbert Super PAC was to change its name to "The Definitely Not Coordinating with Stephen Colbert Super PAC."

Tellingly, the Colbert super PAC website has yet to change its name, though it does now have an opening letter from Mr. Stewart.

The punchline, of course, is that this is all actually legal, and that candidates use super PACS (which can raise unlimited amounts of money by getting donations from corporations and unions as well as individuals) as their own personal campaign machines all the time now. And as we learned tonight (or already knew!) you can still be close associates, friends, and/or business partners with the person in charge of the political action committee, as long as you aren't "coordinating."

We'd be outraged...except that we really want to see Mr. Colbert enter into the 2012 race.