Rock Center with Brian Williams

When I was in middle school, I used to spend my Friday night watching 20/20 – both because I liked how it made me feel more mature than my peers, and because I didn’t have a social life. (Frankly, the latter was the bigger influence on my decision to watch the show.) I’m not going to say that it was great journalism, and I now recognize that it could at times focus on stories that were sensationalist and/or overly frivolous, but it was never as crass as I remember say, Dateline, being, as it was a fairly slick and classy way for me to get some extra news into my television diet.

In fact, thanks to 20/20, I have a soft spot for “news magazine” television programs, even I recognize all the trapping and problems these kind of shows hold, both in terms of their validity as “news” sources, and the fact that they generally add to the problems that we generally ascribe to “the media”. As I grew older, I grew out of the long-winded and sensationalist 20/20, and learned to embrace Nightline, both in the awesome Ted Koppel-helmed version, and the later, not-nearly-as-good version that came after he retired. Nightline was slicker and more efficient, and especially in the current iteration, became very good at balancing the tone between the serious and more light-hearted stories. (Though now that I mention it, I’m not really a fan of the fluff pieces, but I know that some people really like it, so I accept it as a necessary evil.)

It’s with this mindset, and for these reasons, that I decided to review Rock Center with Brian Williams. I’m didn’t go into the show with all that high of expectations, but considering that Williams is a affable host, that the news magazine, while not dying, is a highly marginalized genre; and that NBC is flailing in the ratings, I was interested in seeing what the show had up its sleeve, if anything. (Perhaps the only thing I could count on was that Rock Center would be better than The Playboy Club, but that’s not a particularly difficult prediction to make.)

I ended up being surprised by the fairly unsurprising nature of the program, and while I can’t blame NBC for playing it safe instead of risking a larger audience and losing, I’m a bit disappointed that the network would use valuable primetime real estate to air something so decidedly average.

For most of its running time, the show is broken down into four taped news segments – here, they were about a “boom town” in North Dakota presented by Harry Smith, reporter Richard Engel sneaking into Syria for a report on the country’s oppression, an in-studio report on news ideas for airplane boarding, and Kate Snow investigating “birth tours”, where women come to America so that their children can gain American citizenship, and then go back with their kid to their home country. Each segment ends with Williams having a brief follow-up conversation with the conversation with the correspondent (with the exception of the segment on airplane seating; Williams presented that one himself) which gives Williams to direct the viewers to follow-up with the story on the show’s website.

Pretty standard, right? What’s bothersome about this is that the way that Williams presents this material isn’t so standard. The sound stage that the programs is hosted in is fairly open in its design, and though there are couches (for the guest) and desks (for the post-segments de-briefing), Williams prefers to stand to deliver the segues, as if to cast a less formal vibe for the news program.

I almost wish that the show would embrace this more talk-show like format more. In the cold open, there was, for whatever reason, a brief shot of Williams sitting down on the couches will all of the correspondents, and they seemed to be cross-discussing the various stories. I would like to see that approach taken in the future; segments like Snow’s on the birth tours seem to be trying to present both sides of the stories – not just for the sake of journalistic ethics, but because they want to facilitate discussion, and having a panel discussion would certainly help to achieve that goal.

Of course, not all the news story are proper for discussion, given that both the “boom town” and airplane seating segments were more of the “huh, that’s interesting variety”, but I see no reason why the program can’t just have these correspondents share a little camaraderie. It would especially help with the running time; with an hour-long running time split amongst four segments and a guest interview, those segment feel like they run for a bit too long without actually using their time effectively.

And speaking of guests, tonight guest was, in a weird bit of scheduling, was Jon Stewart. Now obviously Stewart was their to be the softball kind of interviewee for the show to test out its format (it’s broadcasted live, for whatever reason), and thought he seems like the type to detest these kinds of show, Stewart was a game enough for the task. But in a weird bit of a scheduling hiccup, the interview was broken up into two short halves; in the first, Stewart and Williams swapped Halloween tradition, and in the second, they debated the Occupy Wall Street movement.

So the question remains: What kind of show is Rock Center going to be? Is it a news program or a talk show? Will it attempt to engage its viewers, or would it prefer that they just complacently take in the stories they tell? Will it ask it’s guest serious questions, or Williams just spend seven minutes with them shooting the shit? Because right now the show seems to be stuck in a wishy-washy middle place, and it’s not going to attract viewers, or even hold on to the one it got tonight, by acting so beige.

Perhaps the best part of tonight’s show was seeing Stewart pop-up randomly in little bits preceding his interview. Sure he’s the kind of guest to who’s down for those sorts of things (and maybe even suggested them himself), but it also speaks to the affable and rather humorous nature Williams sports, and I think this show would work better if NBC would let him off the leash and let him run the show that’s he’s currently pushing through the cracks.

Quotes, Etc:

“Brian Williams needs vascular support.”