However, BBC America’s campaign to earn Maslany an Emmy nomination comes at a time when the Academy’s traditional logics—while still present—are being challenged by new spaces for Emmy campaigning. Regardless of whether or not the campaign to earn her a nomination is successful, Maslany offers a valuable case study for understanding the value of an Emmy nomination and strategies available to harness and/or generate that value for those connected to the television industry.

Although BBC America may lack the prestige that AMC and FX have tapped into in recent years, they are one of a number of cable outlets that see the Emmys as an opportunity for legitimation. In 2010, USA made a flashy push for Emmy attention by flying banners over Los Angeles; while they were supporting specific candidates, they were also reinforcing that they deserved to be part of the conversation. Although USA has been shut-out since breaking through with two acting nominations that year, their example—outlined by their executives here—is one that a channel like BBC America can follow as it moves away from airing imported series and begins building an original content brand based around shows like Orphan Black, Copper, and Ripper Street. Maslany’s campaign came with its very own banner flying over Los Angeles pictured above, a splashy pronouncement not just for Maslany’s performance but also for BBC America’s desire to be perceived as an award-winning channel (outside of the marginalized miniseries category, where they have had success with imports The Hour and Luther).

Maslany’s campaign also comes at a time when the Emmys are beginning to function similarly to the Oscars in terms of an “awards season.” While the Screen Actors Guild and Golden Globes feature TV awards, they operate off-cycle from the Emmys, and happen too early in the year to function as clear precursors. However, the Broadcast Television Journalists Association has been bullish in promoting their Critics’ Choice Television Awards as a predictor of Emmy success, scheduling their awards for the day Emmy ballots became available to voters and touting throughout their streaming webcast how many of last year’s Emmy winners they had predicted, so as to spotlight their own legitimacy.

In truth, treating the CCTAs—or the long-standing Television Critics Association Awards, which have by default become part of the newly-formed “Emmy season”—as a precursor is ill-advised: the CCTA nominees are determined by small juries, and—like the TCAs—winners are voted on by a small, marginal membership with neither the Emmy crossover of the Screen Actors Guild members nor the decades of precedent held by the Golden Globes’ Hollywood Foreign Press Association. However, they function as a promotional precursor by offering channels like BBC America a platform; even Maslany’s nomination for a CCTA was a boost to BBC America’s campaign, but her eventual win for Best Actress in a Drama Series offers considerable momentum for her Emmy campaign. It also doesn’t hurt that a room of industry elites—read: Emmy voters—saw Maslany defeat Emmy champions Claire Danes and Julianna Margulies: chances are some of the looks of surprise in this video will increase the likelihood of curious actors or producers digging through their pile of channel-provided screeners to find out what the fuss is about.

That narrative of discovery is the ultimate goal of an Emmy campaign, but it doesn’t only have to happen within the safe space of award shows or guild-sponsored Q&As or the pages of glossy Emmy inserts from industry trade journals. While fans have often led informal social media campaigns in support of particular shows or performers, BBC America has been actively pushing Maslany through their official Twitter accounts by highlighting nominations and retweeting praise from fans and critics as the first season unfolded this Spring. By actively encouraging fans to get involved in the campaign on platforms like Twitter or Tumblr—on which BBC America has also been active—in this way, the channel seeks to blend their promotional campaign with the existing grassroots fan community around the series, known affectionately as “#CloneClub,” and as seen in this tweet from Maslany herself.

Although there is no clear evidence to suggest this kind of Twitter campaigning is reaching Emmy voters en masse, the #CloneClub has gained a few famous followers. Lost co-creator Damon Lindelof effusively praised Maslany’s performance on Twitter; Patton Oswalt excitedly live-tweeted his experience watching the series and tweeted about his thrill at meeting Maslany at the CCTAs; both Shawn Ryan and Kevin Williamson tweeted about watching the series, the latter isolating Maslany’s performance. Not all Emmy voters are likely tied into this community of industry professionals active on Twitter, but this convergence between industry and fandom nonetheless highlights the potential for buzz to translate to legitimate consideration.

Odds are that the obstacles facing Orphan Black and Maslany will prove more difficult for the Academy to embrace: even if BBC America is flying banners over Los Angeles, and even if Maslany adds a TCA award to her CCTA, much of Maslany’s buzz is isolated in critical communities likely only visible to a small niche of industry professionals whose influence within the mass popular vote-driven nominating process is limited. It’s difficult, though, to root against something that would challenge the traditional logics of the often stodgy Emmys, and it’s easy—if also somewhat optimistic—to imagine how the industry could embrace an underdog like Maslany when her example could open up doors for other performers, other channels, and other organizations that seek to acquire or determine television value.

First, MSNBC. Its tagline, “Lean Forward,” may have invited ridicule, but the cable news network’s branding efforts have succeeded as CNN’s have outright imploded. Keith Olbermann’s contempt for the McCain/Palin campaign in 2008 solidified MSNBC as the alternative to FOX News. And even though MSNBC starts its programming day with conservative host Joe Scarborough of Morning Joe, it ends its primetime lineup with a self-proclaimed socialist, Lawrence O’Donnell of The Last Word. Although the prison reality program Lockup still has a home on weekends, its dominance is waning. In 2011 MSNBC began to carve out a space for more political discussion on Saturdays and Sundays with a four-hour programming block of roundtable shows, Up with Chris Hayes and Melissa Harris-Perry, followed by two more hours of a standard talking-head program, Weekends with Alex Witt.

In mid-March MSNBC announced a shuffling of personnel and, in the process, revealed that their fetish for younger viewers did not end with The Cycle or The Rachel Maddow Show. MSNBC pulled 34-year-old Chris Hayes out of his weekend show and moved him to 8pm on weeknights as the lead-in for its progressive primetime lineup and to counter The O’Reilly Factor on FOX News. Hayes displaced Ed Schultz, a 59 year-old, labor-focused host who was moved to a completely new show on weekends at 5pm following a newly announced hour-long show helmed by former DNC spokesperson Karen Finney. Replacing Hayes on Up is another 34 year-old, Steve Kornacki, who was plucked from the youthful foursome at The Cycle. The gap left by Kornacki has been filled by the 33-year-old Ari Melber, a commentator from MSNBC’s best print-journalism friend, The Nation. Chris Matthews, Al Sharpton, and Lawrence O’Donnell remain firmly in place but surrounded by a crop of faces launched into relevancy by the value of young consumers and young voters actively courted by the two Obama presidential campaigns. Is this a schedule or a mobilization?

Next, NBC Sports. In late 2012 NBC Sports announced it would begin airing Formula One races at the start of the 2013 season, outbidding Fox Sports Media Group (owner of Speed Channel) for the U.S. television rights. Formula One is a primarily European open-wheel motorsport, known for its outlandish spending and international racing locales. Team budgets can reach the hundreds of millions, and high-end brands like Ferrari, Mercedes, and Lotus—as well as high-profile international drivers—inspire loyal fandom across the globe. A new F1 circuit debuted in Austin, Texas last November, so the pairing of a new U.S. track with a new U.S. TV home for F1 makes sense.

F1 has always struggled to find a friendly audience in the U.S. market; NASCAR dominates here for obvious reasons. Plus, F1 races happen all over the world, which means that viewers who want to watch live must keep very odd sleep schedules throughout a race weekend. Despite the obstacles to acquiring a sizeable audience, Speed Channel aired the races for 17 years but never did much with them. The upside of F1 migrating to the NBC Universal family is in the parent company’s infrastructure and its motivation to court its audience. The new set for F1 commentators is the first clue that NBC Sports has thrown quite a bit of money at this new venture. The network has also partnered with sponsors to offer “Formula 1 Non-Stop,” a split-screen experience that allows viewers to watch a silent frame of the live race as a larger frame (with sound) offers the break’s advertisements. This isn’t available in every break, but it certainly is a convenient way of getting the DVR crowd to at least listen to the ads while they watch the on-track action.

The increased commercialism is apparent in the shift from Speed to NBC Sports, but it just seems redundant in the face of the rampant sponsorship of any motorsport. F1 drivers only win a seat once they secure adequate sponsorship: lose your sponsor, lose your drive. The television audience should be accustomed to that arrangement.

While we hear about new lows at NBC and await an upswing, let’s remember the changes happening within the family. MSNBC revamps its lineup, giving cable news a facelift and shaving a couple of decades off of the authoritative figure staring back at us. NBC Sports takes a chance on a domestically unpopular but globally thriving sport. Both cable networks are actively stalking a quality audience—a young, urban group of consumers that can be as vital to news and sports as it is to comedy and drama. Grandpa Peacock may be floundering, but the kids are holding their own.

At the end of the day, though, they highlight the fact that the Emmy Awards are a broadcast event, and therefore must be concerned with keeping the attention of broadcast viewers. And in the current televisual age, that means organizing the show in ways that emphasize what wide audiences are actually watching or interested in. Accordingly, the emphasis on presenters (as opposed to what they were presenting) in these on-screen prompts fits in with a larger strategy of making a niche celebration of television production culture seem like a celebration of capital-T Television that viewers across the nation can relate to.

The challenge for Emmy producers is that they are forced to complete this same task with different nominees every year, which requires certain adjustments. In recent years, after the era of The West Wing and The Sopranos, the drama categories have been dominated by shows that most people aren’t watching, with the little-watched Mad Men winning four straight Emmys for Outstanding Drama Series and Lead Actor seeing similar domination from Breaking Bad’s Bryan Cranston. By comparison, comedy has exited a dark period where niche or low-rated comedies like The Office and 30 Rock walked away with the trophy, as Modern Family offers a populist hit with comparatively mass appeal (although its total viewer numbers pale in comparison to the sitcoms dominating its category a decade earlier).

Accordingly, comedy categories opened and closed this year’s Emmy telecast, despite the fact that the only interesting story was happening in the dramatic categories. For those who actually follow the awards, and for whom the evening is a suspenseful reveal after months of speculation, Homeland’s win for Outstanding Drama Series, Lead Actor and Actress in a Drama Series, and Writing in a Drama Series was the story of the evening. Not only does it dethrone Mad Men after its four-year reign and mark the first time since 1993 that a series has won Series, Lead Actor and Lead Actress in a single year, but it also signals Showtime’s first ever Series win at the Emmys, becoming only the third cable channel to win a Series award (after HBO and AMC). But Homeland draws a small audience, limited by access to premium cable, and so Modern Family’s predictable win for Outstanding Comedy Series closes the evening as a celebration of television that people watching have actually seen (and, not entirely coincidentally, television on the broadcast network that happened to be airing this year’s Emmy telecast).

This seems to fly in the face of the prevailing discourse surrounding the current era of television, which is often heralded for its serious dramatic programming—most often on cable—by those who suggest we are in a golden age (a notion Damian Lewis echoed in his speech, making me reach for the bingo card I drew into the back of my copy of Newman and Levine’s Legitimating Television); However, while the very existence of the Emmys as a judgment of art would seem to offer proof of this claim, the Emmys telecast can actively work against the exclusivity of those definitions. Although no broadcast series made it into the Outstanding Drama Series category, eight made it into the montage of eighteen series that marked the beginning of the drama period of the telecast, only one of which was nominated for a single award given out during that telecast (CBS’ The Good Wife, with three acting nominations). And yet House, Once Upon a Time, Grey’s Anatomy, Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, Revenge, Smash, and NCIS all have something in common: more people have probably seen them than any of the series nominated for Outstanding Drama Series. Heck, more people watch NCIS weekly than the six shows nominated in that category combined.

These montages may not seem as important as the winners, and they certainly aren’t likely to be part of news reports or historical records regarding the telecast, but they capture a different way in which the Emmys serve as a discursive space for the contested meaning of television quality. Although we normally think about winners and losers, or even nominees, as the primary space in which the Emmys reinforce or establish certain hierarchies of quality, we also need to think about the broadcast itself as a push back against those hierarchies, particularly given the ongoing battle between the broadcast networks and the Academy regarding the Movie/Miniseries category (which privileges HBO, who won four out of seven awards in the category, with the other two going to basic cable programs). Next year, the Supporting Acting categories for Movies and Miniseries are disappearing, leaving more time for genres that remain part of the industrial structures of broadcast television, and therefore genres that the networks paying to air the awards are more invested in.

In other words, it wasn’t a coincidence that only three of the eighteen series featured during the broadcast’s comedy montage were from cable networks (and all of them from HBO, with no representation from nominated series from Showtime—Nurse Jackie—and FX—Louie—within the evening’s broadcast). It was a statement that comedy is and always will be a broadcast genre, even though they could have easily selected another six great cable comedies to achieve the relative parity they sought in drama series. Like the choice to lead and close with comedy, it’s the broadcast networks’ way of marking their territory: while the battle for drama might seem lost, the war for comedy wages on, and it will be fought in the editing bays and production booths as much as in the voting ballots.

Hugh Hefner's Playboy's Penthouse

**This is the first in our new series: Mediating the Past, which focuses on how the past is produced, constructed, distributed, branded and received through various media.

About six months before Mad Men’s very first episode takes place, Hugh Hefner debuted a syndicated television program entitled Playboy’s Penthouse.  It was an early example of intra-corporate cross-media promotion, in which—to invoke the era’s term of art and Hefner’s actual words—the “foremost exponent of sick humor.” Lenny Bruce, explained “I would never satirize the obvious,” before wondering aloud, on the program, who would advertise on such a program.  Bruce concluded his ad-libbed ruminations by gibing Hefner directly: “I’m glad you’ve got some guts…you’re not interested in the people that don’t have any money.”

Maybe it was the mise-en-scène, but I recalled this line again during the extended swinging penthouse party sequence in Mad Men‘s fifth season premiere episode (of an apparently contractually finalized seven).  Back with new episodes after 17 months, the media saturation leading up to its return has had me thinking that Mad Men and the cable channel AMC on which it is shown have “got some guts” in rather the way Bruce meant.

For a couple months now, middlebrow America has been utterly awash in Mad Men.  The New York Times ran so many profiles, interviews, style pieces, analyses, reflections, recaps, think-pieces, reviews, political tie-ins, beverage tie-ins, and other pieces, that another media reporter, Joe Flint (@JBflint), tweeted after the season premiere ratings were revealed: “Mad Men draws 3.5 million viewers.  I didn’t know NYT’s staff was that big.”  The Washington Post meanwhile actually ran a piece on the number of Mad Men pieces it ran leading up to the season premiere:  22 including that piece itself!  Newsweek contrived a special retro issue timed to correspond with the new season’s premiere. The New Yorker offers online readers weekly episode synopses, as does Slate, Salon and Esquire (which also lists “all things Mad Men” on its site, and sprinkles its hard copy pages with regular think pieces about the show it has suggested “is the greatest piece of sustained television ever made“).  Even nominally non-commercial public service network National Public Radio ran stories about Mad Men on “Fresh Air,” “Morning Edition,” “Weekend Edition,” “All Things Considered,” it’s online food blog, and “Fresh Air” again!  For certain media consumers, Mad Men has been impossible to ignore.  Have you been hailed by Mad Men? (hint: you’re halfway through another piece about it).

While this media surge contributed to this season’s premiere becoming Mad Men’s highest rated episode ever, ratings are not really the point (it still had 5.5 million fewer viewers than AMC’s The Walking Dead finale had the week before).  Mad Men brings other kinds of value to AMC:  the wealthiest viewers on cable, industry prestige (AMC Networks promotes itself with Mad Men’s four consecutive Emmys and three Golden Globes), and overwhelming (and overwhelmingly positive) media coverage.  Mad Men, in other words, sustains AMC’s brand, providing a specific and prestigious visibility that extends beyond those who actually watch.  Visibility like this matters for attracting more viewers, for setting ad rates, for attracting “quality” program producers, but also, crucially for a cable channel, for negotiating with MSOs and setting carriage fees. (It also helps Lionsgate continue to “monetize” Mad Men beyond AMC).

Branding for AMC is all the more important as it transitions within a changing television industry.  Begun in 1984 to monetize vaults of otherwise unseen old movies, this is no longer seen as the most profitable way to use a library of films much less a branded cable channel.  As AMC sought to expand its revenue (beyond cable carriage fees) by introducing commercials, it began to alter its programming to attract audiences of the type (younger, richer) and size (bigger) advertisers would pay for.  In an era when old movie libraries are now more profitably being licensed to Netflix, Amazon, and iTunes, however, AMC has had to accelerate its rebranding efforts around a significant transformation (which is why “AMC” no longer stands for “American Movie Classics”) without the loss of its most valuable asset, a predominately male audience achieved through non-sports programming.  This audience came to AMC for the Three Stooges marathons and old Westerns.  They’ve been asked to stay for Mad Men.

Actually, not even so much for Mad Men, but for what Mad Men says about AMC, what its presence reflects about the channel.  Set in the milieu of mid-century advertising, it is itself functioning as an advertisement for a channel once associated with mid-century movies and now deriving increasing revenue from advertisements.  Offering viewers the opportunity to feel simultaneously nostalgic for and superior to a version of an earlier era, Mad Men actually achieves something close to what Hugh Hefner only aspired to for his 1959 program, a “sophisticated weekly get together of the people we dig and who dig us.”  If “sophisticated” once again means straight white sex, smoking, booze, and terse conversation, Mad Men at least presents it in ways that feel comparatively and flatteringly grown up for television today.  Rather than zombie walkers and fidelity to a comic book, Mad Men offers well-dressed Manhattanite drinkers and fidelity to the style of an era.  Middlebrow media has not been voluntarily filled with stories on the characters’ inner lives, much less the fashion, style, and recipes of the higher-rated The Walking Dead.  HBO’s hits Game of Thrones and Boardwalk Empire (never mind Mad Men‘s other timeslot competition The Good Wife) have not had their own tabs on The New Yorker website.  But Mad Men has.  It was born to help rebrand AMC.  It lives on to embody and advertise that new brand’s meaning.  In this capacity it is meant for viewers, sure, but it is almost perfectly suited to attract and flatter the imaginations of advertisers, reporters, and the mediasphere more generally.  The show’s value is not entirely dependent upon its immediate ratings.  This is a point lost on would-be imitators like ABC’s Pan Am and NBC’s Hefner-endorsed The Playboy Club, but it is critical to making a show set in the past point to the future of television.  It has got some guts.

By naming Conan O’Brien the heir to Jay Leno’s throne, NBC replaced a comedian known for his broad appeal with one in the mode of Leno’s old friend/nemesis, David Letterman.  Like his idol Letterman, O’Brien was innovative, unpredictable, and polarizing — the antithesis of Leno’s genial, if bland, humor.  While NBC wanted to keep O’Brien from leaving for ABC or Fox, and thereby further fragmenting the late night landscape, they also retained their commitment to The Tonight Show as one of the remaining bastions of “broadcasting” (as opposed to narrowcasting).  O’Brien was thus expected to adapt his quirky humor to the tastes of an older mass audience.  According to Bill Carter’s new book The War for Late Night, NBC executives (particularly Dick Ebersol) became annoyed with O’Brien for what they understood as his refusal to adjust to the earlier time slot during his brief run as Tonight‘s host.

In reality, O’Brien’s Tonight Show was considerably watered down from its 12:30 predecessor — the bawdy, sophomoric edge of Late Night (against which O’Brien would hilariously play an aghast straight man) was buried in favor of another side of O’Brien’s persona — the pleasant, inoffensive goofball.  O’Brien’s Tonight Show had tried to appeal to a wider audience, and ended up satisfying few.

Despite NBC and Leno’s assertions that O’Brien’s low ratings played a key role in the late night shake-up, Carter’s book makes clear that the disastrous performance of the prime time Jay Leno Show was almost solely responsible — that and the unusual “pay-and-play” stipulation in Leno’s contract that guaranteed him a spot on the NBC schedule.  The 12:05 slot on NBC would have been an excellent fit for O’Brien, but his relationship with NBC had grown toxic due largely to undiplomatic behavior on the part of NBC execs like Ebersol and CEO Jeff Zucker.  Carter depicts the execs as unable to empathize with the sensitive artiste O’Brien, and as understanding late night purely in terms of numbers (in the same way, Leno is portrayed as obsessed with minute-by-minute ratings fluctuations, while the other late night hosts take a more holistic, organic approach to their craft.)

The NBC debacle served to catalyze O’Brien’s young fan base; people who avoided watching broadcast TV but knew O’Brien through the internet became ardent members of “Team Coco.”  O’Brien’s post-Tonight theater tour solidified his cult, folk-hero status.  Unlike O’Brien’s Tonight Show, which tried to win over skeptical Leno fans, Conan is aimed squarely at Team Coco.  It presumes an audience that already finds Conan charming — how else could O’Brien get away with singing (and taking a guitar solo) on a duet of “Twenty Flight Rock” with Jack White at the show’s conclusion?

O’Brien’s return to narrowcasting was never more evident than in his choice of first guest.  Even Seth Rogen himself wondered what he was doing there: “I’m so glad everyone more famous was busy right now.”  Rogen and his stories about medical marijuana and his fiancee’s “titties” targeted the 18-34 demo, with no regard for older audiences.

Overall, the TBS premiere was refreshing in its ordinariness, its willingness to be unremarkable.  There was little of the sense of “event TV” that characterized Conan’s Tonight premiere – which, for me, was a good thing.  The elephantine first episode of O’Brien’s Tonight, front-loaded with overlong, not-especially-funny remote segments, seemed like it was trying too hard.  Conan was enjoyably brisk in comparison — with each guest on for about six minutes, even O’Brien remarked at how quickly the show flew by.

The Conan premiere’s lack of showy excess is partly a function of the program’s industrial status — it’s hard to celebrate a move to basic cable, after all.  Yet working for TBS should be an artistic boon for O’Brien – the channel’s lowered expectations will allow him to further build his niche appeal and foster the underdog status that suits his self-deprecating style.

Let me start by focusing only on basic cable—premium cable is a different beast, and I’m not sure the argument holds there, certainly if Boardwalk Empire is any indication. So far this summer I’ve watched a handful of episodes of The Glades, Rizzoli and Isles, Covert Affairs, and Memphis Beat, and none have left me curious for more. I’ve got the formula, I can probably tell you what is going to happen for the next 12 episodes, if they all make it that long. None, except for a bit of play with characters in Memphis Beat, feature much I could note as exceptional. Admittedly, my viewing has fallen off from other cable originals such as Psych and Leverage that I once watched regularly; here too, the episodic-caper-of-the-week leaves me with little return on my investment of weekly viewing.

There isn’t a Shield, Battlestar, or Mad Men among these new shows. In the past, other cable originals seemed at least somewhat unconventional—Monk had his neuroses, Psych its generationally-specific banter and references, and Burn Notice—okay, I can’t completely explain my continued interest in Burn Notice, except for its function as climate porn during the Michigan winter. Anyway, cable originals have tended to have some quality or characteristic that made them seem unlikely to succeed on a generally-branded broadcast network. In contrast, Rizzoli and Isles seems a minor twist on Crossing Jordan (which debuted nearly a decade ago) and Covert Affairs is an Alias knock-off (also debuted in 2001) which only serves to remind of the writing and acting skill of the “original.”

Notably, the summer’s new offerings haven’t all been unexceptional. Many of the cable shows that most aspire to be different, exceptional, or both are on FX, and FX’s new summer offering Louie remained on brand (Terriers debuts September 8). AMC’s Breaking Bad went to amazing places this summer and Rubicon seems to be a tremendous new conspiracy thriller. And with the return of Mad Men, this summer’s cable offerings have not all disappointed. Perhaps what I thought was an “original cable” distinction, is really just a matter of the brand of FX and AMC.

Instead of “cable” and “broadcast” being in anyway meaningful descriptors of the artistry or accomplishment of series, maybe we are entering an era in which both broadcast and cable channels feature schedules divided between “branding programs” and “schedule-fillers.” In facing distinctive algorithms of budgets, subscription fees, audiences, advertising dollars, and aspiration, both types of television outlets tend to this calculation in specific ways. What seems odd about this move toward filling out a schedule by cable channels, is that they’ve never needed to—the year-round originals on one night a week seemed a viable strategy (at least from the arm chair). Do we really need more marginal programming—it seems so contrary to the emerging technological and distribution environment. Perhaps the schedule expansion that has led to a focus on quantity over distinction is a strategy to argue parity and draw more dollars from advertisers’ broadcast budgets? I think I recall a TNT executive noting the cable channel featured more hours of new original programming this winter than NBC—which suggests it is on decision-makers’ minds. I have some other theories—more posts to come.

Since the potential purchase became public in September, there has been a great deal of speculation about what the sale means for the media industries and for consumers. Ultimately, the move reveals crucial strategies at work within both Comcast and GE, as reported by The New York Times. The cable company obviously looks to NBC-U as the means to producing their own content, while GE seems to be refocusing what has always been a strangely diverse conglomerate. Perhaps the most telling part of the deal, though, is the fact that the buyout seems to be clearly focused on the value of NBC-U’s cable holdings (including USA, MSNBC, Bravo, CNBC and SyFy), not the flagship broadcast network, which is floundering in fourth place.

And, of course, there’s the spectre of AOL-Time-Warner casting its shadow over the union. That particular combination of cable and content simply didn’t work out, a fate that may still befall this new Comcast-NBC-U venture.

In addition to general concerns about increased media consolidation, consumer advocates are also worried about the effects of the deal on the prices demanded by Comcast for cable content. As Time explains, Comcast could start requiring higher fees from subscription services (such as DirecTV and Dish) in exchange for access to their cable holdings, a cost that would be passed on to consumers in the shape of higher fees.

In terms of content, the sale could mean that audiences are in store for some changes to the way they access NBC & NBC-U cable content online and via DVD, and the speed and means by which they access Universal film content both on cable and online.

However you look at it, the purchase is certainly an impressive and revelatory deal, and one that invites speculation about its potential effects. One thing is for sure: the honchos at Comcast and NBC-U are facing some challenges in the months and years ahead. Of course, all I am pondering this morning is…what would Jack Donaghy do?

(Edited to Add)
Related Links
Kim Masters at The Daily Beast: 5 Comcast-NBC Game Changers
Ben Grossman at Broadcasting & Cable: 10 Things to Watch About Comcast-NBC-U