Rock Center

Prime Time News Magazine Show launched in fall 2011, hosted by NBC Nightly News anchor Brian Williams. It was an attempt by the Peacock Network to return to the style of in-depth investigative journalism long since abandoned (indeed, never fully embraced) in favor of True Crime and Missing White Woman Syndrome by Dateline NBC.

Perhaps unfortunately, the Penn State football scandal led to the show's first major splash being alleged pedophile coach Jerry Sandusky's phone interview with Bob Costas (though it was unexpected as Costas was only supposed to interview Sandusky's lawyer before he suggested putting his client on the line), but network management kept those pieces to one 10-12 minute segment rather than the whole hour, and before long lead stories such as Ted Koppel's piece on forces attached to the U.S. embassy remaining in Iraq after the military pullout reasserted the original vision.

Suffered from frequent timeslot reassignment, especially in its first season. That said, this isn't necessarily NBC trying to kill the show—although it hardly got high ratings, news programs are even cheaper to make than Reality Shows, which means that it could be thoroughly abused by the network and still be quite profitable.

The series was canceled after two seasons and 76 episodes; the last episode aired on June 21, 2013.