With Lester Holt handling the NBC Nightly News, sometimes it’s easy to forget Brian Williams. In case you have, he was that former Nightly News anchor who told all those stories that weren’t true. His fabrications included his helicopter being shot down in Iraq, exaggerating his experiences covering Hezbollah, and being the inventor of Pac-Man. (Okay, we made that last one up.) Now, after spending several months in the supermax penitentiary of “not being allowed on NBC,” Brian Williams has been granted parole: According to The Hollywood Reporter, Williams will serve out the remainder of his sentence on the prison island of MSNBC.
As we previously reported, NBC struggled with Williams’ fate before ultimately deciding to keep him on in some capacity. Much like Tony Soprano discovering that his beloved Christopher Moltisanti was an incurable heroin addict, network executives had to weigh the threat Williams posed to their organization against the cost and trouble of suffocating him in a suspicious car accident.
In a move that some might consider a fate worse than death, Williams has instead been banished to MSNBC, the cable home of The Rachel Maddow Show and presumably other programs. As Ron Burgundy to Maddow’s Veronica Corningstone, Williams will be relegated to covering daytime breaking news. His September 22 return coincides with Pope Francis’ tour of the U.S., a potential opportunity for Williams to recount the time he foiled the assassination of Pope John Paul II, promptly followed by his being replaced with Chris Matthews.