Welcome back to In the Room. I’m Dylan Byers.

Greetings from Los Angeles, where I’m back in the saddle after a restorative family vacation up in the Pacific Northwest. It seems I missed a relatively slow news cycle, the Paramount-Skydance developments notwithstanding. That said, if you’ve been sitting on any good intel in my absence, please don’t hesitate to get in touch.

In tonight’s email, even more rumblings from 30 Rock and 400 North Cap. Nearly two weeks after the Ronna McDaniel fiasco, the NBC newsroom is still scrutinizing its leaders and speculating about whether any heads may roll. Meanwhile, the conflict-averse Comcast front office is quite eager to move on, and signaling their support for Cesar Conde.

But first…

🖼️ A little home team news…: Marion Maneker, the veteran art market journalist, is joining Puck, via acquisition. Marion will launch his own private Puck email, “Wall Power,” covering the “mega-auctions and galleries, elite buyers and sellers, and the power players who run this opaque world.” This is a fascinating domain, and Marion is the master. I strongly encourage you to sign up here.

👀 Don’t mess with Leon Black: Also, today my partner Bill Cohan published the second installment of his series on Leon Black, the former C.E.O. of Apollo Global Management, who had inexplicable ties to Jeffrey Epstein. In Bill’s first piece, Black forthrightly explained in great detail the work and services for which he paid Epstein a staggering $178 million (including a loan that was not repaid before his death). Today, Bill reports on Black’s chilling negotiations with his former paramour, Guzel Ganieva.

🏃‍♀️ You can Ronna, but…: Before I dig into the post-Ronna McDaniel aftermath at NBC News, I wanted to plug my partner Tina Nguyen’s excellent new piece on the former R.N.C. chair’s exile from both the mainstream G.O.P. and its MAGA wing. Alas, it appears everyone has closed their doors on Mitt Romney’s niece—proving, once again, that the only uglier industry than television is politics. “It’s not about money; the power is your relationships. And she didn’t have the relationships,” Michael Steele, another former R.N.C. chairman, told Tina. “She was always on the bubble with Trump. People don’t get that. The man told her to stop using her family name, and she fucking did. If she had the relationships, he never would have told her to do it.”

Backstage, Conde greeted the talent and their entourages—the Rev. Al Sharpton, who also took the stage; former MSNBC president Phil Griffin, who now runs Maddow’s production company; etcetera—and mostly evaded any discussion about the recent clusterfuck at his network. It had been 10 days since Conde announced that NBC News would sever its ties with McDaniel—plenty of water under the bridge—and he had long been trying to telegraph a return to normalcy. It was all “very warm,” a source present backstage that night said. “No drama.”

In any event, Conde’s deputies play by a “no unforced errors” mantra that befits that mandate, as well as their boss’s careful management of his own reputation. And, up until the Ronna fiasco, Conde had largely succeeded in that effort while leaders at CNN and ABC News endured multiple turns in the barrel. “Things had been quiet for three and a half years,” one high-level NBC News insider said. “This was the first stubbed toe.”

Meanwhile, the panic that ensued during the mutiny laid bare some unseemly character flaws, most notoriously in Budoff Brown’s jaw-dropping willingness to thank a McDaniel aide for fomenting conservative criticism of her own colleague, Chuck Todd. (The dynamic now between Todd and Budoff Brown was described to me as “civil but frosty,” and the two have not met in person. In some ways, this seems like a detail in a show pilot that will manifest itself in an act of vengeance later in the season…) As I’ve noted, Rashida Jones’ own attempt to evade responsibility for any involvement in the McDaniel hire was similarly craven, given that the receipts prove otherwise.

Alas, the view from Philadelphia is a little more nuanced. Comcast chairman Brian Roberts and NBCUniversal C.E.O. Mike Cavanagh were predictably miffed about all this drama, I’m told, but they’re also too smart to exacerbate a brutal 48-hour personnel drama by continuing to mete out punishments. Also, as they know better than anyone, the news business is a business. And Comcast executives are very pleased by the profitability of their units. “Cesar has a very good relationship upstairs, and he runs a solid business,” one high-level NBC News insider said. “Despite the tumult and maelstrom of the industry, you’d look at us and you’d think we’re pretty steady.” And, indeed, in several private conversations in recent days, Cavanagh has conveyed to many people at NBC that Conde has the full support of his bosses.

And that perhaps may be the fitting denouement to this absurd little episode of late-stage linear theater. After all, as I have noted before, the public agonizing about McDaniel seemed, on a number of levels, to manifest some primal Reichian screamfest evoking the disenchantment of the industry’s stars, all of whom are looking out upon a less certain future. And, in the end, the conclusion to this drama seems fitting and unsurprising. Now and forever, cable news will be defined by fewer Ronnas and more Cesars.