Comcast Buys GE Stake in NBCUniversal, Completing the '30 Rock' Prophecy

Today, in a surprise move, Comcast announced that the cable giant will buy all of General Electric's stake in NBCUniversal for $16.7 billion, and also plans to purchase the 30 Rockefeller Plaza properties in New York (as well as CNBC's Jersey headquarters) from the longtime NBC owner. The move, as Reuters reports, wasn't expected for at least another year. While this is no doubt big news in the business world, it also, perhaps more sentimentally, reveals how much we already miss 30 Rock.

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In the course of the recently departed show, Kabletown (which has its own website) acquires "GE Sheinhardt NBC Universal." During the heyday of the Comcast-NBC merger, 30 Rock was on point in an almost freaky way. A 2011 episode began with Liz Lemon and Jack Donaghy watching the GE sign on the roof of 30 Rock get replaced with the Kabletown logo on the "very same day that the real NBC's employees had a town meeting with their new Comcast boss, Steve Burke, unofficially marking the beginning of that takeover," as Vulture reported then. Now, Brian Stelter at the New York Times writes that "it is possible that the giant red 'GE' sign atop 30 Rockefeller Center could be replaced by a Comcast or NBCUniversal sign." Somehow this all feels like some sort of extended funeral for 30 Rock — or NBC as we once knew it, but still, the connection hasn't slipped folks on Twitter: 

Getting back to business news, what's vertical integration again?

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