Welcome back to In The Room, I’m Dylan Byers.

Christine Romans’ exit from CNN on Friday, after a 24-year run at the network, is merely the latest manifestation of a quiet but steady exodus of talent and executives from Hudson Yards to 30 Rock. Tonight, news and notes surrounding the state of play between NBC, MSNBC, and CNN.

It may have seemed like dayside pablum, but it was actually a very insightful remark. In her two-and-a-half decades, Romans was never a marquee star or household name, à la Wolf Blitzer, Anderson Cooper or Erin Burnett. She was instead, like so many of her colleagues, a reliable journeyman and team player who moved from assignment to assignment, show to show, and did so with admirable modesty and professionalism. She was very good on television—and, indeed, those are the very people who make a 24-hour news network work even if their faces only rarely show up on the promotional material.

At this stage of CNN’s history—amid the detritus of the Chris Licht era, the network’s lingering identity crisis, and the ongoing uncertainty surrounding the parentco’s long-term plans—many of these stalwarts seem to be loose in the saddle. Increasingly, they are looking across town to the only place left: NBCUniversal. Romans, I have learned, will soon continue her career at NBC News. (She is likely to be replaced on Early Start by CNN International correspondent Rahel Solomon, I’m told.) I’ve also learned that Chloe Melas, CNN’s longtime entertainment reporter, will leave CNN for NBC News.

Romans and Melas will join a small diaspora of CNN talent and executives who have recently left Hudson Yards for 30 Rock, including Laura Jarrett, now NBC’s senior legal correspondent, and Ana Cabrera, now an MSNBC anchor. Off camera, Rebecca Kutler, the former head of programming for CNN+ who was once a treasured part of the Jeff Zucker inner circle, is now MSNBC’s senior vice president of content strategy; longtime CNN producer David Gelles is now the executive producer for NBC’s Meet The Press.

Success in this industry is relative: NBC and MSNBC are just as vulnerable to the inexorable decline of the linear television business as CNN, of course, and all the cable news networks are seeing year-over-year declines. And, even as NBC adds CNN alumni to its ranks, CNN has added CNBC’s Kayla Tausche as a White House correspondent. But for many, it seems, the grass is greener over at 30 Rock.

Needless to say, much of this is due to CNN’s own struggles. The network remains mired deep in third place, and seems to be suffering an identity crisis under a quadrumvirate leadership team that has not articulated a bold vision for the post-Licht future. Editorially, it is neither fully committed to the centrist, view-from-both-sides posture mandated by Warner Bros. Discovery, nor has it returned to the avowedly anti-Trump resistance posture of the late Zucker years. Its morning show has been an afterthought since Don Lemon’s defenestration, and its primetime strategy is built around Kaitlan Collins, an inexperienced anchor who draws lackluster ratings and who—to her credit—reminds viewers on a daily basis why she’s better suited to breaking news and reporting from the field.

It’s a useful reminder that television values consistency. Andy Lack’s most public failures during his second tour of duty running NBC News coalesced around force-feeding a liberal audience voices and anchors that they couldn’t countenance, such as Hugh Hewitt, Greta Van Susteren, and most memorably, Megyn Kelly. Pivoting rightward in 2017, as the network did, seemed both editorially and economically logical. But, of course, it was a total fucking disaster and Lack had the good sense to pivot back quickly and feed his consumers what they wanted, for better or worse.

And now as the news cycle slouches toward a depressingly historic double feature of a chaotic U.S. presidential election cycle and Trump’s myriad court trials, MSNBC seems well-positioned to be the preferred destination for the non-Fox News viewers who still access their news with a remote. “It always helps when your competition sets themselves on fire,” one MSNBC source said, “but we’ve had a very consistent strategy. People know what they’re getting.”

Last month, MSNBC averaged 1.32 million viewers in primetime, more than doubling CNN’s totals and coming closer to Fox News than at any point over the past two years in both total viewers and the 25-to-54 year-old demo. Both Lawrence O’Donnell and the Rachel Maddow-Alex Wagner 9 p.m. duo averaged more than 1.6 million viewers, an audience on par with that of Laura Ingraham and the Tucker-less Fox News Tonight. And on the digital side, NBC has started to outperform CNN in certain areas that once would have been unthinkable in the Zucker-Trump era. In Q2, for instance, NBC News outperformed CNN on YouTube with more than 200 million views.

To her credit, MSNBC President Rashida Jones has also kept the network relatively drama-free. “Rashida’s mantra is ‘no unforced errors,’ an MSNBC source told me, and indeed both NBC News and MSNBC have largely avoided controversy in recent years. (On the other hand, the audience that used to watch MSNBC for Brian Williams’ dignified broadcast probably clutched their pearls when Symone Sanders, who was guest-hosting in his old chair, posted this Instagram video. Alas, times change.)

At a broader level, there’s reason to be bullish about NBC News’s near-term future. While Bob Iger is busy shopping ABC, with potentially fatal consequences for that news division, and Shari Redstone’s plans for Paramount’s CBS News remain unclear, NBCUniversal chief Mike Cavanagh has decided to further consolidate his various news assets into one portfolio. Earlier this month, he gave NBC News Group chairman Cesar Conde oversight of both Telemundo and NBC’s owned and operated local stations, adding to his existing portfolio of NBC News, MSNBC, and CNBC. Conde is now embarking on an effort to align all these assets and enhance collaboration across linear and digital.

There are no great options in television news anymore, but for the industry’s journeymen and women, it can be reassuring to see that there is at least a semblance of order and a strategy in place. Still, we shouldn’t overthink the rationale for some of these recent personnel moves: sometimes, it just makes sense to get the hell out of Dodge.