Just about a year after Brian Williams was let out of television jail and sentenced to doing breaking-news hits on MSNBC, the former Nightly News anchor may be moving on up to late night. CNNMoney’s Brian Stelter reports that Williams is expected to anchor a special half-hour news wrap-up at 11 P.M. for NBC News’s cable arm—a time slot that is usually taken up by reruns of its earlier prime-time shows. The network will reportedly run the broadcast as a test between Labor Day and Election Day.

This would put Williams, who lost the anchor chair he held for a decade at Nightly News last year amid an uproar over exaggerating stories on-air, closer to a spot that he reportedly wanted to snag long before he was booted. The anchor, who often traded in the evening teleprompter for late-night appearances slow-jamming the news with Jimmy Fallon, trading jokes with Jon Stewart, and hosting Saturday Night Live, had been itching for a more permanent off-the-cuff gig for years, New York’s Gabriel Sherman reported last year. Years ago, he reportedly told NBCUniversal chief executive Steve Burke that he wanted to take over The Tonight Show for Jay Leno, but was instead given the ill-fated Friday-night special Rock Center. Once that was canceled, New York claimed Williams shopped the idea of replacing David Letterman to Les Moonves at CBS (the network didn’t bite).

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Representatives for MSNBC did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

An 11 P.M. slot at MSNBC would place Williams just before the Tonight Show and Late Show slots he reportedly wanted. But it also means he won’t be competing for eyeballs with Fallon and Stephen Colbert. Instead, he would be up against the less-than-beloved Trevor Noah reboot of The Daily Show, what is often prime-time replays on CNN and Fox News, and local news broadcasts on the networks.

That lack of real competition, the fact that he’d be in a time slot previously occupied by reruns, and the truncated three-month time period in which his show would run could insulate Williams from the possibility of real ratings failure. It is certainly a huge push forward on the comeback train, conducted by NBC News chairman Andy Lack, who first nurtured Williams’s career in a prime-time newscast on the cable network in the 90s and brought him back amid a talent shakeup at MSNBC last year. It is unclear how close to the news Williams would stay—whether the show would hew closer to MSNBC’s usual tone or the one Williams struck on his late-night appearances in the past. But it is hard to deny the appeal of slow-jamming the news from this election.