Megyn Kelly was standing on the street in St. Petersburg, Russia, last week, waiting for Matt Lauer and the gang from Studio 1A to make the toss to her first on-location live shot in months, and her first at her new corporate home, NBC. Kelly had absconded to Russia to promote her highly prized one-on-one interview with President Vladimir Putin, the main feature in the debut episode of her new weekly newsmagazine show, Sunday Night with Megyn Kelly.

In some ways, though, the interview seemed secondary to a larger looming question—whether Kelly, who spent years wooing right-wing audiences at Fox News with her sharp questioning and prosecutorial instincts (and, yes, her sartorial flair), could appeal to the warm-and-fuzzy audiences that she would be encountering in her new gigs. Kelly, after all, was not only trying to pour new life into the staid newsweekly format; in a matter of months, she would also be on the receiving end of regular handoffs from the Today show gang as the host of a 9 a.m. broadcast that was rebranded for her talents.

Kelly’s ability to translate outside the Fox News bubble, and particularly to the softer environs of morning television, has been a question circulating in the television news business ever since she announced her surprising departure earlier this year. And judging from her toss, Kelly may still have her work cut out for her. Standing in St. Petersburg, she greeted Lauer and co-host Savannah Guthrie but did not appear to acknowledge another anchor on the set at 30 Rock, Hoda Kotb, who threw up her hands in good-natured surprise. To be fair, Kelly didn’t have a return video, so she couldn’t see who was on set, but the optics were nonetheless challenging for a woman whose arrival at NBC resulted in the departure of Tamron Hall, one of the only high-profile African-American women at the network. In the chilling world of cable news, where people grin through their tears—or, as Ann Curry did years ago, just cry—it was all people in the business could talk about for days. (An NBC insider pointed out that Kelly did greet Kotb in her throw back to the studio.)

Video: Megyn Kelly Asks 12 of Her Toughest Questions

Kelly’s foibles were certainly not unnoticed at her old digs—Fox News—where a little schadenfreude could be considered a welcome respite from what has been a startling couple of months’ worth of news. Weeks after the unexpected death of ousted co-founder Roger Ailes, and the shocking departures of anchor Bill O’Reilly and Ailes’s former deputy Bill Shine, whom one former Fox News executive called Ailes’s spiritual “brother,” the existential angst within the company’s subterranean newsroom has reached a deeper level. A standoff exists between the old guard, represented by Rupert Murdoch, and a newer reformist wing, embodied by his sons, James and Lachlan Murdoch, who oversee parent company 21st Century Fox. At the center of the debate is a question that has essentially plagued the network since Ailes’s ouster a year ago: Is Fox News hoping to patch over its recent spate of unpleasant headlines, or is it ready to truly transform its culture once and for all? And, probably more important: what would be left if it did?

“If Rupert is still in position, he’s not going to let you change a whole heck of a lot,” a former Fox executive told me. “But I’m not sure James and Lachlan have an idea [of what they want to do] as much as they realize that some significant change has to occur,” this person continued. “It’s been an embarrassment, and that precedes the scandal.”