On January 7, the Saturday evening before the 74th annual Golden Globe Awards, NBCUniversal vice chairman Ron Meyer hosted a convivial party at his Malibu home in honor of the broadcast’s host, Jimmy Fallon, one of NBC’s brightest stars. Meyer’s modernist 13,600-square-foot mansion is a 45-minute drive from Los Angeles, but many of the industry’s most totemic figures gladly made the trek. Fallon and his band serenaded a coterie of stars, and corporate overlords, that included Lorne Michaels, Jeffrey Katzenberg, Kevin Tsujihara, Oprah Winfrey, Gayle King, Les Moonves, Tobey Maguire, Chris Martin, and even Barbra Streisand. It was a casual and informal affair, one person present told me, until one guest made quite an entrance. Before too long, this person spotted Megyn Kelly, who had announced her surprising move from Fox News to NBC only days earlier. Kelly was flanked by her husband, Douglas Brunt and her C.A.A. agent, Matt Delpiano.

Even in a room filled with stars, and the executives who create them, Kelly’s entrance made quite an impression. On the one hand, despite being surrounded by people often far more famous, some attendees mistook Kelly's companions as her security detail. That impression stood to reason, given that being involvement in a public feud with Donald Trump, and being threatened by his bloodthirsty supporters, requires some extra protection. But her presence was both a reminder of her bizarre, epic year and a remnant of the grittier conservative cable-news culture that she appears to be attempting to leave behind. Also notable, according to a veteran television-news-industry insider who attended the event and has close ties to NBC, was that none of NBC News’s stars were there. (NBC was broadcasting the award show the following night.)

Eventually, chatter turned to the meaning, literal or otherwise, of Kelly’s very appearance at such a party. “It was something of a coming-out party for her,” this person told me. Her inclusion in the party, this person continued, suggested Comcast and NBCUniversal’s plans “to turn her into a bigger, more mainstream star than anything else that Fox could have done.”

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Most tantalizingly, the TV-industry insider posited a theory for Kelly’s hiring at NBC. “It was all about replacing Matt Lauer in a couple of years. They want to protect the Today show and they will build the Today show around her.” This person continued: “I know she is going to be sitting in one of those chairs eventually.” (Sources familiar with the specifics of Kelly’s discussions with NBC vehemently denied that her hiring represented anything but expanding her star power and adding yet another heavy hitter to NBC’s stable of big-name TV-news stars.)

Weeks after Kelly’s stunning decision to leave Fox News, some details behind the move are becoming clearer. NBC is paying Kelly between $15 million and $17 million a year, according to the industry veteran, far less than the $25 million a year she was offered to stay at Fox News. (She will be eligible for other mechanisms that could increase her compensation, this person added.) For that salary, she will host a weekday show and a Sunday-night newsmagazine. As part of her deal, Kelly has also signed on to contribute to NBC News’s political coverage, which means she will be a staple at political conventions and during big elections.

Kelly is still negotiating the timing of her departure from Fox News, according to two people familiar with those discussions, but she is expected to show up at NBC this spring to start work on a show that will likely air in the fall, these people said. Kelly’s departure from Fox News is to many a sign of the slightly rightward shift that the news media is making to cover the Trump administration. (Earlier this morning, CNN added Rick Santorum to its political lineup.)

So far, however, less attention has been paid to Kelly’s coverage of the New Black Panthers, or her declaration that Jesus and Santa Claus are white. More scrutiny, certainly within NBC News, has been focused on the precise time of day that her skills will be utilized. NBC insiders tell me that a decision has not been made about when Kelly’s weekday show will air. I’ve heard everything from 9 A.M. to 10 A.M. to 1 P.M. Each time slot sets off a minor shockwave somewhere in the television universe. The one P.M. rumor, for instance, set the soap-opera world atwitter, given that that particular slot is currently occupied by Days of our Lives, one of the longest-running scripted television programs in the world, airing nearly every weekday since November 8, 1965. Yet it appears more likely that Kelly will inhabit the nine A.M., that nebulous third hour of Today that Billy Bush briefly occupied before the revelation of his participation in Donald Trump’s infamous Access Hollywood hot-mic moment forced him out of the network.

That proposition would put Kelly right next to the most coveted spot in television news: the seven to nine A.M. segment of the Today show. Kelly’s ascension to an eventual Today slot is, for some, a game of deduction, and could happen over the course of years. Today, after all, has a history of getting viewers comfortable with a person before moving them into the big chair. Lauer and Ann Curry were both newsreaders on the show, for instance, before becoming anchors. “You don’t pay someone that type of money unless they are going to play a substantial role and be the face of the network,” the industry insider told me. Kelly, for her part, has specifically stated that she didn’t want to continue at her nine P.M. weeknight slot, citing family reasons. “She is not going to be the evening news network. The only other role that’s a marquee role is the Today show,” this person continued. “You are telling me that you would be paying someone $15 million to $17 million to be at nine A.M. or to have a Sunday-night magazine show.” The individual noted that Kelly probably makes more than everyone on CBS News’s 60 Minutes combined.

Another industry source counters that Kelly’s salary makes perfect sense even if she stays away from the prime Today show hours for three reasons. By hiring Kelly, NBC kept her off the field for competitors including CNN and ABC’s Good Morning America, which recruited her with an unusual Willy Wonka deck presentation. It sets her up for a Sunday-night magazine show, which legendary NBC News chairman Andy Lack, who helped resuscitate the division in the wake of the Brian Williams scandal, has long coveted. And, Kelly will be invaluable in political coverage, especially in a Trump era. (Of course, all these plans could change if Kelly fails to translate to a daytime show.)

That may all be true, but according to two people familiar with the matter, Kelly’s move to NBC was known in advance to only a small circle inside NBC, including Lack; NBCUniversal C.E.O. Steve Burke; NBC News president Deborah Turness; Meyer; and both Today executive Noah Oppenheim and Matt Lauer, the longtime co-host of the show, who recently extended his contract through 2018 at a reported $20 million per year. (An NBC source vehemently denied that Lauer had previous knowledge of NBC’s discussions with Kelly and told me that Lauer learned of Kelly’s hiring the morning of her announcement, alongside other NBC News talent such as Lester Holt, Chuck Todd, and Lauer’s co-host, Savannah Guthrie, who has been out of the office on maternity leave. Guthrie re-signed a five-year deal with NBC in the fall.)

Integrating Kelly into the NBC lineup, much less the Today show itself, will take a level of sophistication and execution that the previous NBC News management team did not entirely demonstrate, as Brian Stelter has reported, when it parted ways with Curry. Only in the past year has Today clawed itself back into the No. 1 slot among the coveted advertising demographic. No one at NBC wants to live through all that again. The notion of a Kelly takeover of the prime bloc of Today (first floated in the New York Post’s Page Six column, which is, perhaps not incidentally, owned by Kelly’s former boss, Rupert Murdoch) was beaten back with a definitive force by unnamed NBC sources, who promised that Guthrie would be waking up in the middle of the night for many more years to come.

But Kelly is ambitious, and while no one has specifically talked to her or promised her anything about those first two hours of Today, according to people close to her, that didn’t stop the cocktail-party chatter at Ron Meyer’s house from contemplating the possibility of such a move down the line. Any change to put Kelly into the main chair at the Today show “has to be done over the long term,” the TV-news-industry insider told me.

Meanwhile, according to two sources with knowledge of the discussions inside NBC, it’s not just the on-air talent who have signed on to stay at the network for the foreseeable future. Oppenheim, the executive in charge of Today and the screenwriter for Jackie, is close to re-upping his own contract to stay at NBC. Oppenheim is credited with helping the resurgence of Today, and there was considerable anxiety about whether his success in Hollywood might take him back to Los Angeles. But as a sweetener, NBC has inserted a clause into his contract that gives him the option to leave the show after a certain period of time, free and clear, without the typical noncompetes and other clauses that would prevent him from taking on other work.

As inhospitable as Fox News had become for Kelly, the world she is entering at NBC, while outwardly friendlier, has its own way of turning the knife. Kelly can likely hold her own. The daringly dressed TV-news host is lauded for her incisive interviewing style. Lack, who handled the negotiations to bring Kelly to the network, praised her for her “tremendous skill and poise,” and there’s no doubt she exhibited cool under pressure in her very public battle with President-Elect Trump. But she is also known within Fox News to have sharp elbows with her own colleagues, and, according to two Fox News insiders, doesn’t share the spotlight easily.

That might have flown at Fox News, where stars are siloed and show up for work without having to interact with one another. Kelly and Bill O’Reilly famously almost never saw one another despite having back-to-back shows every night; O’Reilly taped his top-rated show earlier in the day and was out of the building by the time Kelly showed up most nights. But the “NBC family” requires much more forced intimacy.

This article has been updated. According to a spokesperson, Kelly did not arrive at Meyer's party with a security detail.