Jon Stewart has never been less necessary. He may be on many people’s list of truly necessary Americans in 2011, but at the end of Monday’s premiere of “Rock Center,” Stewart, as a guest, did a 10 minute-plus interview with the show’s host, Brian Williams, that was, arguably, the biggest waste of NBC prime time that entire evening.

“Rock Center” is not merely the news magazine stuffed bizarrely into the time slot formerly inhabited by bunny-tailed beauties at that startlingly insipid fantasy “The Playboy Club.” It’s better than that, believe me.

Stewart, though, is, as we all know, the satirist who has insisted that truth is the only beacon for journalism left in its current benighted age of nervous breakdown.

Williams is often presumed to be the funniest anchor in the TV news business. So he has always seemed when he has been a guest on the shows of America’s reigning late-night wiseacres— Stewart himself, Letterman, Leno.

Together on “Rock Center,” they were two lambs who’d lost their way. Stewart mouthed a lot of inane nothing about the Occupy Wall Street movement. Williams took obvious pleasure in having a supposedly “light” segment to end the debut of his news magazine but couldn’t really come up with anything funnier than Stewart’s inadvertent display of two inches of calf when the socks he’d donned in the morning proved to be inadequate to cover his lower extremities.

As anyone knows who’s ever sat on a TV set couch while a camera was running, there is absolutely nothing you can possibly say on television that can compete with the unintentional flash of unwanted calfskin at the camera. You could be announcing the date of the Second Coming, and a sizable part of the audience at home will be pointing at the tube and saying: “What a clod. He doesn’t even know what socks to wear on TV.”

The misfired humor of Williams and Stewart notwithstanding, “Rock Center” was, in its way, the most valiant TV news effort on prime time this year.

It isn’t exactly a secret that journalism is in trouble everywhere. The tectonic plates of its economy have shifted, and most importantly, the Internet has made a lot of the most-cherished assumptions of its post-Watergate version look self-righteous and boring to younger generations.

No one is better than Stewart at making sport of the conscientiousness of the profession’s most self-satisfied and ardent hacks. There are, perhaps, few private conversations that the American TV audience could more profitably be privy to than what Williams and Stewart have to say to each other off-camera.

On camera, they were utterly irrelevant to “Rock Center” on Monday night.

And that, so help me, is the good news.

I don’t know if “Rock Center will prove to be the Last Stand of Magazine Journalism on network television, but I wouldn’t bet against it. Some of journalism’s most indentured hacks may not have noticed, but it was awfully hard everywhere else to ignore what Williams and his bunch were doing.

Anachronism has never looked so fresh and feisty.

Just look at some of the names on its opening credit roll—the big guns of the current NBC news department (including emeritus big shot Tom Brokaw and recent CBS news defector Harry Smith) as well as, yes, former “Today” host Meredith Vieira and the first anchor of ABC’s “Nightline,” Ted Koppel, as acidulous a prophet of Old Journalism Integrity as you’re likely to find.

When you make such a point of putting names like that on your opening credit roll, you’re telling the world: “We’re for real. What we’re going to give you on this show may be an entirely unwanted commodity, but we’re sure as hell going to do it right, regardless of numbers.”

And that they did.

The first show was superb in a way that—thank heaven—owed absolutely nothing to CBS’ primal news magazine “60 Minutes.”

For Harry Smith’s major debut on the show, he did what I found to be an extraordinary story about a North Dakota town where America’s economic travails are turned upside down. There are more jobs available, in other words, than there are people to fill them.

And that’s because the oil deposits in that region are the richest in North America in our century. They require controversial “fracking” and other new techniques to bring up, which is why North Dakota wasn’t pumping oil like Texas and Oklahoma 60 years ago.

But let me freely admit that to me, that part of it was a heck of a “hey, Martha” story—you know, where you elbow your partner in the bed next to you and ask, “Hey, Martha, did you know that North Dakota, South Dakota and Montana have the biggest oil reserves in North America?”

It’s called the Bakken Formation, and some people say it could end American dependence on foreign oil.

I’m freely willing to admit that I don’t live on the busy superhighway of American info about oil drilling. I’m definitely out of the loop, there, if you must know (ask me instead about the final collection of Updike’s essays).

But Smith’s report gave us the primal pleasure of all journalism when it’s good—telling us something fascinating we didn’t know already or had ever thought about. And it assumed an audience of people for it, too.

The other segments on the “Rock Center” debut weren’t really as strong or surprising, but they were absolutely solid—Richard Engel reporting with some risk from Syria about the chances of that repressive country being the next to experience the “Arab Spring” and the phenomenon of “birth tourism,” i. e., Chinese parents coming to America to have babies, who will then automatically be American citizens.

Yes, it’s so much cheaper to do news magazines than it is to invent fantasies about the Playboy Club. And yes, “Rock Center” is opposite ABC’s “Castle” and CBS’ “Hawaii Five-O” on Monday nights, as well as one of the two best new shows of the season by far, “Boss” on the Starz network.

But that’s what DVRs are for. And all those handy-dandy, prime-time “On Demand” features that cable companies are so justly proud of.

If “Rock Center” is Williams and Co.’s way of circling the wagons, they’re doing it very well—well enough, it seems to me, to be moved to another time slot if the killer competition makes the numbers untenable.

jsimon@buffnews.comnull