Top of the Morning: Inside the Cutthroat World of Morning TV (29 page)

“I am going to beat this,” said Roberts, sitting between Stephanopoulos and Elliott, as she gripped both their hands. Then, perhaps trying to preempt criticism of ABC for keeping her on the job, she assured viewers, “I
want
to be here. I don’t have to be here. I want to be here while I can.” Everyone around her confirmed that was indeed the case.

Roberts, while making the announcement, didn’t say how long she would stay on the show before leaving for her bone marrow transplant. She wanted to make it clear, though, that she would be back. She was a fighter, she said, and she’d fight off MDS the same way she’d fought off breast cancer in 2007. Tens of thousands of supportive comments soon piled up on Facebook and Twitter, the vast majority from the women who comprised about 70 percent of the regular
GMA
audience. Some shared their own personal experiences with MDS, and others changed their profile pictures to pictures of Roberts. One person wrote, “God will be inundated with prayers.” In the coming days and weeks Roberts would scroll through the comments and, buoyed by the support, occasionally reply to them. The contrast between this use of social media and the tarring and feathering of Matt Lauer on social media could not have been more striking.

After the show, at ten a.m., Roberts addressed the understandably anxious staff of
GMA
, dozens of whom gathered around a row of desks to hear her speak. Besser was on hand to describe the rare disease—it affects only one in thirty thousand Americans each year—in detail, and to answer questions. Standing in front of the staff, Sherwood spoke first and sought to head off any speculation that Roberts was permanently off the show—and any campaigning by ambitious fill-ins. “That is her chair,” he said. “When she comes back after her transplant, it will be her chair.” Then Roberts, in a red hoodie and jeans, held up a photo from the rooftop party on April 19. “I found out this night,” she said, pointing to the photo and smiling at it. She thanked the handful of staffers who had kept her illness a secret, and said, “You saw how they continued to work.” She wanted the same reaction from the full staff now. She hadn’t told them sooner, she said, because “you crave normalcy when your life is kind of not normal.”

Roberts then hugged Sherwood’s boss, Anne Sweeney, who was leaning on a desk nearby. Sweeney, she said, had “assured me that every possible resource is available to me.” For ABC, Roberts’s illness was a family crisis, but also a network…what? Was the right word here
problem
or
opportunity
? On the one hand, the absence of a principal player from a morning show lineup has rarely if ever been a positive thing; host vacations almost always lead to lower ratings. Roberts’s open-ended medical leave, some people at ABC were saying, could wreak havoc on the momentum that
GMA
had clearly been building since at least March. “Robin is so essential to what we do, we just don’t know what effect this will have long-term on our audience,” an ABC News executive said at the time, insisting on anonymity because even speculating about the effect on the ratings was taboo. But on the other hand, personal dramas and adventures experienced by the hosts have always been viewer honey. Joan Lunden’s very public pregnancies in the 1980s and Katie Couric’s crusade against colon cancer in the wake of her husband’s death in 1998 both resulted in ratings spikes for their respective morning shows. And, though she’s not a morning show host per se, the attention Oprah Winfrey reaped as she sometimes tearfully fought the battle of the bulge is the stuff of TV legend. Said Chris Licht, the
CBS This Morning
producer, a few days after Roberts’s announcement, “On a human level you think, how much more can this woman go through? On a network scumbag level you think, this must drive the
Today
show nuts. Because
GMA
will get a lot of attention.”

How calculating the
GMA
producers were or weren’t about Roberts’s illness is hard to say. Roberts remained more than slightly interested in the overnight ratings, and people at ABC said they took their cues from her about how to cover her illness. She was clearly happy to draw attention to the cause of bone marrow donation. The network let the press know that the day after she spoke on the air about having MDS, the national marrow donor registry Be the Match had recorded more than 3,600 new signups, up from a daily average of two or three hundred. Later in the month ABC News held a bone marrow donor drive at its headquarters. No one could say that a lot of good hadn’t come from the network’s involvement, yet some people at NBC were whispering about the ways ABC was milking the situation for ratings. The smack-talking truly never stops between the Big Two.

Be that as it may, a big problem for ABC in June, on a network scumbag level, was that the
Today
show also had a woman in distress. Ann Curry, who the research showed was perceived by viewers as being not terribly good at the craft of morning television cohosting, was also perceived as being treated as if morning television ineptness were some kind of felony. She was being leaked about to the gossip press (which said her days were numbered and her colleagues hated her), handled sometimes coldly and sometimes roughly on the air, and (though the at-home viewer was not privy to this) mocked and/or ignored by the show’s staff.

This sounds awful, and, as we have seen in an earlier chapter, it most definitely was—but just as Conan O’Brien’s audience swelled when his job was at risk in 2010, the
Today
show’s ratings benefited from the unresolved questions about Curry’s fate. The perennial ratings leader won the weeks of May 28 and June 4, and even squeaked by the week of June 11, when Roberts made her announcement about MDS, taking the prize by a mere thirty-five thousand viewers per day.
GMA
was back on top when the week of the eighteenth started, but on Thursday the twenty-first
Today
beat
GMA
by more than half a million viewers, the biggest daily gap in months. The flip-flop happened because Curry’s negotiations to leave
Today
had become front-page news. Curious viewers were flocking to NBC, wanting to see if she’d keep showing up for work.

Today
wound up winning the week by 133,000 viewers, its fourth straight weekly victory. At the time this was puzzling to some observers who had come to see the
GMA
victories of April and May as something more than a spontaneous surge, and who thought the status of both major shows was rapidly morphing. In retrospect, though, what was happening seems clear: even as a new era in morning television came to pass, the townsfolk were congregating in the public square to witness the torture that precedes the execution.

Its unpleasant reasons aside, the quartet of consecutive
Today
wins, even if they were by a mere one- or two-tenths of a ratings point, put the show much closer to its goal, modest by the standards of the late 852-week streak, of making it to the Olympics (starting July 27) without faltering and falling back to second place. The London Games would give the show a guaranteed ratings lift lasting all the way until August 12. By then, the executives at NBC felt,
GMA
would have cooled off so thoroughly that it might not be a threat again for—who knows?—maybe another fifteen or sixteen years. Or at least for that many
weeks
.
GMA
, during the same pre-Olympics period, had a goal of its own: to finally hit the bull’s-eye of the demo, a sweet spot it hadn’t struck since the week of September 11, 1995. That was not going to happen, NBC News president Steve Capus told
USA Today
on the eve of Curry’s weepy sign-off, because “every week in the last month we’ve started a new streak!” Alas, apart from not quite making sense, that statement was unfortunate in at least one other way: its cockiness aroused the ABC team and caused them to redouble their efforts. “If there’s one quote that riled up everybody here,” said
GMA
boss Cibrowski, “it was that quote.”

The TV train wreck viewers had simultaneously been hoping for and dreading came, as we have seen, on June 28, when Curry was fake-promoted. How any executive worth his nearly seven-figure salary could have let the wounded cohost go on the air live, without tissues, and make a speech in which she asked forgiveness from all “who saw me as a groundbreaker” for failing to “carry the ball across the finish line,” and then squirm away from Lauer’s attempted kiss, would for months afterward remain a subject of bitter debate. Curry was still in a town car on her way to the airport (she was flying to California for a wedding) when the spinning and rationalizing began. “She deserved the right to say goodbye to everybody,” said one of her few remaining defenders, who would speak only on condition of anonymity. More voluminous were her detractors, some of whom compared Curry’s exit speech to a suicide bombing, designed to inflict maximum professional damage on all the people around her on the couch that day, especially Lauer. “The execution wasn’t of Ann,” said one television veteran, challenging the conventional wisdom that Curry’s goodbye had been a public execution. “Ann was the executioner, and the victim was the
Today
show.”

*  *  *

Talk about must-see TV:
Today
beat
GMA
by three hundred thousand viewers that Execution Thursday—but a day later NBC’s mini-streak was no more. Jim Bell had warned some colleagues that the ratings would be “a roll of the dice” in the period following Operation Bambi, and, sure enough, they quickly came up craps. As one viewer put it in a Twitter message to Lauer, “If NBC thought the ‘Today’ show ratings were bad with Ann Curry, wait until they see them without her.” The day after Curry’s departure, June 29,
GMA
went from a trailing position to a victory, with 614,000 more viewers than
Today
. It was as if Ann Curry’s fan club, more than half a million viewers strong, had changed the channel in unison. The head-snapping number on Friday completely offset
Today
’s Monday-through-Thursday superiority and turned the weekly race into a tie—“a really unbelievable move,” said Cibrowski, justifiably. No one could remember the last time the two shows had tied. Said one
GMA
producer: “NBC may have done more to help
GMA
by the way they threw her out the door than had they kept her.” Another said he saw the ratings as “a total fuck-you to the
Today
show for firing Ann.”

Producers at NBC saw it as something else, too: a rude welcome for Curry’s pretty, bright, and well-intentioned replacement, Savannah Guthrie.

Act 3

(Almost) Instant Karma

Chapter 16

The New Girl

Savannah Guthrie was a Nice Person in a Terrible Position. On June 20, as the leaks about Curry’s impending departure were about to morph into the kind of double-edged publicity that can be dangerous to both sides of an argument, Capus called Guthrie, then the nine a.m. cohost of the
Today
show, to his corner office on the third floor at 30 Rock. He had to let her in on a secret.

“There’s a story coming out,” he said, “about Ann Curry.”

In retrospect, it’s remarkable how little Guthrie actually knew about Operation Bambi up until this point. Then again, executives like to keep talent in the dark—that’s one way they maintain some power over the people who make vaults more money than they do. And sometimes talent keep themselves in the dark—as Guthrie had. She had heard the scuttlebutt about Curry, of course, but she had tried to block it out. Now that was no longer possible.

When Guthrie left Capus’s office that Wednesday afternoon, she wasn’t quite sure what was going to happen next. It sure sounded as if she was the chosen one for Curry’s job—but no one had called her agent to start the necessary negotiations. (Guthrie was represented by Michael Glantz, who also represented Meredith Vieira.) The end of the week came and went without any word from NBC. The network finally called the following Monday, the twenty-fifth, after Capus had spoken to Guthrie once again—in much the same vague and zigzaggy fashion. At one point Guthrie—still not quite wanting to believe that the
Today
show family was on the verge of a major overhaul—got tired of the suspense and interrupted her boss.

“Are you offering me the
Today
show?” she asked.

“Yeah,” said Capus, now smiling broadly. “I am.”

This was the fun part of the job—giving people good news and helping them have fulfilling careers. Sure, the joy was tempered a bit in this case by the fact that Burke and Bell had forced this transition to happen far sooner than Capus would have liked it to. But on balance he’d much rather be sitting with the next star of the
Today
show than bargaining with Curry’s lawyer, Bob Barnett, who’d been in and out of his office for days on end at that point. Capus told me later, “It’s cliché to say it, but in this world, when you can do good things for good people, those are the best days. You know what? That was a good day.”

Guthrie tried to smile along with Capus—but she wanted to cry. She was in some ways an odd fit for the cohost job at a major morning program because she is not a schemer, not overly ambitious in what Chris Licht has so helpfully dubbed the network scumbag way. She doesn’t trash her rivals, nor does she employ a publicist to plant flattering stories about her. She’d heard talk about Jim Bell and other executives having a kind of professional crush on her, but when confronted with or teased about this she had the habit of clamming up, looking at the floor, and saying…nothing. Her abiding flaw was that she was, by her own admission, an over-worrier. When something happened on or to the show, her brain didn’t go to “How can this help me?” but rather to “Will this hurt me?” She was vulnerable, not awful, even when especially sleep-deprived. Which was one of the reasons so many people had a crush on her, strictly professionally of course.