Top of the Morning: Inside the Cutthroat World of Morning TV (31 page)

FROM: Bell, Jim

SENT: Tuesday, July 10, 2012 7:30 AM

SUBJECT: Private

IMPORTANCE: High

Because I think they can be an unnecessary distraction, I’ve asked research to stop sending metered market data [early ratings from the major cities] for now. This information is wildly unreliable, almost comically so at times, and every minute that it fuels chatter, phone calls & e-mails is time that could be spent focusing on the next great show idea or coming up with fun ways to highlight our new team and get others, like Hoda [Kotb, the ten a.m. cohost], Tamron [Hall, a fill-in host], Willie [Geist, a fill-in host], Ryan [Seacrest, a special correspondent], into the mix. It’s time that could be spent mentoring junior members of the staff. Hell, I’d even prefer it if we spent this time on personal business, call a loved one, get some balance, whatever.

We’ve allowed ourselves to be somewhat manipulated by the noise of the last 3 months and it is completely understandable; the streak was a big deal…Matt’s contract was a big deal…and the Ann situation has been a big deal. Those things all had negatives attached…losing the streak…the concern that Matt would leave…and Ann’s last day as anchor. But there are positives here too; we are freed from the burden that the streak had become…Matt’s committed and is here for a while…and Ann was out of position and we now have a much better show. And you are a very strong, talented and experienced group. There have been times when I think we, and I start with me, have acted like careful custodians of a legacy instead of bold shapers of that legacy’s future. We should all now feel motivated, invigorated and engaged about getting the chance to create this show’s future at a critical time. Who is coming up with Savannah’s first big interview? Who has an idea that will get Matt excited? Whether it’s graphics or bumpers, contributors or trips, politics or pop culture, let’s take some chances…we are the underdogs now.

We have a tough road ahead to be sure and, though it won’t happen overnight, I know we are entirely capable of meeting the challenge. We are featuring the best co-anchor team in the business and their excellence should eventually drown out any residual bad vibrations caused by recent times. But we are tackling this challenge at a time when GMA is using Robin’s illness and the accompanying public interest in her health as a new weapon in its arsenal. In addition, our competitors have already shown that they are prepared to use the press and social media in combative ways previously unimagined. Let’s make sure there are better things for everyone—the staff, the viewers & the press—to focus on, and we are going to leave this chapter far behind us just as quickly as possible. We can and should take reassurance from the fact that if we are judged on our merits, we cannot help but win.

*  *  *

It was six thirty a.m. on Monday, July 9—Savannah Guthrie’s first official day as cohost. The
Today
show had tied
GMA
during the week of Curry’s departure and, with Willie Geist and Natalie Morales filling in, had lost the following week by an average of 243,000 daily viewers. Still, as Lauer strolled into Studio 1A he looked happy and relaxed. Inside he chatted with the crew and read the morning’s teases for local stations. Twenty minutes later he was joined by Guthrie, who had picked out a dark-blue Diane von Fürstenberg dress for the occasion. Lauer and Guthrie had done this together dozens of times, when Curry was on vacation or off interviewing refugees, but this time was special.

A makeup artist walked in at 6:56 and applied a little blush and powder to Guthrie’s face. Lauer took off his reading glasses and practiced his introduction for the show. “Bright and early, it’s a big day around here as Savannah Guthrie takes her place at the anchor desk,” he said.

No one mentioned Curry or the travails of recent weeks. The new duo smiled while an NBC photographer snapped a picture of them at the anchor desk. With a minute to go before airtime, Lauer suppressed a cough and Guthrie sat up straighter and brushed back her hair. Then, holding a script, she placed her hands on the desk and looked straight into Camera 1. “Have fun,” Don Nash said in her ear. The clock struck seven a.m.

For those who remembered the elevation of Curry to the cohost spot thirteen months earlier, the opening moments of the broadcast brought on a feeling of déjà vu. Lauer celebrated her arrival and had the control room replay the audio clip of her name. “We’re happiest,” he said, “because you bring a great attitude and what we like to call a weird sense of humor.” Guthrie played along, and immediately showed an ease with Lauer that many viewers thought Curry had lacked. “Seven oh-two,” she said, gesturing to the camera, “and he’s already calling me weird.”

The whole broadcast on Monday was designed to show off Guthrie without seeming to say, “Look, we’ve upgraded!” to the show’s many confused and angry viewers. Jim Bell, who’d been away over the weekend on Olympics business, flew back from London for the day to supervise. Guthrie was given the first interview of the morning, with the Obama campaign advisor Robert Gibbs, who talked about possible tax hikes on millionaires like Lauer and Guthrie. Later the cast moved over to what is no doubt the only couch in America that could itself get a mid-six-figure book deal, for a long segment welcoming Guthrie to the family, including a highlight reel reintroducing her to viewers. There was Guthrie the legal correspondent, Guthrie the interviewer, Guthrie the jokester, Guthrie the amateur guitarist. She cracked up when the video included a clip of her singing Bob Dylan’s “You’re Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go.”

The
Today
show knew how to do this kind of thing—and maybe that’s why some people found the tribute hard to watch: it was slick and professional, but a little by-the-numbers, as Curry’s had been the year before. After the video, Guthrie smartly acknowledged the odd circumstances of her promotion. “I just want to say, in all seriousness: this was a little unexpected, as we all know. But I just want to say, I’m so proud and honored to be in a place occupied by so many women that I admire: Ann, Meredith, Katie, Jane, Deborah, Barbara.” As her official welcome came to a close, the sun suddenly broke through the clouds in midtown Manhattan and shone straight into the windows of the studio. Those NBC people think of everything. Later in the show Guthrie was surprised by one of her musical idols, the singer-songwriter Shawn Colvin, who invited her to play the guitar and sing a song with her. (Unbeknownst to Guthrie, her boyfriend Michael Feldman had helped a
Today
producer sneak into her apartment and pick up her guitar after she’d left for work.) The whole show went off without a hitch. And the Olympics were only three weeks away!

Operation Bambi?

As that infamous banner above George W. Bush’s head read, “Mission accomplished.”

*  *  *

Or, actually, as more than a few people said back to George W. Bush, “Maybe not.”

On Monday, Guthrie’s first day,
Today
lost to
GMA
by 356,000 viewers, and it lost again, by 151,000, on her second. It lost in the demo, too. Her third day was even worse, a 582,000 viewer margin. “Killed them yesterday,” read an e-mail from Schneider, the ABC spokesman. Guthrie turned off the Google Alert for her name and tried mightily to ignore the daily ratings reports.

Kopf, the
Today
spokeswoman, reminded reporters that Stephanopoulos had had a tough go of it when he started on
GMA
in December 2009, and no one should expect anything different of Guthrie. But no one in the business thought that the viewers were rejecting Guthrie per se—they were rejecting
Today
for hurting Curry. Kopf was blind to how severely the show was damaged. “This,” said a top ABC executive, “was always the real bind these guys were gonna find themselves in. Ann was taking them down. But actually taking
her
down alienated a whole other group of people. They were damned either way.” Could Guthrie repair it? Clearly she was a more comfortable companion for Lauer than Curry had ever been. But there were a couple of knocks against her—patently unfair ones, maybe, but knocks nonetheless. Guthrie was unmarried and had no children. Every time she cracked a joke about knowing nothing—
nothing
!—about cooking, she reminded moms at home how little she and they had in common.

With
GMA
pulling ahead among viewers ages twenty-five to fifty-four, Cibrowski began, for the first time, to contemplate whether—and how—he should celebrate a weekly win in the demo. When I asked whether he’d hold another rooftop party for the staff, he admitted, “I was thinking about that last night in bed.” It was Thursday of Guthrie’s first week. “We gotta wait till that happens, though. It’s very close, it’s very close,” he cautioned. Then he looked up at the monitor in the
GMA
control room showing
Today
, and saw a tease for a story about Jesse Jackson Jr., the charismatic Illinois congressman who had been hospitalized for depression. “We did that story yesterday,” he said with a chuckle. Cibrowski said he wasn’t surprised that
Today
was losing to
GMA
every day, despite the press hoopla around Guthrie’s arrival. “Nothing, zero, has changed on that program,” he said. “They’ve offered nothing new.”
GMA
, meanwhile, continued to push hard. Although she was in the midst of twice-weekly chemotherapy treatments, Roberts, who’d been in Atlanta the night before for a ceremony honoring a local anchor there, flew back overnight on a charter flight to be on
GMA
by seven.

At seven thirty Cibrowski and Denise Rehrig looked up at the monitors and saw that all three network morning shows were simultaneously teasing the same amateur video of a South Carolina couple who were shocked when they reeled in a shark on a fishing trip.

“Look!” Cibrowski exclaimed. “All three shows. A trifecta.”

“Oh my God, amazing,” Denise Rehrig said.

GMA
was the only show that would bring you the couple live, though. They were going to come on via Skype for a short chat at 7:47. The Internet video connection was ideally informal for such a segment. “To roll a truck to them for two minutes, it’s just not worth it. It’s too much money,” Cibrowski said. Through his earpiece, Cibrowski instructed Josh Elliott to brag on air about the exclusive nature of his upcoming chat with the still-astonished anglers.

Scoff if you must, but the American public likes its sharks and its exclusivity.
GMA
wound up winning on Thursday by more than four hundred thousand viewers. For the week of July 9, Guthrie’s first as the cohost of
Today
, the ABC show enjoyed its largest lead yet—a daily average of about 350,000 viewers. Yet
GMA
still couldn’t quite break the
Today
show’s 898-week streak among twenty-five- to fifty-four-year-olds.
Today
stayed ahead—if only by a mere 1,496 viewers—in the demo. The loss, small as it was, rankled. “Total viewers was cool, but this is the money streak,” said one senior
GMA
staffer, who admitted to being tired of reading about how
Today
had made nearly five hundred million dollars in advertising revenue in 2011, 150 million more than
GMA
. The demo, as Jim Bell had once said, “is the only number that matters” to the executives, their bosses, and their bosses’ bosses, because of the huge cash premium associated with first place. If
GMA
started winning in the demo, it would not just be the most popular morning show—it could become by far the most profitable.

*  *  *

Ann Curry had a hard time sleeping in, just as she’d predicted she would when she left
Today
. She couldn’t shake the habit she had formed fifteen years before, when she became the show’s news anchor. So she would rise early in her home in Connecticut and start thinking.

Weeks after her departure, Curry still struggled to make sense of her slow rise and sudden fall. Looking back on her year in the cohost chair, she recalled certain moments that, in retrospect, seemed like clues. Or maybe they were best described as non-moments, because it was mostly a lack of support from producers and staff that she most painfully recalled. More than she’d realized at the time, it had been an ugly situation, with Bell, fearful of losing his own job and his pristine reputation, freezing her out to save himself.

That, at least, was one of the theories she entertained as she talked the matter over with family members and friends. Her husband of twenty years, Brian, a software executive, was particularly incensed by the network’s treatment of his wife. He wondered, had she been set up to fail, like Deborah Norville and Lisa McRee before her?

When TV critics and anonymous sources blamed a lack of “chemistry” for Curry’s bad year with Lauer, she heard a euphemism for something else. Several friends recalled her saying, “Chemistry, in television history, generally means the man does not want to work with the woman.” They said she added, “It’s an excuse generally used by men in positions of power to say, ‘The woman doesn’t work.’” Historical examples abound: Connie Chung and Dan Rather; Barbara Walters and Harry Reasoner. Chemistry, Curry argued, is when both people want to play catch—when somebody isn’t interested in playing catch, that’s when there isn’t chemistry. She, at least in her own mind, came to work every day with her glove on and her throwing arm all warmed up.

Curry’s friend Nicholas Kristof said he believed Curry had been unfairly made the scapegoat for the show’s declining ratings. “They had to pin the blame on somebody,” he said, and they couldn’t pin it on Lauer, given the size of his paycheck. “She was the new kid on the block and they turned on her.” While Kristof described himself as being “just enraged at NBC” after Curry’s demotion, he said she herself “had no venom in her.” NBC, he said, “couldn’t have found a better person to treat so brutally. She at one point said that while it was very painful, it was better to happen to her than someone else because she’s very resilient,” he said. “And it’s true. She is very resilient. But it was sort of an incredible thing to say.”