Top of the Morning: Inside the Cutthroat World of Morning TV (36 page)

A good deal of anger came through in the interviews. “‘GMA’ is a boy band,” one person said; “we’re a group of professional musicians.” But some people noted that the competition had shown a better sense of the zeitgeist. “They went light, just as we were spending too much time on the dark stuff,” said one of the interviewees. Another said of
GMA
, “They may be ice cream, but we can’t become vegetables.”

Sterling found two schools of thought about how the show should change. The first it called the “look at others” school: “Look outside, especially at GMA, to guide how we should change.” The second, which they called the “back to the future school,” was the one Lauer personified, the one that said the team should “re-discover our sense of self and innovate forward from there.” Sterling stated the obvious: that
Today
currently suffered from a lack of a clear self-identity. Conjuring up the voice of the staff, it said, “We know we want to be north of ‘GMA’ and south of ‘60 Minutes,’ but then we have trouble defining exactly who we are.” The consultants seemed to throw their weight behind the more high-toned vision of the show’s future espoused by Lauer. “Part of the American viewing diet will always be an appetite for tabloid style journalism,” reads the report. “But this appetite can be fully whetted elsewhere. Tabloid journalism is corrosive to our positioning. Corrosive to our soul. They are not who we are.” According to a producer who read the report, “Sterling dismissed
GMA
as ‘fluff,’ merely a guilty pleasure.”

“They are an entertainment show that covers the news,” the consultants wrote. “We are a news show that tells compelling stories, and we need to be better at this than we have ever been before.”

Not everyone who saw the report agreed with Sterling’s conclusions. To some it sounded as if the consultants wanted
Today
to morph into
CBS This Morning
: as one staffer put it, “To get back to number one, imitate number three.” Sterling had little to say about talent, even though talent was arguably the reason
Today
was failing the Sound-Off Test, something propounded by Fili and countless other television executives to see how two shows stack up against one another. Turn off the sound and watch the shows side by side, they’d say: see which team is having more fun. See which team you’d rather spend time with. The answer in 2012 was
GMA
.

Fili knew that. And that’s one of the reasons why, as the fall wore on, it began to look more and more as if Bell would not be part of
Today
’s future. It was not an easy time for the man who had once run a show that had a string of victories going back to the Clinton administration. As Curry had in the months leading up to her sign-off, he resisted the inevitable, avoiding conversations about a new job, talking in public about how much he loved
Today
, and showing up for work every day despite suspecting that his boss—in this case Fili—wanted him gone. The Olympics job was a hugely important job, but it was awfully hard to give up
Today
.

That Bell should wind up a loser in the morning game was, to some observers, ironic, since a strong case could be made that he had jump-started the
Today
show’s recovery. Not only did he take out Curry—a hard but necessary thing, many believed—but he brought in both Savannah Guthrie and her friend and occasional fill-in Willie Geist, who was about to join the cast full-time as the cohost of the nine a.m. hour. Both of those hires, almost everyone agreed, had made
Today
better.

Geist, thirty-seven, was perhaps the single biggest beneficiary of Don Imus’s stupid 2007 slur. “In the span of five seconds, Don Imus talking about the Rutgers women’s basketball team changed my life forever,” Geist said. The son of CBS correspondent Bill Geist, Will had already worked all the grunt jobs of TV—he’d logged plays, edited tapes, produced interviews, written jokes, brainstormed shows for CNN and Fox Sports Net. He’d been hired by MSNBC in 2005 to help produce a late-night show for the conservative commentator Tucker Carlson. At the end of every episode of this show, which was titled
The Situation with Tucker Carlson
, Geist came on camera to sum up the day’s pop-culture news in a segment with Carlson called “The Cutting Room Floor.” “I definitely had the bug,” he said. But Geist wasn’t on a mission to become TV “talent.” It just sort of happened. Olbermann asked him to tape a couple stories for
Countdown
. Joe Scarborough, who was still on in prime time, asked him to do the same. “They were closer to the
Onion
than
Nightly News
,” Geist said. But the segments impressed the right people. When Imus was fired, Geist was on Scarborough’s list of suggested costars for a new show called
Morning Joe
.

Geist was initially Scarborough’s sidekick, a source of comic relief amid serious political debates. But gradually he refashioned himself into the kind of calm voice of reason that perfectly suited the upbeat and aggressively unthreatening environment of the
Today
show. Geist started filling in for Lauer in 2011 and seemed like the designated sub in 2012, just as Geist’s contract was coming up for renewal. NBC persuaded Geist to stay by offering him a package deal: he’d helm the nine a.m. hour, continue to fill in for Lauer, and contribute to NBC Sports and its Olympics coverage. He’d even continue to cohost the six a.m. hour of
Morning Joe
, televised across the street.

Capus, Fili, Burke, and even Tom Brokaw were all involved in keeping Geist at NBC, but Bell got to announce the young cohost’s promotion. Geist, a beneficiary of Curry’s fall (since Guthrie’s rise opened up the nine a.m. time slot for him), tried to paper over all the terribleness. “Right now I see a moment of great opportunity,” Geist told me the day his promotion was announced. “And the great news is that everybody over there at the
Today
show feels the same way, too.”

Bell by this point was all but gone. By late October, according to people at NBC News, he had stopped resisting Fili’s order and started negotiating with NBC Sports for a new contract. He told colleagues that he was opting for “stability,” his word, in sports after a stressful year (or seven of them) in news. Fili and Capus, meanwhile, had settled on a new, two-tiered management structure for
Today
. They’d appoint Alex Wallace, the female VP who had conducted an assessment of the show while Bell was producing the Olympics—and whose responsibilities included overseeing Curry’s reporting unit—to be the executive in charge. They would also appoint someone—it was unclear who, but Povich was in contention—to be the show’s executive producer. This system had worked back in 2005, the last time
GMA
was a threat, when Bell was the producer and Phil Griffin was the executive in charge.

Change was in the air of the
Today
show control room in early November. Bell’s deputies put out feelers for work elsewhere, thinking they might fall victim to a corporate bloodbath. His longtime No. 2 Don Nash inquired with ABC about work on Saturday the tenth. And then the shake-up finally started to, you know, shake. When Wallace’s role leaked on Monday the twelfth, NBC confirmed the by-now-obvious: that Bell was leaving. He’d have the same responsibilities he’d had over the summer, executive-producing NBC’s Olympics coverage, only now he’d have them full-time. The official line, which had also been the official line with Curry, was that he was being matched with a job at which he excelled and relieved of burdens that were almost beneath a person of his extraordinary talents. Bell said the change was bittersweet. “When you start to look at the truly special franchises in television, the ones that have stood the test of time and the ones that continue to not just be relevant but really thrive, it’s a very short list,” he told
Sports Business Daily
. “The Olympics are on that list. And the
Today
show is on that list.”

NBC told reporters that it would be able to name a new
Today
executive producer by the end of the week. First, though, it had to pick one. Fili was intrigued by a pairing of Povich and Tammy Filler, the producer of the ten a.m. hour. It would have been an all-female team, and an innovative one, too.
Today
needed innovation. But Fili encountered resistance—from Lauer, some said. An NBC executive said, “Matt had no veto power,” but admitted, “we weren’t going to put somebody in that Lauer completely disagreed with.” Povich and Filler were never offered the jobs; Fili accepted that such a move might be too disruptive. Instead, Fili and Capus decided to promote from within. Don Nash was in his car, heading home to Connecticut at around four o’clock the next day, when Capus called and offered him the job. “I was overcome with emotion,” Nash said. “I was thrilled, I was humbled, I was excited. It was almost a surreal experience.”

Nash very much wasn’t what some people thought the show needed—a break from the past. He
was
the past. A mild-mannered twenty-three-year
Today
veteran, he had been passed over for the executive producer job in 2005 when Zucker went out and recruited Bell from NBC Sports. He’d reached out to ABC recently when he suspected he was going to be passed over again. But in his conversations with Fili and Capus, Nash had said all the right things about the future: specifically, that
Today
“needed to evolve.” “I’m easily bored. I have the attention span of a gnat,” he told me on the day of his promotion. “I think one of the reasons why I got the job is, I’m always looking for the next thing.”

For Capus, Nash’s appointment was a big victory—a long-awaited vanquishing of Bell. He couldn’t wait to get the news out. The prose in his press release sounded boilerplate: “I am thrilled for Don and for
Today
,” the statement read. “I know firsthand the show will benefit from Don’s unmatched morning television experience, control room skill and leadership.” But when Capus introduced Nash as
Today
’s new boss at a two p.m. staff meeting amid the show’s rows of cubicles on Wednesday the fourteenth, the applause was loud and sustained and the expressions genuinely joyful. “The feeling,” said one staffer, “was ‘One of our own is up there. He gets the show. He’s not gonna come in here and tell us we suck. He’s gonna look out for us.’” Lauer and Nash had their share of disagreements, but at least they knew and respected each other.

But simply appointing a well-liked producer was no more a solution for
Today
’s problems than removing Curry had been. The solution lay deeper, somewhere in the shifting reasons viewers reach for the remote control—or don’t—when they wake up. Fili alluded to it when she talked to a reporter from the
Wall Street Journal
on the fourteenth. “People wake up with their smartphones, that’s their alarm,” she said, “so when you are presenting the ‘Today’ show, we have to keep that in mind.” The world had changed, and
Today
had to, too.

*  *  *

One thing had changed already: the arrogant edge was off the voices of producers and bookers handling pitches from book, film, and would-be guests’ publicists. The aura of invincibility was gone. Instead of thumping its chest about the ratings, NBC issued weekly press releases noting that it was “closing the gap” with
GMA
. Closing the gap! Imagine how hard
those
words are to write if you’ve spent the past sixteen years issuing pompous press releases about your gargantuan winning streak. It was true that, with a mix of somewhat more substantial stories (but still with plenty of breaks for fun and games),
Today
was edging a little closer to number one in the twenty-five-to-fifty-four-year-old demographic, now and then—and it managed to beat
GMA
in the demo by six thousand the week that Hurricane Sandy ravaged the New York region (although that week didn’t count in the year’s ratings because of the widespread power outages related to Sandy). But the larger truth was that
Today
was now the number two morning show, even if it pulled off a win once in a while. On Bell’s very last day in charge, Friday, November 30, Nielsen released numbers that showed just how much the TV world had changed, and in which direction it was going. The ratings were for the November sweeps month, sweeps being a vestige of a time when ratings were collected just a few times a year, not every second of every day. During the November sweeps in 2010,
Today
had won by nearly 942,000 viewers. During the sweeps in 2011, it had won by 663,000 viewers. And this November?
Today
lost by 466,000 viewers—a swing of more than a million in one year.

Kopf, the spokeswoman, countered that bad news with the only positive piece of information she could scrounge up:
Today
had won in the demo for the three days leading up to Thanksgiving. After that, though,
Today
looked as deflated as a Macy’s parade balloon on Black Friday. Lauer looked exactly the same way. Viewers—make that
former
viewers—continued to assail him for his role in Operation Bambi. And he continued to avoid questions about what his role had really been. Online commenters even ganged up on him when he mispronounced the name of the George and Ira Gershwin song “’S Wonderful” while hosting the Thanksgiving parade. Seriously. He said “S-Wonderful.” A week later, a Page Six story provided the year’s best reminder of how badly
Today
had been mismanaged, and how seriously Lauer had been hurt by it all. The story was a rebuttal to another gossip column’s claim that Lauer would be fired if the show’s ratings didn’t rebound soon. “There is absolutely no truth to this,” Alex Wallace told Page Six.

Of course there wasn’t.
Today
was still
The Matt Lauer Show
. But that the question had to be asked—“Will Matt survive?”—and answered by NBC—“Yes”—was nothing short of astonishing. Even Ben Sherwood couldn’t have scripted it.