Top of the Morning: Inside the Cutthroat World of Morning TV

by Brian Stelter

  Chapter 2

  America’s First Family

  What’s truly interesting about this proliferating panoply is not so much that it came into existence—the whole world is breaking down into niches—but that the very numerousness of the options worked to alter the nature of morning TV shows, institutions that have always seen themselves as being in the familiarity industry, and thus have historically been about as open to change as your average seventy-six-year-old Roman Catholic cardinal. Consider, gentle reader, that it’s been time to see, in the immortal words of Al Roker, “what’s happening in your neck of the woods,” for sixty friggin’ years now.

  Actually, Roker, the current Today weatherman, hadn’t even been born when NBC gave birth to the show. But even on the very first day—Monday, January 14, 1952—Garroway scrawled regional weather forecasts on a chalkboard map of the country and spoke as if he knew the tape would be preserved for history. Today, he predicted, presaged “a new kind of television.” He was right. Watching the tape today, it’s remarkable to see how many now-familiar features of morning television were a part of the original recipe. Not just the weather; even back then there were short newscasts, live shots from other cities, and sidekicks who humanized Garroway and cracked jokes and generally made Today feel like a family. There was even a clock in the lower right-hand corner of the screen, next to a ticker of newspaper headlines. GMA borrowed the recipe when it came on the air in 1975, though it fiddled with the specifics slightly, opting for instance for a softer, more conversational style and a studio that was supposed to look like a suburban home, not a newsroom. GMA was Pepsi to the Today show’s Coke; the greatest rivalry in television was on. It continues to this day.

  In the early part of the 2010s, though, the morning menu became in almost every way noticeably…more so. Which is to say that the fluffy show, GMA, became fluffier, the “serious” portions of the long-running shows were spun off into distinct brands such as Morning Joe, and the perennially “other” show—whatever it is they are calling the CBS a.m. entry at the moment you’re reading this book—became more “other.”

  Perhaps you noticed that Today was missing from the previous sentence. That right there points to the show’s single biggest problem. In a media universe that was changing at a revolutionary pace, the Today show…wasn’t. As one senior staffer memorably said in 2012 when a bunch of brand strategists showed up at Today to help retool it, “If I look at the show, I am not sure I’d know what year it is.” This from one of the smart people in charge of a show called Today.

  * * *

  GMA, on the other hand, looked very much like, no pun intended, today, and possibly even the future. After a gut renovation in 2011 the pace of the show was faster, the banter between the hosts was snappier, and the hosts themselves were smiley-er, something experts had once thought was not possible. The screen literally looked brighter than it used to be, and the show’s stories were, too: in preshow meetings, producers fretted about not broadcasting too much “darkness” as viewers were just rubbing their eyes and putting on their slippers. So while the lurid crime-of-the-day segments at seven thirty were still deemed necessary (“Without them, viewers reject the show,” one of the anchors said), they were balanced by viral videos of stupid human tricks and no small number of stories about celebrity crushes and “bags that compliment your body type” and morbidly obese house cats.

  Loyalists to Today liked to describe GMA as smutty, crappy, and, most of all, tabloid. But in the face of such criticism, the man in the GMA control room overseeing the renovation, James Goldston, just shrugged. What he was producing, he thought, was what morning TV was supposed to be. “If I had any mission,” he said later, “it was to bring more FUN to the show.… If it’s boring to you, it’s going to be boring to the audience. So make it entertaining. You can be serious, you can be very serious, but even if it’s serious it has to be entertaining.”

  No one disputes that the morning shows are supposed to be entertaining as well as informative—look no further than the chimp on the Today show set in the 1950s for proof of that. The philosophical battle is over the mix—the exact proportions of light versus dark, of You Should Know This versus You’ll Enjoy This. With Goldston in charge, GMA, aware that You Should Know This was always just a click away, skated as fast as it could to You’ll Enjoy This. George Stephanopoulos was front and center, to suggest gravitas, but everyone understood that Bill Clinton’s former communications director wasn’t, by himself, the reason people came to their party. No, GMA got its five million daily viewers by front-loading the show with the fast and frivolous, the criminal and the cute. (In 2013 Jon Stewart called Stephanopoulos a “contractual hostage.”) Some of the cutest stories were a weird fit for Stephanopoulos, Robin Roberts, and weatherman Sam Champion, but that didn’t matter so much because Ben Sherwood, the man who had put Goldston in charge of GMA in 2011, had added two new partiers: Josh Elliott, a hunky import from ESPN, and Lara Spencer, an entertainment reporter who served as the show’s social butterfly.

  These people not only related well to the viewers, they got along like chums, or so it seemed from the many GMA segments in which they relayed stories about their time spent hanging out when the cameras were off. Yes, the members of the team butted egos once in a while, as people with Macy’s-parade-balloon-size egos will, but overall adored each other compared to the way the Today team coexisted, which was, in a word, tensely: Lauer and Curry rarely if ever saw each other away from the set.

  Some journalism professors and surely some ex-viewers cringed at the morn-porn being churned out by ABC. So did some people close to GMA, like Charles Gibson, who had cohosted the show with Lunden in the 1990s and with Diane Sawyer until 2006. Gibson, who could still remember a day on GMA when he’d moderated a long debate about the existence of God, disliked what he called the “pop-culture news” format of the current show. But no one could say that the recipe—which was really only a recipe in the sense that “deep-fried Oreos” is a recipe—wasn’t working. In the overnight ratings that both networks obsessed about, GMA, the perpetual runner-up, was, in late 2011 and early 2012, cutting into the Today show’s lead, and thus into its sense of invincibility.

  Although the difference between the two morning titans was sometimes subtle—Today yanked many of its stories out of the same goody bag as GMA—Today seemed to enjoy it less and second-guess it more. Lauer and Curry often agitated for more meaningful stories about health, politics, and foreign affairs, but with limited success. “I want more spinach and less sugar in this big meal we give viewers,” Curry told Newsweek in November 2011. “Sometimes I feel personally our balance isn’t quite right.”

  In early 2012 Lauer and Curry continued to complain about the tawdriness of it all, but neither they nor anyone else on the show went the additional step of conceiving a workable alternative. No one had a vision. The best the cohosts could do was show the viewers, with a bit of body language or a sarcastic smirk, or an occasional ahem, that they did not think that the news of a celebrity’s engagement or a potty-trained cat was so earthshakingly important. Some in the audience thought the snarkiness was an insult to the amazing animals and the pertinent celebs they, the audience, fiercely crushed on. Most just wanted more dishy/funny/scandalous segments, and sooner, please, obese-cat videos being, if the ratings are any indication, addictive.

  * * *

  If in 2011 the Today show was a classic New York City department store, it would have been B. Altman’s at the moment when the smartest person then working at that storied Fifth Avenue emporium looked out upon the teeming sales floor and realized that the world had shifted beneath the retail business and something was deeply and horribly wrong. Altman’s is no more, and while no one expects Studio 1A, the Today show’s legendary street-level venue, to become a 16 Handles anytime soon, it was apparent to anyone casting a gimlet eye on the situation that, in contrast to GMA, and despite Bell’s, and a lot of other people’s, best efforts, Today seemed a bit lost in
the twenty-first century, as if all it had going for it was its rapidly dwindling 1990s momentum. Top NBC executives later called what happened to the show a “slow fade,” although no one was uttering that phrase when the fade was just starting to take effect. Still, it seemed to many as if America’s first family was going the way of the Mulvaneys in Joyce Carol Oates’s We Were the Mulvaneys. And now there was something else at the center of the show, something that, if it was a family, was one of those makeshift nineteenth-century frontier families in which the mommy dies and, out of some kind of no-longer-comprehensible hardscrabble necessity, the daddy marries the aunt. All anyone could say for certain was that this family-like thing costarred Ann Curry, who for so long had been but a member of the supporting cast, and that all was not going swimmingly.

  But the lack of a vision wasn’t the biggest obstacle the Today show faced. Visions can be concocted or stumbled upon or co-opted from another show. Visionaries can be wooed over osso bucco. Much harder to come by, the one problem you can’t solve by throwing money at it, is chemistry, that elusive quality that most discussions about the medium of television center around. Chemistry is the difference between Friends and so many other well-written sitcoms that die in October and whose names we don’t recall; it is the reason someone as talent-challenged and unbeautiful as Ed McMahon could have so many millions of dollars to squander at the end of his improbable career. It’s important at every stretch of the daily schedule, but ask the pros: if you don’t have it in the morning, when the research shows that viewers want to smell the coffee and feel the warmth and hear the happy banter that happens when the highly paid stars are aligned, it doesn’t matter what else you’re toting, pardner. You’re Richard Nixon in 1960, you’re Big Brown in the Belmont, you’re CBS.

  A lot—but not all—of what we mean by chemistry is ineffable. You know it when you see it, but you can’t say what it is. Tracy and Hepburn had it. John Travolta and Lily Tomlin in Moment by Moment? Maybe not so much. Lauer and Couric had it in historically significant proportions from 1997 to 2006, and when Couric left and Vieira slipped in beside Lauer, well, the NBC stagehands still had to spark-proof the couch. Over at GMA the crew—Roberts, Stephanopoulos, Champion, Elliott, Spencer—were relatively new to the game, but still so good at it they treated chemistry like a scholarly treatise: first they told you they had chemistry, then they went ahead and had the chemistry, then they told you that what you had just seen was chemistry in action.

  The subject does not totally resist description, though. Parts of chemistry, in the TV world, come down to technique: to the questions you ask guests, the way you handle transitions to and from your cohost, the way you read the teleprompter. Perhaps most importantly, chemistry is in the things you don’t do when others are speaking. A good part of chemistry, on morning TV, in other words, comes down to principles and tricks that you can learn at the close-cover-before-striking school of broadcasting. If you do these relatively mundane things the textbook way, you minimize distractions and show your viewers and your colleagues that you feel comfortable in your role: voilà, the screen exudes warmth and the audience gathers round. In this sense of the term, Ann Curry flunked chemistry badly, almost as soon as she was elevated to the cohost position in the spring of 2011.

  What were her faults, exactly, as Bell (and his allies) saw them? Start with the frequent faux pas. Only seconds after Lauer announced on May 9 that Curry was going to be his new cohost, she said, “I feel like the high school computer nerd who was just asked to the prom by the quarterback of the football team.”

  This wasn’t just disingenuous, it was painful to endure. Asked to the prom? The MVP of morning broadcasting hadn’t invited her anywhere. He thought she was a perfectly nice human being, but not the perfect cohost—not by a long shot. When Capus, the news division president, told him that Curry was going to be his new cohost, he had said only, “OK, but…” The but was that their on-air chemistry had been lacking big-time in the more than two hundred times she’d filled in for Couric and Vieira.

  Lauer’s opinion was important—by virtue of how much he was paid, it had to be. But Lauer wasn’t paid to pick talent, his bosses were. And they—primarily Capus and Bell—didn’t feel they had much of a choice in the matter. Curry had been the news anchor of Today for fifteen years, ever since her predecessor, none other than Lauer, was elevated to the cohost chair next to Couric. Having been passed over once before, Curry pushed hard for the chair this time and NBC knew she could be trouble if she was passed over again. She might indeed have had a certain Bambi-like quality, as the operation named for her suggested, but, in her own strange way, as even some of her supporters will tell you, she is as ego-driven and career-consumed as anyone who ever stood in front of a tangle of sign-waving tourists, looked into a camera, and said, “When we come back, David Hasselhoff.”

  Speaking of her strange way, that was another problem. Curry’s on-air comebacks to Lauer during her first months as cohost were just plain weird—the conversational Hacky Sack often fell thudding to the rug or, figuratively speaking, wound up in the saucepan put out for Al Roker’s cooking segment. You could argue, and her supporters did argue, that this inability to make small talk on TV meant she was bad at being a phony. Yet her honest reactions to comments, features, and news stories also seemed fundamentally off, as if she had been raised on a planet only somewhat similar to our own. Then there was that unsettlingly ambiguous look in her beautiful Bambi-like eyes. As Tracy Jordan said to his psychiatrist in a 2007 episode of 30 Rock, “Who’s crazier, me or Ann Curry?”

  Most annoying to her detractors was Curry’s “whisper-​talking.” When interviewing people who had just lost a child or suffered some other severe emotional trauma, Curry would soften her voice to the point that it was virtually inaudible. She offered no apologies for this trademark move. When addressing people in the first blush of shock or grief, “I have a natural tendency to lower my voice,” she explained. “It’s not even intentional. I just don’t want to make them feel that their backs are against the wall.” But what about the viewers with their ears pressed against their TV screens?

  If you go back and look at the tapes from this period, you’ll see Lauer glancing slightly out of camera range, as if he’s searching the wings for the ghost of Couric or Vieira. “He would lob something to her, and he never quite knew what he was going to get back,” said a longtime Today staffer. “As a result, he just started playing it very, very straight, and then it looked like they had absolutely no rapport.

  “At some point,” the staffer added, “Matt just kind of gave up.”

  It’s debatable whether Lauer gave her a chance at all. Curry didn’t think he did. She told her friends that she tried to soften Lauer up by taking him out to lunch a couple of times, but she didn’t feel that he reciprocated her gestures of goodwill. They almost never socialized outside of the office. At first Curry tried to think positive and attributed their lack of quality time to the fact that both she and Lauer had children to attend to. What would you tell yourself, if you were her? Later on she told herself that Lauer, the Alpha Dog, was uncomfortable with her own alpha-ness.

  Curry had branded herself years ago as an international reporter, ready and willing to parachute into any trouble spot on the map. She was the first anchor, for instance, to report from Sri Lanka after the devastating 2004 tsunami in Southeast Asia. “By the time everybody else realized how big a deal it was, Ann was already on a plane,” one of her former producers said. Curry had strong feelings about using television as a force for good—but what came across as inspirational to some seemed overly righteous to others. And it may have been a particular turnoff for Lauer. “She was so determined to prove that she was a real journalist, she got in the way of herself” by trying to prove how much knowledge she had, said one person who was interviewed by Curry many times on the show. “When television types do that, particularly women, they rarely succeed.” A lot of people echoed the sentiment. They said, rather simply,
that Curry “tried too hard.” And the harder she tried, the more grating and insincere she seemed.

  It was Bell’s job to fix these problems, or at least address them. Tape reviews are part of the job for executive producers, just as they are for athletic coaches: with the talent, they look at highlights and more importantly lowlights, pointing out things little and larger that could be done better next time. These get-​togethers not only address particular problems, they tell the person under review that she’s worth the time and effort; that she’s been given a great TV job for a reason, after all. The reviews usually end with both producer and talent feeling better.

  But those conversations with Curry barely happened after she started cohosting, even though for a lot of reasons (see above) she seemed like the ideal candidate for a tape review. “She got no feedback from Jim Bell,” one of her allies inside NBC News said later. “Ann just became more and more anxious as the days, weeks, and months went by, because she was not getting that kind of feedback.” Maybe she was getting the feedback, but was ignoring it—that’s what Bell’s allies said. “He was trying to be constructive,” said one who blamed Curry for lacking self-​awareness and being in deep, almost supernatural denial.