Who were those powers these days, anyway? Many of the little brass name plaques on the executive floor atop 30 Rockefeller Center had a bright-ish sheen, for Comcast’s years-long quest to take control of NBCUniversal had finally succeeded in January, and the new owners were settling in. There was no plaque for Zucker; he’d been asked to leave by Steve Burke, the longtime president of Comcast’s cable division, who was the new CEO of NBC. If Zucker had been best described as a programmer, Burke was a no-nonsense operator. He had twenty-two business units to tend to, and more than a few were in bad shape. NBC’s prime-time lineup, for example, was mired in fourth place. But NBC News wasn’t one of his headaches. It was number one in the morning with Today, number one in the evening with NBC Nightly News, and number one on the weekends with Meet the Press, and it was bolstered by two cable channels, MSNBC and CNBC, that made hundreds of millions of dollars for the company each year. When Burke moved into his suite on the fifty-first floor he had taken one long look at NBC News and thought, “That’s one I don’t need to worry much about.”
So Capus was still the president of NBC News and Bell was still the producer of Today. But the news division was on edge nonetheless, wondering who and what would survive in the Comcast era. Vieira’s decision to leave had been a real jolt, and not the good kind. For the record it shouldn’t have been a surprise, since Vieira, when her contract came due in 2010, had signed only a one-year contract extension. Even Glantz—who got a cut of every one of her paychecks—had told her it was probably time to go. “Some of the usual lightness of Meredith is missing,” he’d said to her, according to an interview in Good Housekeeping. Still, NBC seemed caught off guard. The network tried very hard to persuade her to stay, “because she was so beloved and the show was doing so well,” said Don Nash, who was the senior broadcast producer of Today, the No. 2 to Jim Bell. She and Lauer got along famously; sometimes they’d greet each other with “Hey, honey,” like an old married couple. But Nash and his colleagues respected Vieira’s decision to spend more time with her husband and children. “She has balance in her life,” Nash said. “It wasn’t all about the Today show for her. It was first her family and second the Today show, which I think is a really healthy outlook.”
Yes, but: now Today had to stage another transition, this time without Zucker and with new corporate overlords who knew almost nothing about the show. Vieira wanted to sign off in June, three months before the end of her contract. NBC had to act fast.
But we really shouldn’t overcomplicate this. Curry was the only real candidate for the job. Why? Well, for one thing, her Q Score—a proprietary measure of likability obtained by surveying thousands of John and Jane Does, and taken deadly seriously in the TV industry—was twenty-one, nine points above the average for a news anchor. Similarly, when focus groups were shown video clips of Curry at her best—interviewing refugees in Darfur, for instance—the responses showed that she was not just liked but adored by the audience. So did the comments on Facebook, Twitter, and every two-bit TV blog that mentioned Curry. An NBC executive who saw the research and read the comments said offering her the position was a “no-brainer.”
Another reason Curry figured to move up was that clause in her contract. Geller, her agent, had passed away one month earlier, but her right to leave if she wasn’t picked made the decision to promote her, said an NBC executive, a “nondecision.” And on top of all that, Capus genuinely believed she was more than competent, and felt that after fifteen years of dutiful service as Today’s news anchor, she deserved her shot. “It was her turn,” he said.
Bell wasn’t so boosterish. He had reservations about Curry, just as Lauer did—or maybe because Lauer did. Just because she was beloved in one job, Bell thought, didn’t mean she was right for another. He took some meetings in the spring with possibly poachable outsiders like Megyn Kelly, a rising star on the Fox News Channel. He also inquired about breaking bread with Robin Roberts, though it never happened, according to associates of hers. But those were merely one-lunch stands; ultimately he bought into the talk of this being Curry’s turn, even if he didn’t fully believe it.
In a meeting with Burke, Capus laid out his reasoning, as well as one other pesky point that loomed over every single move Today made in 2011: Lauer’s future. Lauer’s current contract was due to expire on December 31, 2012, and he had—significantly, everyone thought—declined to proffer any assurance that he was inclined to stay for any number of additional New Years. If Curry, miffed at being passed over a second time, exercised her contractual right to quit without penalty, and Lauer left a year later, the Today show would be two Familiar Faces short of enough Familiar Faces to be a serious morning contender. Burke did not want to start the Comcast era with that kind of debacle. His conclusion, according to other NBC executives, was nothing if not commonsensical: “If Meredith’s leaving and we can’t convince her not to leave, it goes to Ann.” In other words: a nondecision.
The only one of the players who did not seem certain that Ann Curry would be the next Today cohost was…Ann Curry. “She had some misgivings,” said Nicholas Kristof, an op-ed columnist for The New York Times and a friend of hers. At dinner at Curry’s Connecticut home in April, Kristof and his wife Sheryl WuDunn weighed the pros and cons with her. “We couldn’t believe that she was even debating this,” Kristof said. “How could you be offered the job of cohosting the Today show and not leap at it in a nanosecond?”
For a couple of reasons, Curry told them. The first thing worrying her was that the ratings for Today were already starting to slip. Beyond that, Curry was also concerned about how the new job would affect her international reporting. “She was afraid that NBC would make it harder for her to go overseas,” Kristof said. “She didn’t want to be doing fewer of those pieces just because she was climbing one notch up the ladder.” Curry wasn’t doing all that many at the time—no more than two or three a year. But the stories she did do, about the victims of wars and natural disasters all too frequently forgotten by the rest of the media, were important to the people she interviewed, to the people watching all across the country, and to the reputation she sought to embellish. According to Kristof, she worried that the new assignment would be more prestigious but ultimately less satisfying. “I think the argument that affected her most was that this promotion would make it easier to get those kinds of stories on the Today show,” he said—she’d have more clout and more control over her day-to-day destiny than she ever had as news anchor. Assured that she could continue her overseas jaunts, Curry said yes to the cohost job at the end of April. Her dream job—that’s what she called it—would become her reality.
The producers of the Today show were well aware that baton-passings were important, highly emotional moments for viewers. Sudden disappearances could be disastrous; CBS had proven that time and time again. Heartwarming transitions, on the other hand, could be beneficial, bringing in new viewers and ginning up all sorts of positive press attention. Rule of thumb: the word love should be used as much as possible in regard to fellow cast members. The word deodorant should be avoided.
All this may seem obvious, but the going of Vieira and the coming of Curry provide starkly contrasting examples of the different ways transitions can work.
Vieira went out dancing. The whole show on June 8, 2011, was a love letter to the departing cohost, starting with a sound bite from the Bruno Mars song “Just The Way You Are”: “When you smile/The whole world stops and stares for a while/’Cuz girl you’re amazing/Just the way you are.” There was a ten-minute video celebrating her tenure, mentioning her coverage of news events like the Virginia Tech mass shooting in 2007 and her interviews with figures like Charla Nash, the Connecticut woman whose face was torn off by a chimpanzee in 2009. Fighting back tears after the video, Vieira recalled a candlelight vigil on the campus of Virginia Tech shortly after the shooting, during which students came up to her and asked, “Can we please hug you?” She said, “They watched the show every day. And they didn’t have
their mothers or their fathers next to them. I realized in that moment what’s so humbling about the power of this show to really reach people. And it’s such a blessing to have had that ability.” Holding her hand, Lauer said, “I’m not sure they would have said that to everybody. I think it’s you.”
This was all a warm-up for a grand finale, put together with only a few days’ notice by a small team of producers. It was an over-the-top lip-synch of “Don’t Stop Believing” done live with two hundred staffers. Vieira seemed genuinely surprised when her cohosts, all clad in special T-shirts emblazoned with her name, guided her through Studio 1A, a myriad of hallways, and the control room one floor below, then outside to Rockefeller Plaza. There were Jimmy Fallon, Abe Vigoda (the butt of a running joke on Today), and a synchronized dance on the plaza, one that made anyone half-watching at home stop and pay full attention.
After it was over, Vieira, in tears, hugged Bell, who was wearing an “El Jefe loves Meredith” shirt. “Thank you so much, I love you,” she said to the staff. Then she leaned into Lauer’s embrace. “I love you,” she said. As the show went to a commercial break, the staff chanted “MER-E-DITH.” The sequence went off perfectly. In response to an e-mail congratulating him on the transition, Bell wrote, “It has been a fun, if draining, week. It’s definitely the duck analogy: smooth on the surface, furious paddling beneath the water.”
The next morning it was Curry’s turn. Today celebrated her promotion with an eight-minute-long highlight reel that interspersed Curry’s foreign conflict coverage with her hijinks on the plaza and her bungee-jump for charity. All of her cohosts showered her with praise. “We don’t own our position, we are caretakers for a certain period of time. And there will be no better caretaker than Ann Curry,” said Roker, her closest friend among the castmates.
But something went wrong in Curry’s very first minute as cohost. It was a Today show tradition, on a new cohost’s first day, to replay the announcer’s introduction a couple of times and let the new person savor it. The intro is iconic: “FROM NBC NEWS/THIS IS TODAY/WITH MATT LAUER/AND ANN CURRY.” “Let’s take a listen,” Lauer said at 7:01, pointing skyward—but the control room played only the words “ANN CURRY.”
“That was it?” Lauer asked. Curry put her hand to her face. “ANN CURRY,” the announcer said again. The crew started cracking up. “That worked well,” the show’s longtime stage manager Mark Traub sarcastically said off camera.
This was followed by “awkward Ann moments” of the sort that would plague the relationship between Lauer and Curry in the months to come. Curry must have been sweating while watching the highlight reel of her career, because right afterward she said, “I knew I should have worn deodorant today, this is hard today!” Caught off guard, Lauer mock-groaned and said, “Thanks for sharing that.” Then she gave him a halfhearted hug and exclaimed, “Well I’ll share some more if you’d like!” Lauer, seeming embarrassed by her inelegant behavior, quickly changed the subject to the oversize glasses Curry, in the video, had just been seen wearing as a local reporter in the 1980s, and repeated a joke that Don Nash, the senior broadcast producer, had said in his ear: “You know, contact lenses have been great for Ann’s career.”
“I don’t actually wear them!” she blurted back. “Which is, you know, why I can’t read the teleprompter half the time!” The cast and crew all laughed loudly. As Homer Simpson has been known to say, “It’s funny ’cause it’s true.”
This was a preview of Lauer and Curry’s awkward year to come. The day before she started, Curry had told an interviewer, “I’ll be dancing with a partner who is Fred Astaire. I’ve just got to be able to go backwards, in heels. And I do love to dance.” You’d never have known it, however, from the way she repeatedly—and seemingly obliviously—stepped on Lauer’s toes. “Katie and Matt, it took them a while to get up to the same dance and move in the same steps,” one longtime NBC executive said later. “Meredith and Matt, it took them a little while, too. Ann and Matt? They’re not even listening to the same song.”
Lauer, a discreet and deliberative guy, was careful not to air his discomfort with Curry’s promotion in public. But it came up time and time again in private conversations. At the end of their second week together on Today, late on a Saturday night, Lauer bumped into Zucker at a party in Bridgehampton, a few miles from Lauer’s Hamptons estate. The two men hadn’t seen each other in a while. They started chatting about the changes at the show, and Zucker made it clear that he wouldn’t have appointed Curry to cohost had he still been in charge. “Yeah, well, you know,” Lauer responded, “it’s not exactly the way I would have done it.”
Bell, in conversations with friends around the same time, hinted that the “out” clause had had a lot to do with the ultimate decision (or nondecision) to make her the cohost. “It was probably a mistake,” he told one friend, “but we just didn’t want to wake up and see Ann on another network.”
Viewers picked up on Lauer’s dissatisfaction, maybe through his sour expressions when Curry fumbled her lines or told a strange joke. Some thought his overall performance as an anchor sagged. One day, according to a longtime staff member, he said to a production assistant, “I can’t believe I am sitting next to this woman.”
It must be noted here that not every day was dire for Curry or for the Today show, which remained America’s favorite show to wake up with. She did good work: she interviewed the Dalai Lama in July and shed light on the famine in Somalia by flying there in August. Even though she didn’t like all the softer stories picked by her producers, she loved the challenge of cohosting; she strove to be one of the best who’d ever had a seat on the famed couch.
But before long Curry wasn’t the only one whisper-talking: rumors were spreading that, because of her inability to find a niche on what was increasingly The Matt Lauer Show, she was on her way out. In 1989, Deborah Norville, at the start of an ill-fated thirteen-month stint as Bryant Gumbel’s cohost, had complained that the staff and the viewers of the Today show didn’t allow a new person enough time to succeed. “This job is radically different from any I’ve had before,” Norville said shortly after being upgraded from news anchor. “It’s a learning experience for me—and I think I can learn. All I can say is, don’t shoot me before I’m in the saddle—let me get up there and ride a bit.”
Now Curry was experiencing the same thing. When I interviewed her for a short story in The New York Times in February 2012, right after she had returned from a trip to the Sudan, she sounded like a woman who wanted more time. “I used to struggle,” she said, with the sharp turns that morning TV demanded. “But actually, this time, on my first day back, I was interviewing someone about why neon colors are the colors for spring. I marveled because, I remember, I switched into that gear pretty seamlessly. I felt, sort of for the first time, that I’m getting better at switching gears.” Case in point: Curry was calling from John F. Kennedy International Airport, where she was about to fly to Los Angeles to cover the Oscars. There was still sand in her suitcase from Africa.
Curry rambled on for a little while about having a “real chance” to redefine the Today show cohost role. I thought nothing of it at the time. But I wondered later if she’d been campaigning, in effect, to keep her job. Did she know that, within months of her debut as cohost, Bell had begun to think about what a succession plan would look like, whom it would involve, when it would roll out? By the end of 2011 he had a specific successor in mind: Savannah Guthrie, the former White House correspondent who had joined Today as the cohost of the nine a.m. hour in June, at the same time Curry ascended to the main seven-to-nine cohost job. He’d seen how Lauer and Guthrie clicked when they shared the screen, and he made that happen more often by ensuring that Guthrie was the first, second, and third choice for fill-in when Curry was away. To colleagues he trusted, he said, “I think Matt and Savannah are the best pairing I have.”
For a while Bell and his lieutenants wondered if they should let Curry remain next to Lauer, but replace news a
nchor Natalie Morales with Guthrie, thereby injecting some new energy onto the set. In that scenario, Morales would have been moved to the weekend show. But the idea didn’t get very far: NBC, always worried about too much change in the morning too quickly, extended Morales’s contract in early 2012, although she wasn’t being seriously considered for the top job. Only Guthrie was.
Guthrie, born in 1971 in Australia, grew up in Tucson, the Arizona city where her family settled in 1975. Her father, a mining consultant, suffered a heart attack and died when she was sixteen. She went to college a few miles from home at the University of Arizona and studied journalism, then climbed the TV ladder like Curry and wound up at Court TV covering the Michael Jackson trial in 2005. NBC poached her in 2007 and gave her a prestigious White House posting a year later. People in high places at NBC loved her, though she seemed uncomfortable when told that—a sign of shyness that to many at NBC only increased her charm. Guthrie was important to Bell not just because of the particular talents she brought to the show, or even the way she got along with Lauer, but because she represented an answer to the question “If not Ann, who?” “Not Ann” started a civil war of suits inside NBC. On one side was Bell. On the other was Capus, who was fond of Curry and wanted Bell to give her a chance. Sure, she probably wouldn’t last for five years like Vieira did. But Capus wasn’t convinced that there was an imminent problem.
Top of the Morning: Inside the Cutthroat World of Morning TV Page 4
