He was right about that, but more change was to come. As viewers fled, Westin knew he had to do something. There was talk about scrapping the GMA format altogether and running an hour of news followed by an hour of The View, the new eleven a.m. talk show that was quickly turning into a hit. Gibson thought that was such a bad idea he went to Westin to protest it.
“You’ve got more than twenty years invested in this concept,” Gibson said. “You’ve got the best-named program in the history of TV. This is a tried-and-true formula if you have the right people.”
“Well,” Westin said, “would you come back and host again?”
The idea sounded as outlandish then as it does now. Thus Gibson declined, but when he heard whom he’d be paired with—Diane Sawyer, then in her tenth year of hosting ABC’s Primetime Live—he started to reconsider. Many stars of ABC News had shunned GMA in the past, but Sawyer’s presence, he predicted, would change that. As it turned out, Sawyer caused an attitudinal change over at Today, too. “I remember thinking, ‘That’s a big move’ when they brought them on,” said Don Nash, who was a West Coast producer for Today at the time. “Game on,” Nash and his colleagues thought.
Newman and McRee, as you might have guessed, were replaced faster than you can say severance. McRee returned to California, gained a lot of weight, then lost it, and now runs a weight-loss Web site. Newman returned to Canada, where he now hosts a newsmagazine. When GMA celebrated its thirty-fifth anniversary in 2010, “Lisa and I were nowhere to be found in its official history,” he wrote in a magazine essay. “We never happened.”
Sawyer and Gibson (who at first said they’d host the show for only a few months—maybe to protect themselves in case the ratings went even further south) made for a dramatic and almost instantaneous improvement in both the quality of GMA and the quantity of its viewers. He calmed her down and she revved him up. “Charlie was the key,” Sawyer said. “Charlie was the institutional memory for the audience. I was new energy for Charlie.”
But others at the network believed that it was Sawyer who was the secret of GMA’s recovery, and credited new show producer Shelley Ross, one of the few women ever to make it to the upper reaches of morning TV, for bringing out the best in her. Sawyer and Ross were constantly searching for the special something (crime stories? inspirational interviews? overseas trips?) that would restore GMA to first place. They had endless amounts of energy. Today withstood the challenges and continued winning every single week. Years passed and as the streak was further cemented, it became the stuff of legend—completely unprecedented in the television industry. But the funny thing was, it didn’t yet feel unbeatable. Especially after a forty-year-old producer named Ben Sherwood took over GMA in 2004, there were half hours and then days and then weeks to feel good about; there were causes for hope. In morning TV, you gotta give ’em hope.
* * *
Sherwood is one of those highbrows who is not afraid to go low and aim for the emotional labonza, to hit the groundlings where they live. He graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Harvard, then spent several years at Oxford as a Rhodes scholar before working his way up through the news divisions at NBC and ABC. He’s written a best-selling novel that was made into a movie, and a substantial work of nonfiction brought out by the publisher of the book you hold in your hands. He probably likes classical music and stuff. But when he focused on GMA as its executive producer, practically the first thing he saw was a chance for the shameless promotion of Desperate Housewives, one of his network’s cheesiest and most successful prime-time entries. Over the course of nine months, Gibson, an easily lathered fan of the nighttime soap, and Sawyer interviewed no fewer than five of the show’s MILFy stars. The effect on the ratings—and on the equally besotted GMA staff—was nothing short of electrifying. After Gibson’s hard-hitting chitchat with Housewives narrator Brenda Strong in February 2005, the cast and crew gave them a standing ovation. “It’s funny,” Strong told the New York Observer afterward, “because I didn’t really realize kind of the far-reaching impact that our show had until I went on and Charles actually said, ‘You know, you guys don’t understand—it’s even trickling down to the news department. The entire network feels like it’s gotten a fresh surge of optimism.’”
The Observer called the GMA hype-fest a “slightly sloppy, gushingly passionate intra-network hug,” and some people at Today rolled their eyes at the utter crassness of ABC running virtual infomercials for its own prime-time programming. But the idea of jumping on the company bandwagon, and trading exclusive access for fawning coverage, was nothing new—NBC did it often, too, with the casts of ER, Friends, and the other hit series it had in the days before it was a nocturnal also-ran. “The thing is, they pioneered using the prime-time schedule to advantage in the morning,” Sherwood said of NBC. “And, you know, we were lucky in 2004–2005 to have a couple of great shows come along and help us.”
The Housewives tie-ins worked so well that in the second week of May 2005, many people at NBC—including Jim Bell, who had just been appointed the producer of Today in April, and Phil Griffin, who’d been appointed the executive in charge of the franchise—feared that ABC was going to break its nearly ten-year streak. “It was an atmosphere of triage. ‘How do we stop the bleeding?’” said a producer who was there at the time. “All of our careers were kind of on the line,” said another producer. “We knew that if we saved the show, we’d be in good standing there. And if we didn’t, we’d be the guys who were on watch when it fell.” Bell, Griffin, and a phalanx of publicists even met in a dingy conference room to talk about what to tell the press if GMA won.
That may sound silly, but their fear was real. Jeff Zucker, the soon-to-be NBC CEO, was so worried about the streak’s being broken by GMA that week (rumor had it that ABC had already bought the champagne for a celebration) that he cut all the national commercials that were supposed to run after eight a.m. on Friday’s broadcast of Today. Exploiting the fact that Nielsen, for complicated reasons, didn’t rate the parts of shows without commercials, Zucker managed to inflate Today’s total rating for Friday and for the full week.
The move cost the network hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of dollars in advertising revenue. It made no business sense—“it was an ego-driven thing,” said a producer. In the end the commercial trick wasn’t even necessary. GMA lost by forty thousand viewers for the week. Its best wasn’t quite good enough.
But the episode illustrated just how obsessed NBC was with negating the Desperate Housewives effect and staving off GMA. At any cost, and by any means necessary. As bizarre as it may sound, some were so intent on keeping the ratings streak going that they prayed it would be broken, just so, while sinking back into despair and poking around for future employment, they could get some relief. But the streak did keep going, and the staff of Today spent all summer plotting how to defend itself when the drama returned in the fall. Here’s how seriously they took the war: Griffin, who was addicted to Housewives, gave up his habit cold turkey. He just couldn’t enjoy the soap opera on Wisteria Lane anymore, not with morning TV supremacy at stake.
Their counterparts at GMA were no less obsessed. Sherwood’s wife Karen once calculated that her husband’s “net sleep deficit” after spending two years and five months at the helm of the show was 1,400 hours. Sherwood was the sort of executive producer who thought, like a dogfighting World War II pilot, that victory would always go to the guy who could withstand the g-forces of sleeplessness the longest, and thus not pass out before his adversary did as they plunged around the wild blue yonder. Still, sleep deprivation, he conceded, “produced every imaginable personality defect” in morning show executives, staff members, and stars. Sometimes he’d suffer short-term memory loss and mood swings and, maybe scariest of all, feel momentarily unambitious. “There is a reason that at Guantanamo Bay, one of the approved ways to break an al-Qaeda terrorist is to deprive them of sleep,” he said. Throughout all his time in the morning TV business, he added, “I’ve rarely seen anybody
who is able to keep it completely together ’cause everybody is functioning on a sleep deficit.”
Sherwood, it was true, could get a little weird sometimes while running GMA. He talked of morning TV as a game of three-dimensional chess, which put off those around him who were especially sensitive to clichés. But his ability to think two or three moves ahead impressed others. “I developed a deep love of the program and the arena,” Sherwood later said of his time at GMA. “I couldn’t help it. It’s a feast for people with curiosity about lots of different things. Everything fits under the morning TV tent.”
Sherwood’s ability—or even his desire—to play well with others has long been a controversial subject at the places he has worked. He has been called “polarizing” by people who are on his side, and worse things by others. While he was twenty-four and completing his studies in British imperial history and development economics at Oxford, he was savaged in a Spy magazine article titled “Résumé Mucho” by Andrew Sullivan, who called him “the ultimate in a long line of centerless résumé featherers.” The article quoted classmates who said things like “Ben is one of the most hated people alive” and “It’s bizarre. People actually make an effort to dislike him.” Let’s not forget, that’s when Sherwood was getting sufficient sleep.
The article, which came about when Sullivan went looking for the person he called “the archetypal Rhodes scholar,” dogged Sherwood all his professional life. “I don’t think there is a person in the world who would want to have their college persona written about and described in a satire magazine,” Sherwood told The New York Times in 2011. Sullivan included. “I have no opinion of my own” about Sherwood, Sullivan told me. “I was merely conveying the astonishing level of contempt leveled at him by his peers.” In the same Times article Sherwood also said, “What I do know about that time, is that I was a guy with a lot to learn.”
One thing he’s learned: how to manage his own press. His story is one of constant self-reinvention. For a time in the early nineties he was a producer for Diane Sawyer’s Primetime newsmagazine. Then, spurred by a near-death experience while covering the war in Sarajevo and by the death of his father soon after, he left ABC and wrote a novel, Red Mercury, under a pseudonym. He returned to television in 1997, but this time to NBC, where he was a producer for Tom Brokaw’s Nightly News. There he reconnected with Zucker, a Harvard classmate also known for proactive press relations, who calls him Benjy. Sherwood wrote a novel called The Man Who Ate the 747 while at NBC, then left the network. Brokaw said Sherwood quit in a huff because he wasn’t promoted; Sherwood, politely disagreeing, said he left to write another novel, The Death and Life of Charlie St. Cloud, which in 2004 became a best-seller and was adapted into a 2009 film starring Zac Efron.
Sherwood, according to associates, felt unappreciated by NBC. His return to ABC in 2004 came as Diane Sawyer was casting about for someone, anyone, who could get her ahead of Couric in the overnights. Rounding forty, he seemed just as intense as his younger self, but somewhat more likable. “He was very good at forging relationships with underlings,” said one such underling, who noticed that he cared about even the littlest details of the show, like the graphics along the bottom of the screen. He exuded confidence and competence, others said—traits that are sometimes in short supply in second-place newsrooms. But even he couldn’t snap the streak. Bell and Griffin had brought Today back from the brink of second place, and their show was better than ever. Two thousand six was a year of transitions. Couric left Today for CBS Evening News, and Gibson left GMA for World News. Sherwood left, too: he moved back to his native Los Angeles, where his mother was battling cancer. While taking care of her, he enjoyed stay-at-home-dad-dom with his two young sons and knocked out a nonfiction book called The Survivors Club, about why some people survive crises while others perish. To Sherwood, and to the people who slept with one eye open so they could keep track of him, this period felt like a break but not a whole new direction: he would return someday to television, “the arena” that he loved, everyone felt.
Chapter 8
Unfinished Business
There was no need for the producers of Good Morning America to conduct a nationwide talent search, or to stay up past their usual bedtime of nine thirty p.m. endlessly watching audition reels, if they wanted to find the one person most likely to put them in a position to topple Today from its promontory spot in the ratings. She was sitting right on their set, and, as GMA’s news anchor, building a relationship with the audience morning by morning. It wasn’t, of course, instantly apparent that she had the potential to affect the show in a way that would, if she was handled correctly, result in the diversion of tens of millions of dollars in advertising revenue from NBC to ABC, and thereby save the skin of no small number of news division executives, but it was there for the superior minds who run such enterprises to see. She was a woman of great personal dignity, stately beauty, and, what’s most important in her mysterious genre, a certain je ne sais quoi that you can’t just order up by the ounce from human resources. Naturally, because morning TV still comes down to a group of elite men trying to guess the needs of a mass audience of mostly women, many of the powers that were at ABC wanted to fire her ass as soon as feasible.
Truth be told, Robin Roberts was something of a project when she first popped up on GMA in 1995, a tall, athletic-looking ESPN anchor contributing sports stories, like interviews with Venus and Serena Williams and live reports from the Sydney Olympics. She didn’t exactly impress the news purists on the staff; in the words of one, “she didn’t have a journalistic bone in her body.” But she gained experience and started filling in for Diane Sawyer and Charlie Gibson, foreshadowing her promotion to news anchor in 2002. Even then, said someone who was a senior producer at the time, “There were a lot of people in the building that wanted to give up on her, and certainly everyone acknowledged that her lackluster performance and lack of growth and range was a problem.” But ABC’s research showed that the audience liked and related to Roberts’s soft-spoken style. And to be fair, there wasn’t a lot of room for her to grow in between Sawyer and Gibson, two of the brightest stars on TV. Even when she was promoted to full-fledged cohost in 2005, she was overshadowed by the other two, and there was a distinct lack of ease.
And then Hurricane Katrina happened.
Roberts grew up in the Mississippi town of Pass Christian, a tiny peninsula that juts into the Gulf of Mexico. Her mother, Lucimarian, was a social worker and educator, and her father, Lawrence, who died in 2004, was a Tuskegee Airman who spent thirty-two years in the Army and Air Force. They had deep roots in the area—and Roberts considered herself a die-hard daughter of the Delta, having graduated cum laude from Southeastern Louisiana University with a degree in communications in 1983. When Katrina washed ashore, she didn’t ask, she told her producers that she was going there to cover it personally. What she didn’t tell them was that her first priority was not to get the story but to try to locate her mother, her older sister Dorothy, and other family members who had hunkered down for the hurricane in Biloxi, and whom, since the storm hit, she had been unable to contact.
Initially this conflict of intentions made things a bit dicey. Roberts and an ABC News crew landed in Lafayette, Louisiana, on Monday evening, some eighteen hours after the hurricane made landfall, and drove through the windswept night toward her home state 150 miles away. She recalled that when the crew arrived in Gulfport, Mississippi, she told them, “You guys stop. Set up. I’m going to go and find my family. If I can get back in time for the live shot, I will. If not, I’m sorry.”
From Gulfport she drove by herself another fifteen miles or so to Biloxi. A police officer with an oversize flashlight helped her navigate on foot through the blacked-out neighborhood where her mother and sister had ridden out the storm. When they knocked on the door, Dorothy shouted, “No TV!” She thought the flashlight was the light of a camera crew.
Roberts reached the home about an hour before air time. She had to turn around rig
ht away to get back to the satellite truck in time for her seven a.m. live shot. She recalled, “My family was very encouraging of me to go: ‘Tell the story!’” She wasn’t planning on telling viewers about the reunion. But Gibson, at the end of her live report, asked if she had been able to reach her family yet. Roberts instantly teared up; she struggled for words, but gave him a thumbs-up sign and said, “They’re OK. They’re all right.” Their house? “Not so good.”
The moment was transformative. “I hadn’t cried on air like that,” Roberts said. “I think just the raw emotion of it came out. And here I think, ‘All right, that’s it, I’m going to get fired.’ You don’t show emotion! You don’t get personal like that.” She was shocked, she said, by the support that poured in from ABC and from the audience, which showered her with loving letters and e-mails.
Roberts may have gone off to Louisiana a not-very-squeaky third wheel, but she came back a star. When Gibson left GMA in 2006 to anchor World News, she and Sawyer were left to handle the show on their own. The decision, made by Westin and by Sherwood’s successor, Jim Murphy, was based partly on the belief that the two women could hold their own and challenge Today, and partly on the fact that the executives felt they had no strong male candidates up their sleeve. Moving forward without a man was considered risky, the mock married couple having been the morning show model since the days of Dave Garroway and J. Fred Muggs. Everyone—NBC, CBS, CNN, Fox News, even NPR’s newly remade Morning Edition on radio—had a mix of at least one man and one woman. But Sawyer and Roberts proved they could make it work. “It was in some ways a way to explore sisterhood—beyond race, beyond age, beyond background,” Sawyer said. Roberts concurred. “The beauty of it was that we didn’t make a big deal out of it being two women,” she said. “And there weren’t a lot of articles written about it being two women. Which I think is a real credit to the two of us and also to where we are as a society.”
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