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

by Brian Stelter

  After the show, at ten a.m., Roberts addressed the understandably anxious staff of GMA, dozens of whom gathered around a row of desks to hear her speak. Besser was on hand to describe the rare disease—it affects only one in thirty thousand Americans each year—in detail, and to answer questions. Standing in front of the staff, Sherwood spoke first and sought to head off any speculation that Roberts was permanently off the show—​and any campaigning by ambitious fill-ins. “That is her chair,” he said. “When she comes back after her transplant, it will be her chair.” Then Roberts, in a red hoodie and jeans, held up a photo from the rooftop party on April 19. “I found out this night,” she said, pointing to the photo and smiling at it. She thanked the handful of staffers who had kept her illness a secret, and said, “You saw how they continued to work.” She wanted the same reaction from the full staff now. She hadn’t told them sooner, she said, because “you crave normalcy when your life is kind of not normal.”

  Roberts then hugged Sherwood’s boss, Anne Sweeney, who was leaning on a desk nearby. Sweeney, she said, had “assured me that every possible resource is available to me.” For ABC, Roberts’s illness was a family crisis, but also a network…what? Was the right word here problem or opportunity? On the one hand, the absence of a principal player from a morning show lineup has rarely if ever been a positive thing; host vacations almost always lead to lower ratings. Roberts’s open-ended medical leave, some people at ABC were saying, could wreak havoc on the momentum that GMA had clearly been building since at least March. “Robin is so essential to what we do, we just don’t know what effect this will have long-term on our audience,” an ABC News executive said at the time, insisting on anonymity because even speculating about the effect on the ratings was taboo. But on the other hand, personal dramas and adventures experienced by the hosts have always been viewer honey. Joan Lunden’s very public pregnancies in the 1980s and Katie Couric’s crusade against colon cancer in the wake of her husband’s death in 1998 both resulted in ratings spikes for their respective morning shows. And, though she’s not a morning show host per se, the attention Oprah Winfrey reaped as she sometimes tearfully fought the battle of the bulge is the stuff of TV legend. Said Chris Licht, the CBS This Morning producer, a few days after Roberts’s announcement, “On a human level you think, how much more can this woman go through? On a network scumbag level you think, this must drive the Today show nuts. Because GMA will get a lot of attention.”

  How calculating the GMA producers were or weren’t about Roberts’s illness is hard to say. Roberts remained more than slightly interested in the overnight ratings, and people at ABC said they took their cues from her about how to cover her illness. She was clearly happy to draw attention to the cause of bone marrow donation. The network let the press know that the day after she spoke on the air about having MDS, the national marrow donor registry Be the Match had recorded more than 3,600 new signups, up from a daily average of two or three hundred. Later in the month ABC News held a bone marrow donor drive at its headquarters. No one could say that a lot of good hadn’t come from the network’s involvement, yet some people at NBC were whispering about the ways ABC was milking the situation for ratings. The smack-talking truly never stops between the Big Two.

  Be that as it may, a big problem for ABC in June, on a network scumbag level, was that the Today show also had a woman in distress. Ann Curry, who the research showed was perceived by viewers as being not terribly good at the craft of morning television cohosting, was also perceived as being treated as if morning television ineptness were some kind of felony. She was being leaked about to the gossip press (which said her days were numbered and her colleagues hated her), handled sometimes coldly and sometimes roughly on the air, and (though the at-home viewer was not privy to this) mocked and/or ignored by the show’s staff.

  This sounds awful, and, as we have seen in an earlier chapter, it most definitely was—but just as Conan O’Brien’s audience swelled when his job was at risk in 2010, the Today show’s ratings benefited from the unresolved questions about Curry’s fate. The perennial ratings leader won the weeks of May 28 and June 4, and even squeaked by the week of June 11, when Roberts made her announcement about MDS, taking the prize by a mere thirty-five thousand viewers per day. GMA was back on top when the week of the eighteenth started, but on Thursday the twenty-first Today beat GMA by more than half a million viewers, the biggest daily gap in months. The flip-flop happened because Curry’s negotiations to leave Today had become front-page news. Curious viewers were flocking to NBC, wanting to see if she’d keep showing up for work.

  Today wound up winning the week by 133,000 viewers, its fourth straight weekly victory. At the time this was puzzling to some observers who had come to see the GMA victories of April and May as something more than a spontaneous surge, and who thought the status of both major shows was rapidly morphing. In retrospect, though, what was happening seems clear: even as a new era in morning television came to pass, the townsfolk were congregating in the public square to witness the torture that precedes the execution.

  Its unpleasant reasons aside, the quartet of consecutive Today wins, even if they were by a mere one- or two-tenths of a ratings point, put the show much closer to its goal, modest by the standards of the late 852-week streak, of making it to the Olympics (starting July 27) without faltering and falling back to second place. The London Games would give the show a guaranteed ratings lift lasting all the way until August 12. By then, the executives at NBC felt, GMA would have cooled off so thoroughly that it might not be a threat again for—who knows?—maybe another fifteen or sixteen years. Or at least for that many weeks. GMA, during the same pre-Olympics period, had a goal of its own: to finally hit the bull’s-eye of the demo, a sweet spot it hadn’t struck since the week of September 11, 1995. That was not going to happen, NBC News president Steve Capus told USA Today on the eve of Curry’s weepy sign-off, because “every week in the last month we’ve started a new streak!” Alas, apart from not quite making sense, that statement was unfortunate in at least one other way: its cockiness aroused the ABC team and caused them to redouble their efforts. “If there’s one quote that riled up everybody here,” said GMA boss Cibrowski, “it was that quote.”

  The TV train wreck viewers had simultaneously been hoping for and dreading came, as we have seen, on June 28, when Curry was fake-promoted. How any executive worth his nearly seven-figure salary could have let the wounded cohost go on the air live, without tissues, and make a speech in which she asked forgiveness from all “who saw me as a groundbreaker” for failing to “carry the ball across the finish line,” and then squirm away from Lauer’s attempted kiss, would for months afterward remain a subject of bitter debate. Curry was still in a town car on her way to the airport (she was flying to California for a wedding) when the spinning and rationalizing began. “She deserved the right to say goodbye to everybody,” said one of her few remaining defenders, who would speak only on condition of anonymity. More voluminous were her detractors, some of whom compared Curry’s exit speech to a suicide bombing, designed to inflict maximum professional damage on all the people around her on the couch that day, especially Lauer. “The execution wasn’t of Ann,” said one television veteran, challenging the conventional wisdom that Curry’s goodbye had been a public execution. “Ann was the executioner, and the victim was the Today show.”

  * * *

  Talk about must-see TV: Today beat GMA by three hundred thousand viewers that Execution Thursday—but a day later NBC’s mini-streak was no more. Jim Bell had warned some colleagues that the ratings would be “a roll of the dice” in the period following Operation Bambi, and, sure enough, they quickly came up craps. As one viewer put it in a Twitter message to Lauer, “If NBC thought the ‘Today’ show ratings were bad with Ann Curry, wait until they see them without her.” The day after Curry’s departure, June 29, GMA went from a trailing position to a victory, with 614,000 more viewers than Today. It was as if Ann Curry’s fan club, more than ha
lf a million viewers strong, had changed the channel in unison. The head-snapping number on Friday completely offset Today’s Monday-through-Thursday superiority and turned the weekly race into a tie—“a really unbelievable move,” said Cibrowski, justifiably. No one could remember the last time the two shows had tied. Said one GMA producer: “NBC may have done more to help GMA by the way they threw her out the door than had they kept her.” Another said he saw the ratings as “a total fuck-you to the Today show for firing Ann.”

  Producers at NBC saw it as something else, too: a rude welcome for Curry’s pretty, bright, and well-intentioned replacement, Savannah Guthrie.

  Act 3

  (Almost) Instant Karma

  Chapter 16

  The New Girl

  Savannah Guthrie was a Nice Person in a Terrible Position. On June 20, as the leaks about Curry’s impending departure were about to morph into the kind of double-edged publicity that can be dangerous to both sides of an argument, Capus called Guthrie, then the nine a.m. cohost of the Today show, to his corner office on the third floor at 30 Rock. He had to let her in on a secret.

  “There’s a story coming out,” he said, “about Ann Curry.”

  In retrospect, it’s remarkable how little Guthrie actually knew about Operation Bambi up until this point. Then again, executives like to keep talent in the dark—that’s one way they maintain some power over the people who make vaults more money than they do. And sometimes talent keep themselves in the dark—as Guthrie had. She had heard the scuttlebutt about Curry, of course, but she had tried to block it out. Now that was no longer possible.

  When Guthrie left Capus’s office that Wednesday afternoon, she wasn’t quite sure what was going to happen next. It sure sounded as if she was the chosen one for Curry’s job—but no one had called her agent to start the necessary negotiations. (Guthrie was represented by Michael Glantz, who also represented Meredith Vieira.) The end of the week came and went without any word from NBC. The network finally called the following Monday, the twenty-fifth, after Capus had spoken to Guthrie once again—in much the same vague and zigzaggy fashion. At one point Guthrie—still not quite wanting to believe that the Today show family was on the verge of a major overhaul—got tired of the suspense and interrupted her boss.

  “Are you offering me the Today show?” she asked.

  “Yeah,” said Capus, now smiling broadly. “I am.”

  This was the fun part of the job—giving people good news and helping them have fulfilling careers. Sure, the joy was tempered a bit in this case by the fact that Burke and Bell had forced this transition to happen far sooner than Capus would have liked it to. But on balance he’d much rather be sitting with the next star of the Today show than bargaining with Curry’s lawyer, Bob Barnett, who’d been in and out of his office for days on end at that point. Capus told me later, “It’s cliché to say it, but in this world, when you can do good things for good people, those are the best days. You know what? That was a good day.”

  Guthrie tried to smile along with Capus—but she wanted to cry. She was in some ways an odd fit for the cohost job at a major morning program because she is not a schemer, not overly ambitious in what Chris Licht has so helpfully dubbed the network scumbag way. She doesn’t trash her rivals, nor does she employ a publicist to plant flattering stories about her. She’d heard talk about Jim Bell and other executives having a kind of professional crush on her, but when confronted with or teased about this she had the habit of clamming up, looking at the floor, and saying…nothing. Her abiding flaw was that she was, by her own admission, an over-worrier. When something happened on or to the show, her brain didn’t go to “How can this help me?” but rather to “Will this hurt me?” She was vulnerable, not awful, even when especially sleep-deprived. Which was one of the reasons so many people had a crush on her, strictly professionally of course.

  As wonderful as Capus’s offer was, she dreaded taking the job under the circumstances. She knew very well what would come next if she said yes: outrage from Curry’s fans and people (like herself  ) who were supporters of women’s rights, attacks on her for being the bi-otch who’d benefited from Curry’s bumbles, criticism of her performance by both critics and colleagues when the ratings weren’t instantly repaired. She felt—rightly—that she deserved better than to be cast as the villain in some play she had never sought a role in.

  Capus, through his slightly too-large and -long-lasting smile, asked her if she wanted the cohost job.

  “I don’t know,” she said.

  Guthrie’s main concern, as she told Capus, was “lowering the temperature,” by which she meant getting beyond the current crisis mode and regaining a sense of normalcy on the set. Guthrie had no idea, for example, how Lauer felt about her being promoted, or how Morales—theoretically the woman next in line for the job—would take the news. And she had to at least consider the possibility that she’d be ushered off the couch in a year, just as Curry had been. As we’ve established, morning TV could be notoriously hard on its women. Indeed, in just a few weeks Erica Hill, a cohost of the still-third-place CBS This Morning, would simply not be on the set one morning, and her absence would go utterly unexplained; a new cohost, Norah O’Donnell, would join a month later. (But CBS sidestepped controversy by removing Hill swiftly—“they decided on Wednesday and told us on Thursday; it happened so fucking fast it didn’t have time to leak,” said one senior producer—and then introducing O’Donnell slowly. NBC’s mismanagement of Curry made CBS seem more humane by comparison.) Taking a tack that surely would have made her agent Glantz nauseous, Guthrie suggested that the network reintroduce her to the audience as just a temporary cohost. “I’ll fill in for you for a year” and then they could decide where to go from there, she said to Capus.

  This idea did not sit well with the news chief. He wanted NBC to look as if it knew what it was doing, and was proceeding with confidence according to a plan, as opposed to groping its way through the kind of difficult period familiar to anyone who has ever accidentally shot himself while cleaning a firearm. Although he had been a staunch Curry supporter, especially in his secret war with Bell, he could tolerate only this much indecision for so long. His boss, Steve Burke, wanted this done before the Olympics, so that’s what he had to do: get this done.

  At forty Guthrie looked as if she was right and ready for the role. She hadn’t always been a high achiever; in high school, shockingly, C’s had been the norm for her. But in college she had begun to step up. “I was not always a big gunner academically or anything,” she said, “but over time I think I raised the standards for myself of what I thought I should do or be able to do.” After graduation her first TV job was at an NBC station in Butte, Montana—which shut down just two weeks after she started. Undeterred, she found a job at an ABC station in Columbia, Missouri. And after two years there she moved back to Tucson for a job at KVOA, the NBC station in town. But she had a nagging desire to go to law school. “She knew she didn’t want to be in local TV forever,” said her friend Ted Robbins, who taught her broadcast journalism in college and now reports for NPR. Robbins encouraged her to enroll. “I don’t say this to everybody, but I said, ‘Dream big. You’ve got the chops. There’s no reason you shouldn’t do it.’”

  In 2000 she did, studying at Georgetown University but keeping a foot in the television world by freelancing as a reporter for WRC, the NBC affiliate in Washington. She recalled, “I would be at law school all day and then they’d call me and say, ‘Can you work the three-to-eleven shift?’ I’d be covering some murder in Gaithersburg or something, waiting for the eleven o’clock news, and I’d have my law book on my lap, studying.”

  Guthrie earned the top score on the Arizona Bar Exam after graduating in 2002. “It was in law school that whatever was hiding in the background in my personality, in terms of wanting to be at the top of my game, rushed to the forefront,” she said. “Suddenly I was studying really hard. It wasn’t because I wanted to get an A, it was because I didn’t want
to get an F.” She added, almost apologetically, “I don’t do all this to try to be Miss Perfect or something, it’s because I’m afraid that I’ll fail.”

  Guthrie at that point was still torn between television and law. She had a prestigious clerkship lined up with a federal judge in Washington, but, gathering her courage, she turned it down and started sending out audition tapes. Some agents told her she’d be lucky “to get in the forties,” meaning a TV market like Austin, Norfolk, or Oklahoma City. But with help from a believer at the William Morris Agency she landed a trial correspondent job at Court TV.

  The job was “perfect, written in the stars,” Guthrie said, for it blended her interests in television and law. Guthrie traveled across the country covering events like the Michael Jackson child molestation trial in 2005 in Santa Maria, California, where she cute-met the BBC producer Mark Orchard: the Court TV and BBC live shot positions were side by side, and, well, the rest was B-roll. Orchard at the time had just split up with his wife Anne Kornblut, a New York Times reporter, which would later lead to unfair claims that Guthrie was a home-wrecker. In fact the two women are friendly: when Kornblut remarried in 2010 and had a child in 2011, Guthrie was invited to the baby shower.