Top of the Morning: Inside the Cutthroat World of Morning TV (2 page)

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Let’s put this in perspective. Jim Bell does not under normal circumstances strike the people he works with, or the reporters who cover television, as a cynic, an a-hole, or a backstabber. To the contrary, he is, according to the testimony of many who know him well, a terribly nice guy, the kind who takes the time to e-mail a list of must-eats to a reporter who’s drinking his way through Barcelona on vacation. (Let me take this opportunity to thank him again for pointing the way to Euskal Etxea and Cal Pep.) A lot has been made of Bell’s physical size (at six foot four, he can be imposing) and his history as a Harvard football player, including by him. At his first meeting with Lauer, he famously described himself to the anchor as “a big guy who likes big challenges.” But Bell is also an unusually intelligent man, even if he sometimes conceals it behind his laconic sports-producer persona. He has a polymath’s fascination with the wide world of news and pop culture that
Today
inhabits, and a reputation as a straight shooter, inspiring deep loyalty among his senior staff. Though he has struggled at times to lose weight, he seems not to sweat at work. “You’d want him as your platoon leader in the trenches,” said one of his deputies. “The guy is just totally unflappable.”

Bell cracks jokes in the male-dominated control room with the best of them. He critiques his lower-rated competitors with a smile, almost always seeming to be an inch or two above it all, which he literally is. But by January he was showing signs of being affected by the grind and the burdens of morning TV, and, well, things happen. No wonder, then, that the friend who called him “unflappable” wouldn’t put his name to the quote, or that Bell wouldn’t put his control room jokes on the record so that they could be printed here. This is a genre that has claimed many victims, starting with Dave Garroway, the first host of the
Today
show when it premiered in 1952, the man whose on-air sidekick was not a smart-’n-sassy woman or a warm-’n-fuzzy weatherman but a chimpanzee named J. Fred Muggs. Garroway, perhaps not the most mentally healthy person to begin with, succumbed to the pressure of filling all that airtime, day after day, in a fascinating way. He saw ghosts, felt he was being followed everywhere, and eventually, long after he left the show, shot himself in the head.

No one was suggesting that Bell was about to go all Dave Garroway on himself or even pull an Arthur Godfrey (in 1953, morning show host Godfrey fired his popular house singer Julius LaRosa on the air; all these years later it still makes for a cringe-inducing moment). But tough stuff had indeed been happening on Bell’s watch. The ratings for the
Today
show had started to erode even before Vieira left in June 2011; her exit and Curry’s entrance sped up the trend, thus helping the long-suffering second-place
GMA
creep closer to first. As if the vulnerability of the streak, now nearly sixteen years long, wasn’t enough to quicken the pulse, the biggest star of the show—Lauer—was thinking about leaving
Today
at the end of his contract cycle. The fact that he was being forced to sit next to Curry was one motivating factor for Lauer—it’s hard enough to wake up in the middle of the night when you adore your coworker, and it’s even harder when you don’t. Lauer was firmly in the “don’t” camp. But there were other factors, too, like his wife, Annette, who had stayed with him despite several rounds of very public, very painful rumors about his extramarital affairs. Annette wanted him to retire, and some days he felt the same impulse. This was hard work, much harder than most viewers ever realized. If he left, what would happen to
Today
? Bell had no obvious successor lined up.

Given that Bell faced so many huge problems in such a short time, could anyone criticize him too harshly for coming up with Operation Bambi? Convinced, as he was, that Curry had to go, the operation as he saw it had three parts: a) convince Lauer to extend his contract, which was set to expire in December 2012, b) remove Curry from the chair next to Lauer’s, and c) replace Curry with the up-and-coming cohost of the nine a.m. hour of
Today
, Savannah Guthrie. Yes, this was all very perilous, but as still another kind of doctor, Hippocrates, told us, desperate times call for desperate measures.

But what is it that makes morning show people so desperate, so murderous of their colleagues and competitors, so willing to bend the rules? It’s all because the stakes are so high.
Today
and
GMA
are the pinnacle of the television profession. For NBC and ABC, respectively, they are the profit centers of the news divisions that produce them; they basically subsidize the rest of the day’s news coverage. In the Most Valuable Viewer category, otherwise known as “the demo,” every hundred thousand viewers represent roughly ten million dollars in advertising revenue yearly. In other words: convince one hundred thousand more MVVs to watch every day and make ten million dollars. Spur the same number to stop watching and watch the ad dollars evaporate. No wonder the producers of these shows pop Tums as they await the overnight ratings. Their jobs and the jobs of many beneath them hang in the balance. And besides, media moguls don’t like to lose.

What people not in the business sometimes don’t get is that being number one in the ratings has a value all its own. Not just in the amount that the winning show’s salespeople can extract from advertisers—though there’s that:
Today
took almost five hundred million dollars in 2011, 150 million more than
GMA
—but in reputation, in influence, in sheer television industry power.
Today
had the upper hand in booking A-list celebrities. It had the clout to insist that a politician talk to Lauer before anyone else. It had the right to call itself “America’s first family.”

But all of that was at risk now for Bell, Lauer, and the rest of the
Today
show staff, and not just because
GMA
was trying to claw its way to number one. The rules of morning TV were changing as cable TV, the Internet, and cell phones all gave people more choices when they wake up. Why wait for Al Roker’s weather forecast on
Today
when the Weather Channel’s phone app can tell you whether it’s going to rain? What’s the point of a sixty-second stock market preview when CNBC’s business-minded morning show
Squawk Box
is only a remote click away? There were a dozen morning shows on TV in January 2012, all with specific audiences in mind—conservatives got
Fox & Friends
, golf nuts got
Morning Drive
, Capitol Hill wonks got
Washington Journal
. The most innovative of the bunch was
Morning Joe
, a political chatfest that dismissed most of the conventions of morning TV and won over most of official Washington and media-centric New York. Like
Squawk Box
and
Today
and a third of the Weather Channel, it was owned by Comcast.

Individually, no cable TV show or Web site or app could challenge
Today
or
GMA
, each of which attracted five million viewers at any given time. But cumulatively all the competition was inching closer to—or maybe it’s better to say dragging down—the Top of the Morning. In fact, in the very month that Operation Bambi took shape in Bell’s brain, January 2012, still another option appeared, a hard-nosed newscast called
CBS This Morning
. CBS had been languishing in third place in the morning show wars ever since there were three networks to choose from. But the fact that the network was still trying after all these years—this time with a completely remade-from-scratch show led by Charlie Rose—was a testimony to the profits and wondrous possibilities of morning TV. And, if you don’t get it right, the pain.

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
.

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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.