Top of the Morning: Inside the Cutthroat World of Morning TV (33 page)

On Thursday, July 26, the atmosphere was a lot less like camp because Steve Burke, the NBCUniversal chief, stopped by the Tower of London set during the broadcast to shake hands with the cohosts and watch the production. Burke was a well-dressed reminder of the role that politics and hierarchies play in the lives of even those people who have what are generally regarded as dream jobs. Right beside him was Pat Fili, the business-savvy former head of ABC and WebMD whom he had just appointed to oversee NBC’s news operations.

Eighteen months had passed since Burke had taken over NBC, and it seemed fair to say he wasn’t having much fun yet. NBC News, he told his colleagues, had turned out to be a time sink. It had consumed countless hours thanks to the
Today
show contract negotiations, the conflict between Bell and Capus, and other miscellaneous botherations. So Burke had decided to combine NBC News, MSNBC, and CNBC under a new umbrella group, the same way he had strung together the company’s various sports units. He named it the  NBCUniversal News Group. To run it he’d picked Fili, one of his most trusted administrators. Internally the pick was hugely important, because it signaled that neither Capus nor Bell was being promoted. Capus would now have to report to her, not Burke. It was time for him to consider packing up his office.

While Fili watched
Today
work its production magic at the Tower of London, the final ratings for the prior week, July 16 through 20, reached BlackBerrys there and in New York. There had been some special concern about the numbers recently, since NBC had run its streak of winning demo weeks to 898, and reaching the big round number of 900 would be a psychologically significant moment—empowering for
Today
, deflating for
GMA
. But when the powers that be looked down at their handheld devices, they saw that in week 899
Today
and
GMA
had…tied. According to Nielsen’s estimate, each show had averaged 1,737,000 viewers in the demo.

Both shows immediately claimed a victory, calling to mind the famous headline “Harvard beats Yale 29–29.” At a press conference (previously scheduled with TV critics, part of a twice-annual event in Los Angeles) ABC News president Ben Sherwood purposely peppered his remarks with Olympics references, adding up all of
GMA
’s “silver-medal finishes” before saying his cast now stood “at the gold-medal podium.” The last time
GMA
had been number one in the demo, he said, “I think the Lillehammer games had just finished the year before.” He didn’t “think” that; he knew. Almost lost in all the gloating was
GMA
’s huge win among total viewers: the gap between the two shows was 353,000, the widest yet.

For NBC there was worse news to come. In the days leading up to the opening ceremony, July 23 through 27,
Today
did everything it could to stomp out
GMA
. That’s why it produced elaborate shows from the Tower of London and Olympic Park with famous contributors like Vieira and Seacrest. It at first seemed to work—the rough drafts of the ratings put
Today
ahead in the demo for most of the week. Even the staff of
GMA
thought their show would win again among total viewers but lose in the demo. So ABC employees were stunned on Thursday, August 2, when Sherwood sent them an e-mail with this subject line:

LAST WEEK—VICTORY IN THE DEMO! AND TOTAL VIEWERS! THE 25-54 STREAK IS OVER!!

Sherwood himself was shocked. The rough drafts had undercounted
GMA
’s audience, especially in the twenty-five-to-fifty-four-year-old demographic. This final draft showed that
GMA
had eked out a twelve-thousand-viewer win over
Today
in the demo—ending the streak-within-the-streak that dated back nine hundred weeks to 1995.

Cibrowski was at Bomboloni, an Italian coffee and dessert shop on Columbus Avenue a few blocks north of the ABC News office, with Chris Vlasto and two other colleagues. They were waiting for their orders and talking about how tough Thursdays are in the land of morning TV (they’re the worst—everyone is tired but everyone knows the weekend is still a full day away) when Cibrowski saw the e-mail from Sherwood. In large type highlighted in yellow, it read:

TOTAL VICTORY!!

Demo 25-54: 12K+

Total viewers: 542K+ !

FIRST TIME IN 2 DECADES TO WIN THE WEEK BEFORE OLYMPICS SINCE 1992 (BARCELONA)!

Cibrowski smiled and held up his iPhone so the others could read it. “No more ties now,” he said. Vlasto wondered about NBC: “How are they going to spin this one?”

The answer was, as hard as they could. In its press release a few hours later, the network claimed—absurdly—that its streak continued into week nine hundred because the two shows had received the same ratings point, a 1.5. The problem with that argument is that, as people in the business know, ratings points are imprecise—like measuring a person’s height in feet rather than inches.
GMA
won outright, surpassing
Today
by twelve thousand viewers in the demo, even though the ratings points rounded up to the same number. No knowledgeable industry observers were buying NBC’s version of events.

This was Cibrowski’s e-mail to the staff:

GMA WINS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

#1 MORNING SHOW TOPS TODAY IN THE 25-54 DEMO OUTRIGHT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

YOU DID IT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I LOVE YOU ALL!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

The morning game had been upended in the year since Curry had succeeded Vieira. In July 2011, Curry’s second month as cohost,
Today
had won by about seven hundred thousand viewers. But in July 2012, Guthrie’s first month, the show lost by nearly half a million—a swing of 1.2 million viewers. To put it another way, before Curry’s exit
Today
was number one in the ratings; after it
Today
was number two. It would be cruel to begrudge Cibrowski his hard-earned exclamation points, yet the bungling of Operation Bambi was arguably just as responsible for
GMA
’s new success as anything he, Sherwood, or Goldston had done.

As the demo victory sunk in, Sherwood was the first to acknowledge that twelve thousand viewers ages twenty-five to fifty-four, in a country of 312 million, wasn’t a meaningful amount. Then again, as he also pointed out,
GMA
’s first victory in the total viewer category had been by a mere thirty-one thousand viewers. Now
GMA
was winning in that category by more than half a million. You have to start somewhere. At lunchtime Sherwood e-mailed all of ABC News to declare
GMA
to be “the Undisputed Champion of the Morning.”

When the Olympics started, the
Today
show’s ratings soared, as expected, as the games steered tens of millions of viewers to NBC in the evenings and the athletes showed off their medals to Lauer and company in the mornings. Kopf issued a press release after just one weekday of Olympics coverage, celebrating the fact that
Today
had “crushed”
GMA
by 1.5 million viewers. But
Today
was
supposed
to crush
GMA
during the Olympics. That wasn’t news. Besides, as ABC happily pointed out, the
Today
show’s lead over
GMA
had been wider during the 2008 Summer Games in Beijing. The real test would come
after
the closing ceremony. Would viewers stay with
Today
or come back to
GMA
?

Even with its ratings success, the Olympics were not a particularly blissful time for NBC. Bell was a superb producer of the prime-time broadcasts, but he and his colleagues were mercilessly criticized on Twitter and radio call-in shows for NBC’s decision to tape-delay some big Olympic sports like swimming and track and field until prime time in the US. The fact that tape-delay seemed to work wonders for NBC—by encouraging prime-time viewership, the network broke Olympics ratings records and even eked out a profit after forecasting a loss—did not appease anyone except NBC employees and shareholders. And then there was that concurrent and somewhat distracting little side event that might be called the Ann Curry Games. Many had wondered whether Curry would show up in London, as Lauer on her goodbye broadcast had assured viewers that she would. Before her demotion she had been working on stories that were supposed to air during the Games, but those had been scrapped. There had also been talk about having her travel to the Syrian border the first week of the Games to cover the conflict there from her warmhearted perspective. But that didn’t pan out, and Curry wasn’t seen once on NBC during the first week of the Games.

She was eventually heard from, though. On August 1 she popped up on Twitter, writing at 6:51 a.m., “Good morning Twitterverse. Your unbelievable kindness resonates. You have made me love YOU even more.” She posted a couple of Gandhi quotes, including one of her favorites—“When I despair I remember that throughout history, truth and love have always won”—and replied to a follower who asked her to tweet when she knew she’d be back on TV. “PROMISE,” she wrote. She was, it seemed, hosting her own little morning show online.

Curry finally made an appearance on the
Today
show on August 9, fronting a story about a sports photographer. This was supposed to be another moment for healing—Lauer planned in advance to say some nice words about Curry. But there was nothing nice about this. Curry walked onto the show’s indoor-outdoor set at Olympic Park with her head down, hiding tears. Lauer, perhaps picking up on her body language, didn’t stand up to shake her hand or hug her. Once the show came back from commercial, Lauer went out of his way to seem welcoming, saying it was good to see her and mentioning her own photography skills. Naturally NBC executives later went out of
their
way to point out how nice he had been. But Curry, perhaps assuming Lauer was just playing to the cameras, didn’t reciprocate. No one seemed to sense just how much pain she was still in. Television critics called the reunion “icy,” “tense,” and “awkward,” and most everyone agreed that it probably set the healing process back considerably. It would be another month before she would make another
Today
appearance.

Today
came back to New York on August 13 with a new sense of optimism about the ratings race. It had spent two refreshing weeks back at number one, and in front of an audience that ranged between five and six million it had shown its best face and promoted its new lineup of hosts. During its first week back in Studio 1A the show featured an all-star cast of Olympian contributors and five straight days of concerts by acts like the Fray and Nicki Minaj.
Today
felt good about its chances, as did the top producers of
GMA
, who thought
Today
would benefit from a few weeks of Olympics afterglow and stay at least that long at number one.

But the audience had other ideas, and once the closing ceremonies were over it promptly resumed carrying its grudge. Said an ABC executive of the Olympics fans, “They came, they watched, they left.” On Monday the thirteenth
Today
had 4.5 million viewers, about three hundred thousand more than
GMA
. But the next day, Tuesday the fourteenth,
Today
slipped to 4.2 million and
GMA
regained the lead. On Wednesday, buoyed by actor Robert Pattinson’s first interview since the revelations about his girlfriend Kristen Stewart’s affair,
GMA
won by half a million viewers. It was all the more notable because Roberts, the biggest star of
GMA
, was on vacation. Maybe the ensemble was becoming the “star.”

Today
that day dipped below the four-million-viewer mark for the first time in more years than anyone cared to count. When numbers like that happen, somebody usually has to be taken out back and shot. With Curry gone, the morbid attention was now focused on Al Roker, who was patently guilty of having been on the show longer than anyone but Lauer. A personal friend of Curry’s, he had been horrified by the way she was treated. On Thursday, August 16, four days after the London Games ended, he and Lauer interviewed members of the rowing team from the Olympics. When the athletes mentioned their tradition of celebrating a win by throwing teammates in the water, Roker said to Lauer, “Which is different than
our
tradition…which is you throw one of us under the bus, but that’s another story.” A moment of awkward laughter followed, and then, mercifully, a commercial break. “Mr. Roker!” Guthrie exclaimed, as if she were a schoolteacher chastising a student. Roker later claimed it was an innocent joke, one he had made on the show dozens of times before. But his colleagues knew better. Right after the segment he said to a staffer in the control room, through his microphone, “I thought you’d like that.” TMZ quickly picked up on Roker’s jab, and then dozens of other media outlets did, too. ABC’s early-morning newscast even mentioned it, which pissed off Roker so much he tweeted about it. “Some competitors are classier than others,” he wrote. All the media outlets seemed to be framing it as a kind of Freudian ad lib aimed at Lauer for forcing Curry’s departure.

On Thursday night, while Roker’s remark made the rounds, an NBC executive ordered a round of drinks at a bar a safe distance from 30 Rock and brought up the prior day’s resounding loss to
GMA
. A gap of half a million viewers, three days after the Olympics? It was worse than anyone had imagined. “This is rejection. This is rejection,” the executive said, raising his voice. “It’s over. We’re in second place.”

Chapter 18

The Empty Chair

Could the billion-dollar
Today
show franchise be fixed? Bell and the other executives and producers there could not rewind and edit “the Ann situation,” as Bell had called it in his memo of July 10, out of their once-glorious history, but could they make improvements that, as time passed and the audience’s anger gradually faded, would result in the re-summiting of Mount Nielsen?