Top of the Morning: Inside the Cutthroat World of Morning TV (5 page)

Zucker wooed Vieira for several more months and once went up to her home in Westchester to talk through the possibilities. Around the same time, he also tried to steal Kelly Ripa away from
Live with Regis and Kelly
, the
Today
show’s main rival at nine a.m. That was a no-go. Vieira, however, was more persuadable. Maybe it was Lauer who sealed the deal: at the beginning of December, while she was still hesitating about the job’s impact on her family (her husband, Richard, has multiple sclerosis) and still dreading the early morning hours, he invited her to dinner at his Park Avenue apartment. Vieira wore a white T-shirt, a black jacket, and jeans, but fretted that she was dressed too casually for this all-important blind date. When she saw what Lauer was wearing—jeans and a sweater—she was relieved. He offered her a glass of wine and she thought, “I love him already.” Over dinner they talked about the time commitment and Lauer, who already had two kids with Annette and would soon have a third, said he was living proof that the show could accommodate family life.

The Vieira deal was done the following April. That’s when Zucker had to call Curry to his office on the fifty-second floor of 30 Rockefeller Center for a “very uncomfortable conversation”—his words.

As soon as Curry saw the direction of the conversation, her emotions started welling up. Zucker said he wanted her to understand that the selection of Vieira was more about what she, Vieira, had—genuine star power—and less about what Curry lacked. But that sentiment, not surprisingly, didn’t make Curry feel any better. Through tears, she told Zucker that she was considering leaving the network. He said she could if she chose—but he wanted her to stay.

Curry didn’t leave, of course, but she did do something to protect herself. She had her longtime agent Alfred Geller petition for an “out” clause in her next contract. The clause didn’t say anything about Curry being guaranteed the cohost seat the next time it came open, as some claimed at the time. But it did allow her to leave the network immediately, and go to work for someone else immediately, with no penalty, if she was passed over again.

Chapter 3

Hands Are Tied

Fade out/fade in five years later, in the spring of 2011. In morning television, where the watchword is consistency, a whole lot had changed. Although
Today
still led in the ratings—its streak was now more than fifteen years old, and some staffers had high-school-age children who knew only a world where
Today
was on top—the footfalls of
Good Morning America
were getting a little bit louder. A year ago
GMA
had been a million viewers behind; now it was just six hundred fifty thousand behind. This was doubly worrying to the powers at NBC, since Meredith Vieira had just given notice that she was quitting the show—completely voluntarily, by the way, a rarity in television news.

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.