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

by Brian Stelter

  Here’s the rub: it sounded like his boss, Burke, was, and that was something he had to reckon with in the political scheme of things. Burke, who had blessed Curry’s promotion mere months before, now thought Curry was hurting the show. Well, not Curry per se, but her dicey serve: “When Ann plays tennis with Matt,” Burke told a colleague, “he hits the ball over the net, and she doesn’t always hit it straight back.”

  When Burke spoke that way, Capus—who’d earned the nickname “Rage” for his short temper—thought Burke was channeling Bell, and he resented Bell for going over his head. The relationship between Capus and Bell was disintegrating.

  * * *

  Things hadn’t always been bad between them. Before Comcast took control of NBC in January 2011, Capus and Bell had had a cordial if distant relationship, according to underlings and friends of the two. Capus beamed with pride for NBC News, Today included. Since the Today show was the main source of profits for the news division, Bell had a lot of autonomy: he was basically the president of the Today show (“Jim’s attitude is ‘I pay the bills around here,’” said one of his lieutenants), but was deferential to Capus when he needed to be. And Capus respected Bell’s producing talent and political acumen. But they never really clicked. Capus was the street fighter, the state school guy—Temple, in Philly. Bell was the Ivy Leaguer—Harvard. When Comcast came in, the differences came out. Steve Burke and Bell bonded early on, which helps explain why there was widespread talk that Bell was in the running for Capus’s seat or for a top spot at NBC Sports. In August 2011 Burke appointed Bell the executive producer of the Summer Olympics in London, the successor to Bell’s mentor Dick Ebersol, who’d had that title for twenty years. Now Bell was in charge of two of NBC’s most important investments.

  Capus didn’t quite understand why Burke was so enamored of Bell. Even before Bell began campaigning for Curry’s removal, Capus thought it was high time to hand Today over to a new producer. But Burke decided to let Bell try to juggle the morning show and the Summer Olympics. Capus was assured that the Olympics thing would be temporary, and then Bell would refocus on Today. But he was annoyed nonetheless.

  What seemed to bother Capus most was the belief that Bell had undermined him in meetings with Burke. Undermined is a strong word, but it was true that Bell had told Burke, “We need to make a change” at Today—beginning the process that would become known as Operation Bambi. The Bell/Burke friendship “shaped all the Ann stuff,” an NBC executive said later.

  Bell’s voice seemed to be coming at Capus (and Curry) from any number of directions. In a gossipy feature called “Workplace Confidential” in the January 16 issue of New York magazine, an anonymous source was quoted as saying, “If the show’s audience doesn’t gravitate to Ann Curry soon, could NBC buck its own succession plan, much as it did with Conan and Jay Leno, and have Savannah Guthrie replace Ann? She’s got that girl-next-door quality, and Ann can sometimes come off as disingenuous in interviews. And I don’t see a situation where they could remove Ann and keep her at the network (she wouldn’t be happy staying on as a special correspondent, and she is no longer hosting Dateline). There would be nowhere else for her to go. Unfortunately, that’s the way those things play out.” After the item appeared, Curry went to the Today show’s spokeswoman, Megan Kopf, and asked if the PR department was ferreting out the source of the blasphemy. It’s unclear what she was told, but the real answer was no, it wasn’t.

  One thing that concerned Bell mightily was the way Curry’s performance affected Lauer’s. The star seemed disenchanted not just with his costar but with the entire show. Suddenly Lauer, the five-alarmer charmer, didn’t have especially good chemistry with anyone on the set. While Bell might have denied this, others could sense that the host wasn’t trying very hard, wasn’t rising to the occasion. According to many of his colleagues, Bell saw the problem as Curry. If she wasn’t sitting next to him, “Matt would get the stick out of his ass,” Bell told several of them.

  Bell may have been right in his opinions, but some of his subordinates thought he was starting to let his anger, and his dread about the ever-improving GMA ratings—the ABC show was now about half a million viewers behind Today—affect his judgment. One afternoon in January, he called his senior producers to a meeting in one of the NBC Sports conference rooms, a dozen floors above NBC News and thus out of view of the rest of the Today staff. Things weren’t good: the more closely one analyzed the ratings trends, the more clearly they favored GMA.

  This mattered beyond the confines of the seven and eight a.m. hours. Sherwood, the ABC News president, and Goldston, the man he’d tasked with turning GMA around, were trying, in tough economic times, to expand the news division into new time slots and onto new platforms. They wanted GMA to have an afternoon talk show spin-off. They wanted ownership of more hours in prime time. A win by GMA would go a long way toward making the division’s other dreams come true, just as years of wins by Today had expanded NBC News’ fortunes and real estate. And now it was all so close. “It just felt that we had the magic,” GMA cohost Robin Roberts said. “That we had become what the other place used to be.”

  Today, though, was conceding nothing. Tucked safely away in the NBC Sports department with his colleagues, Bell felt he could be frank about what he saw as their single biggest problem—guess who. Bell strongly criticized Curry’s broadcasting skills and suggested that she was largely to blame for the weakened state of Today. To some of the producers in the room, both his indiscretion and his comments themselves were shocking. One in particular, senior producer Melissa Lonner, spoke up in Curry’s defense. Lonner, the only Asian American on the senior staff, and Curry had vacationed together with their partners; she couldn’t possibly sit quietly, especially when Curry wasn’t there to defend herself.

  “Ann feels like she has no support,” Lonner said. “She feels like she’s all alone.”

  But Bell didn’t back down. He never explicitly told anyone to stop giving Curry the best segments or to ignore her ideas. But before long his denunciation of Curry trickled down to the lower-level staffers, as he must have known it would. According to one member of the Today team, “The message was ‘She’s dead. She’s a dead woman walking.’”

  * * *

  Bell was the prototypical battle-scarred veteran of the morning wars. He had been hired by Zucker, at Ebersol’s urging, to produce Today in 2005, and had at that time beaten back a fairly serious threat from GMA. Zucker liked Bell because he had ample live television experience and had thrived in a big and complex organization, NBC Olympics. Bell began work at NBC in 1990, as a production assistant in an Olympics unit that was compiling profiles of athletes for the 1992 Summer Games in Barcelona. At that time he had no aspiration to run part of a TV network. He’d happened to be in Spain, taking a year off before law school, when a person in NBC’s human resources department who knew Bell’s dad called and asked him to assist Randy Falco, a top NBC executive, on a trip to Barcelona. Falco had ruptured an Achilles tendon and needed to be pushed in a wheelchair (and occasionally carried up and down stairs where there were no ramps).

  Impressed by Bell’s intelligence and his propensity for hard work, Falco offered him a job at NBC Olympics. By the time of the next Summer Games, in 1996, Bell was a coproducer of daytime coverage. He continued working his way up the Olympics ladder and, along the way, produced innumerable football, baseball, basketball, and tennis broadcasts for the network. A talented and well-regarded guy’s guy, he was not only a friend of the NBC Olympics boss Dick Ebersol but widely believed to be Ebersol’s heir apparent. Bell shared Ebersol’s love of old-school television perquisites—first-class airfare, only the best hotels and restaurants, and, at Today, front-row spots at the show’s concerts. His wife Angelique sometimes tagged along to the concerts and boogied just out of camera range. “Nobody has loved being the Today show executive producer more than Jim Bell,” said one of the show’s producers.

  Bell had earned all the perks—he’d repeatedly
stopped GMA from stealing first place. Now he was trying to stop it again. He, in concert with Burke, had not only a plan but a timeline: try to renew Lauer’s contract by April, then try to get rid of Curry by June, then reintroduce the Today family on the stage he knew best: the Olympics.

  Chapter 4

  “Here Comes the Storm!”

  Which was a better party, the on-air one that the Today show threw for itself on January 13, 2012, to celebrate its sixtieth anniversary, which featured taped congratulations from President Barack Obama and first lady Michelle—or the loud private bash held at the Edison Ballroom the night before?

  The answer will depend on how you feel about Hoda Kotb rapping center stage with her ten a.m. cohost Kathie Lee Gifford, and Katie Couric rhythmically grinding against Megan Kopf’s PR boss Lauren Kapp.

  Yes, the Edison Ballroom was the better party. While the hip-hop artists Pitbull and Flo Rida performed, and the champagne flowed, and a pride of former Today show lions like Barbara Walters and Bryant Gumbel looked on parentally from a VIP section above the dance floor, the current stars and their stressed-out producers blew off some serious steam. “No reporters!” shouted Savannah Guthrie, shy as ever, when I tried to say hi. “Me spanking Kathie Lee—that was off the record.”

  At about nine, a dance band took over, and Capus jumped onstage to play a not-bad rhythm guitar. NBC paid extra for the band to keep playing till eleven thirty, an hour and a half longer than expected. Guthrie, who had no kids at home to worry about, stayed longer than almost any other cast member. “A year ago,” she said, alluding to her position as a White House correspondent for NBC and an anchor on MSNBC, “all I knew was Medicare Part B. Now I know Flo Rida!”

  The next morning, Friday the thirteenth, as generations of Today show hosts gathered to be interviewed in the studio, Guthrie, resplendent in a bright red dress, but not wanting to overstate her role in the proceedings, stood at the very end of the line, just past Natalie Morales. This was a day to celebrate the rich heritage of the show, a day for all those Today veterans assembled—Barbara Walters (1966–1976), Jane Pauley (1976–1989), Bryant Gumbel (1982–1997)—to talk about how the show had changed their lives, yes, but mainly to watch the highlight reels stitched together lovingly by the staff—Oh, look, there’s me probing for the serious side of Tiny Tim!—and to listen as the Obamas paid tribute to the franchise’s importance. “So many Americans start their day right here,” the first lady said in a prerecorded piece, “watching all of you as they’re getting ready for work and sending their kids off to school.” The president picked up where she left off. “Over decades and across generations,” he said, “the Today show has become a part of American culture. A place where millions tune in to see how their world has changed overnight. That’s why we’re so pleased to join all of you in celebrating this remarkable milestone.” Michelle concluded, “And we know you’ll have many more years of success.” The Obamas are technically neutral in the morning show wars, though what that means is that they pay roughly equal attention to the Big Two. It’s hard to imagine the first couple doing a drop-by on, say, Fox & Friends.

  “Thank you for your legacy,” Curry said to the assembled group after Tom Hanks rolled out a birthday cake. Huh? Anniversary, shmanniversary: in terms of impossible-to-respond-to comments, it was, for her, business as usual. Then all the hosts were shooed outside for a class photo on the plaza. The moment would double as a televised champagne toast to the staff of Today, dozens of whom stood to the sides of the assembled all-stars. It was a little after nine a.m.—making this a long morning for the guests who had arrived before six for hair and makeup. Walters, eighty-three, had already left, as had ninety-one-year-old Hugh Downs. When Couric asked Lauer what was coming up next, he teased her: “What, do you have somewhere to go?” Lauer, standing symbolically in the center of the group, huddled for warmth with the woman who had succeeded Couric as cohost, Meredith Vieira. Out here they ducked raindrops and wondered what was taking so long. It seemed one cohost was missing: Curry.

  When she ran outside a minute later, a sharp gust of wind blew through the canyons of Rockefeller Center. The raindrops temporarily turned to ice pellets, stinging the faces of the assembled hosts. Curry positioned herself on the periphery of the group, lest she appear to be butting into the center of the shot. But she was the cohost of Today—the center was where she belonged. Vieira noticed and shouted “Ann! Ann!” convincing Curry to dart over to her.

  The last person involved in the photo shoot to come outside was Jim Bell. He took his place beside Lauer and Curry and nodded to the camera when the control room cut to a shot of him holding his champagne glass high, seeming to savor the moment. One might have reasonably asked why he seemed so purely triumphant, since there was real reason for concern. The week of the anniversary party, the Today show averaged 5.54 million viewers, about 677,000 more than GMA. The same week a year earlier, the gap between the two shows had been 1.13 million. Total viewership of the two shows had stayed more or less the same, meanwhile, which meant that a substantial stream of Today viewers were defecting to GMA.

  As the icy drizzle started to intensify, the hosts and producers dashed back inside, dropping their half-full champagne glasses on a table by the entrance. Curry, before she went inside, looked up at the angry sky and said, a little bit too presciently, “Now here comes the storm!”

  * * *

  Actually, the dark clouds had been gathering above the gleaming Lauerdome for years. Pretty much everyone in the industry agreed that Lauer was the best male morning show host in history. Capus would say it perfectly later in 2012: “It’s as if the man was born to do a program like Today.”

  But he’d been doing it for longer than just about any Today host ever had, even Couric. His contract wasn’t set to expire until December of 2012, but in 2010, before Comcast formally took control of NBC, Steve Burke had been concerned enough about the waning enthusiasm of Today’s longest-running host to reach out to him. Burke had heard secondhand stories about Lauer telling makeup artists and golfing buddies that he was looking forward to waking up when he wanted to, not when his iPhone alarm dictated. “Matt had told people that he was not happy on the show and was not happy with the direction of the show,” said one NBC executive. “You have to think about how tired he must be,” said another. Lauer’s wife Annette, who nearly divorced him in 2006 amid affair rumors, wanted him to quit the morning grind and stop dividing his time between Manhattan, where they had a 5.9-million-dollar Park Avenue apartment, and the Hamptons, where they had a fifteen-million-dollar estate on twenty-five acres. Annette kept reminding him that Bryant Gumbel, his predecessor and best friend, seemed to be enjoying his days in semiretirement.

  With two years still left on Lauer’s five-year contract, Burke invited Lauer to a get-to-know-you dinner, the first of many that they had in 2010 and 2011. Lauer was honest about the fact that he might want to leave at the end of his contract term—“I’ve been doing this a long time, and I don’t know whether I want to keep doing it,” he would say—and Burke honestly sympathized. He just wanted Lauer to know that NBC’s new owners respected Today, and NBC News, and most of all him.

  Lauer in turn wanted assurances that Comcast did not have plans to change Today into a tabloid-style show. If that was what they intended, that was their prerogative—but he didn’t want to be a part of it. Lauer took his role on Today seriously, just as Gumbel had in the eighties and nineties. He saw himself as the keeper of its flame. He had watched the show himself, growing up in the New York City suburb of Westchester, and studied telecommunications at Ohio University in Athens, Ohio, in the late seventies. He interned during his senior year at WOWK, a CBS affiliate eighty miles south of Athens in Huntington, West Virginia. When the station offered him a job producing and writing the noon newscast, he jumped—and dropped out of college four credits shy of a diploma. (The credits were in a classic literature course and he thought he’d find time to finish later, but never did. He wrote a p
aper about his experiences since college to get an honorary degree in 1997.)

  From WOWK Lauer hopped from market to market, with stops along the way in Richmond, Providence, and Boston, but the infotainment shows he fronted kept being canceled—a sequence of failures that left him doubting his future in the television business. Then WWOR, at the time an independent New York City station, called. The station wanted him to host 9 Broadcast Plaza, a three-hour morning talk show. This show, he said later, “was a precursor to a lot of the lowest-common-​denominator talk shows you see on the air now. The producers booked debates on ridiculous subjects, brought in people from both sides, and loved it when those people screamed and stuck their fingers in one another’s chests.”

  Lauer said he probably shouldn’t have taken the job. The breaking point was the station’s proposal that he read live commercials, the same way Today cohosts had in the 1950s. After he resisted he was fired, but not before Ken Lindner, a TV agent in Los Angeles, was so impressed by one of Lauer’s interviews that he flew to New York to meet Lauer in the flesh.

  “What would make your heart sing?” Lindner asked Lauer at their lunch meeting.

  Lauer joked that his heart would sing if he stayed employed for more than thirteen weeks at a time. Then he answered honestly: “I’d like to host the Today show or be Larry King.”

  Well, if that’s the goal, Lindner thought, you’re on the wrong track. Lauer needed a hard news background, breaking news experience, and the kind of credibility that you’re not going to get on shows like 9 Broadcast Plaza.

  In retrospect, then, the pink slip from 9 Broadcast Plaza was a very well-disguised blessing. Lauer spent the subsequent fifteen months mostly unemployed, helped along only by temporary work from ESPN and HBO, while Lindner shopped him to stations. There were offers for Lauer to host infomercials, proposals for him to tape pilot episodes of game shows—but the two men had agreed that if Lauer ever wanted to host a show like Today, then, as Lauer put it in a 2007 interview, “There were certain things I couldn’t do, there were certain paychecks I couldn’t accept. We stuck with that strategy to the point of pain.”