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

by Brian Stelter

  It’s worth noting here that many television journalists would have jumped at the once-in-a-career chance that was on the table. A pricey ticket, paid for by somebody else, to travel the country and the world! But the correspondent position was, of course, also a face-saving way for Curry to drop out of daily participation in an endeavor at which she was failing. As one person with ties to NBC put it, “They’ll pretend Ann wants to go back to ‘newsy news.’”

  Although Curry was stunned by some of what she heard, the lavish lunch ended more or less amicably, with Bell proposing that she give some serious thought to the possibility he’d outlined. “I thought I’d gotten her halfway there,” he later told colleagues.

  * * *

  As it turned out, he hadn’t. Later, Bell’s own colleagues would ridicule both his technique and his optimism. “At age fifty-four, she’d finally reached the top. This was never going to be Ann’s idea,” said one colleague who’d spent decades at NBC. Another colleague, one who viewed Curry with disdain, said “she had a huge sense of entitlement. She thought it was a Supreme Court appointment.” Maybe—but to be fair, Couric and Vieira had held on to the chair as long as they’d wanted.

  For all sorts of reasons, Curry was tough to reverse-seduce. Start with the fact that she had no agent. (After Alfred Geller died, she toyed with signing up with someone new but decided not to; she wanted to keep sending her commissions to his family.) Nor did she have a business manager or lawyer. This put Bell at a disadvantage: he had no one else to go to, no one else to bring into the conversation about her future. Looking back on Operation Bambi, NBC executives would conclude that her lack of representation had been a well-considered choice. Curry would look back and think her lack of representation had been a tactical failure, for it left her without a legal defender until it was too late.

  Bell’s belief that Curry was responsible for the ongoing ratings slippage was bolstered the week of their La Grenouille lunch. The week before, when Guthrie filled in for Curry, Today had had a strong week; when Curry came back from vacation, GMA had a strong week. While the weak numbers were objective fact, Curry would not cop to being their cause. She saw lame content—a daily diet of dubious fashion trends and equally dubious celebrity gossip—as the main explanation for the Today show’s decline. As she told Capus, “Jim Bell has to fix this show.”

  Lauer did not disagree with her on this important point. In March, as he contemplated whether to stay or go, Lauer had confessed to a colleague that he felt the weight of the whole network on his shoulders—that in lieu of new ideas, NBC was relying on his talent and charisma. “There’s more pressure on me now than there ever has been,” he’d said. “They’re relying on Today to prop up the whole network. If we fail…” He’d trailed off, leaving the consequences of failure unspoken. Lauer, like Curry and Capus, felt that the show needed a harder news bent. They both bemoaned their producers’ use of TMZ and the British tabloid the Daily Mail for story ideas. But the stories the producers borrowed/stole about sensational murders and family feuds and shark attacks—one or two degrees shy of “trashy,” the word they tagged GMA with—were the stories that tended to rate highest in the minute-by-minute ratings. They were staples of morning TV. Thus the Today family sometimes had its own feuds when Lauer called in to the office some afternoons and asked the senior producers what was in the next morning’s “rundown,” the second-​by-​second schedule of what will happen on the show. Lauer dismissed stories he didn’t like (he particularly disliked the shark attack stories, staffers said) as “not relevant” to the audience at home. There are few places in midtown Manhattan more uncomfortable than the receiving end of that phone call.

  Lauer knew that his involvement in story selection rankled some producers. But he wanted to resist pandering to the audience the way he thought GMA too often did. Whenever the ratings “tighten up, there is a little bit of a reaction to the other people—and I don’t like it,” Lauer told me in late April.

  While Bell took issue with Lauer and Curry’s views of how newsy a morning show should be—he was a strong believer in the traditional mix of serious and soft segments that had always been a hallmark of Today—he and his cohosts were united in their disdain for GMA. Bell called it a “freak show.” Like Lauer, he frequently cautioned his staff not to get distracted by the competition, though that was much easier said than not done. He was proud of the quality of Today—the live shots from foreign countries, the better-living segments with financial experts, the kinds of stories he didn’t see on GMA. He encouraged reporters to compare the content of the two shows and chastised those who didn’t. “The competition in this case has chosen to do a very different show,” Bell said later in the year. “If you watch them side by side you’ll see. It’s worked for them in the short term. But we’re not going to do anything that’s going to hurt our brand and the legacy of the Today show. We’re going to stick to our knitting and be who we are.”

  Bell stuck to his belief that The Problem was not the time-tested formula—it was the way that formula was executed by Curry. But others began to worry that something bigger was broken. “It’s not Ann,” said one NBC executive at around this time. “Ann ain’t great. But what about the show? GMA is quicker, faster, and smarter.”

  The Today show’s predicament almost seemed straight out of a business school textbook. The brash advertising executive Donny Deutsch, a regular on the show’s panel discussion “Today’s Professionals,” told Bell that Today risked being a victim of its own success like General Motors, the automaker that had had nearly 60 percent market share in the 1960s, before Japanese automakers ravaged the business. “GM wasn’t built to compete,” Deutsch said. “Their whole premise was ‘Don’t break anything.’ Then all of a sudden, when they really had to compete, it wasn’t in their DNA. It’s very hard for an enterprise that’s been the dominant market leader to suddenly switch from ‘leadership maintenance’ mode to ‘competitive counterpunch’ mode.”

  Indeed, behind the scenes at Today, the tension seemed to increase daily, especially after Lauer renewed. Lauer was at odds with Bell, Bell’s No. 2 Don Nash, and Noah Kotch, the seven a.m. producer who was known for his fixation on the daily ratings race. Kotch, despite his hard news background as Peter Jennings’s head writer, programmed a disciplined menu of crime, sex, and celebrity scandal in the seven thirty half hour, which Lauer found particularly distasteful (but which morning viewers did not). Kotch’s critics called him the “trash doctor.” The atmosphere became so strained that Kotch started working from home in the mornings, not coming in until Lauer had left the office. Meanwhile Curry was saddled with more of the tabloid segments while Bell assigned Lauer the smarter segments to keep him happy-ish.

  All the while, Operation Bambi was grinding on. Guthrie did her best to dodge the bountiful speculation about her future—and Curry’s. Guthrie’s usual tactic was to say, when asked about the personnel brouhaha, that she knew nothing—which in fact wasn’t all that much of a stretch. Like everyone else, she had seen the Internet reports and heard the hallway whispers, but hadn’t spoken a word about the subject to her NBC bosses. In fact, she’d gone a step further and instructed her agent not to pitch her for the job. She wanted to preserve her relationship with Morales, with whom she cohosted the nine a.m. hour.

  Curry knew only a little bit more than Guthrie. She was processing the spiel about the roving correspondent’s role that Bell had given her at their lunch—and the more she thought about it, the more she could see it for the easy letdown that it was. Sure, it could be touted as something prestigious like Christiane Amanpour’s “foreign affairs anchor” position at ABC. But Amanpour, if you noticed, was barely ever seen on ABC. On television, airtime is oxygen, and leaving Today would be oxygen-​​depriving. It would be a demotion. Humiliated and angry, she decided she wasn’t going anywhere without a fight. Two weeks after the lunch, on May 9, she sat down for a previously scheduled interview with Ladies’ Home Journal and said something that wou
ld later scream to readers, “They forced me out”: “I’ve been at Today for 15 years and I’d love to make it to 20.”

  For Curry it was the relatively little things—starting with Lauer’s growing indifference, after a decade and a half of their working on the same set—that hurt the most, and, in the words of one staffer, “added up to an ominous feeling about her future at the show.” Among the senior producers, Melissa Lonner was her sole defender as the others fell in line with Bell, whose actions were becoming increasingly heedless and, in the opinion of some, sophomoric. One day he called staffers into his office to chuckle at a verbal gaffe Curry had made during a cross-talk with a local station. More chuckling was heard when, for reasons that went unexplained, several boxes of Curry’s belongings ended up in a coat closet—the sort of thing that would happen when a staffer left in a rush, or was unceremoniously booted off the premises.

  A genuine meanness seemed to color the staff’s attitude toward their troubled colleague, something that looked from certain angles like the giddiness brought on by a sense of doom. One staff member, offended by the behavior, said “a lot of time in the control room was spent making fun of Ann’s outfit choices or just generally messing with her.” On one memorable morning, Curry wore a bright-yellow dress that spawned snarky comparisons to Big Bird. The staffer, who called this day “extra harsh,” said others in the control room Photoshopped a picture of Big Bird next to Curry and asked coworkers for a “Who wore it best?” comparison.

  Given this behavior, it’s not surprising that Curry asked an aide to put together a collection of her best field-reporting clips—what people at the show took to calling her “résumé tape.”

  A strange thing happened at around this time. Despite the dysfunctional nature of the Today family, the senior producers dusted off an old series called “Today Takes On,” which looked very much like GMA’s ongoing attempts to demonstrate that its hosts were best buds. In “Takes On” segments the Today hosts would together do things like rowing with the Princeton University crew team and learning how to perform acrobatic feats at a Broadway show. During the latter episode, Curry, Lauer, Roker, and Morales were shown arm in arm, ready to leap off a platform for a finale-like moment. “Don’t let go,” Lauer said to Curry, looking nervous. “I’m not going to let go,” Curry told him confidently. Viewers seemed to like the lighter-than-air segments. But if this exercise in chumminess sounds at odds with Operation Bambi, it wasn’t really—at least if you listened to those well-placed observers who said that the point was to make the seemingly inevitable banishment of Curry look like a game of musical chairs played by dear friends.

  Bell was willing to go to great and complicated lengths to make the Curry “transition” a smooth one. He knew that removing her would inevitably alienate some people who counted themselves her loyal fans. But he believed that if the show, as a result, took a temporary hit in the ratings, the decline would be (if the thing was handled with the appearance of sensitivity) minor, and Today would rebound during the Summer Olympics. Then Bell’s bosses would be pleased, his job would be protected, and the morning show he loved would find its footing again. The Olympics loomed as both his salvation (“a once-every-two-year chance to introduce a new cast,” said one executive) and an immovable deadline. But because Bell wanted Curry to buy into the change, and show the world through her own attitude and actions that she was making a choice for herself, he was willing to wait a week, and then another week, and then another, if that’s what it took, to create the appearance of voluntary movement. In the meantime he told colleagues that Curry seemed unhappy at the show and eager to report more stories in the field. Everything Bell and his lieutenants did during this time was in the cause of “trying to get Ann to a place where she was comfortable with the move,” said an NBC executive.

  But it wasn’t working. Rather than getting comfortable, Curry felt as if the walls were closing in. On May 15, while interviewing Betty White, who had stopped by the studio to promote her new hidden-camera show on NBC, Curry made a thinly veiled reference to her predicament. When White’s other show, a sitcom on TV Land, came up, Curry exclaimed, “You’ve got two shows, you’re ninety years old—honey, I mean, I barely am hanging on to one show!”

  Many people believed Curry was in denial. Maybe—this is the more charitable point of view—she just didn’t know who or what to believe. Lauer, for instance, had told her he didn’t want her to leave. But he had also told her she needed to “protect” herself by hiring an agent. He was trying to help her, Lauer’s allies said—he hated seeing her in this position. Bullshit, said her allies—he was just trying to protect himself.

  Similarly, Capus had initially assured her that her seat on Today was safe. He still wanted nothing to change until the end of the year. But he had to start wooing Curry. A day before the Betty White interview, he told her to at least consider this roving correspondent idea. “They’re trying to offer her something that will appeal to her,” a staffer said after the meeting with Capus. “The sun, the moon, the stars—anything but sitting next to Matt every morning.” Curry rebuffed the proposal once again. But by the end of May, a month after the lunch with Bell, she started confiding in friends about the situation. According to one of them, she hinted that the correspondent job might not be such a bad thing. But then why’d she tell Ladies’ Home Journal on May 9 that she hoped to stay at Today for another five years? Some read sinister motives into the answer, but it could be viewed a different way: as proof that she truly thought she’d beat back Bell’s attempts to push her out.

  Curry decided not to talk to The New York Times TV critic Mike Hale, who was writing a column about her role on the show and had asked for an interview. But Lauer, knowing the piece was in the works and that Curry’s removal was in the works, did agree to that aforementioned May 30 interview on CNN. His interviewer was a coworker and friend, Donny Deutsch, who was substituting for Piers Morgan, so Lauer knew he wouldn’t be questioned about his concerns about Curry or his complaints about the show’s sensational segments. But he would have a chance to publicly praise Curry in what would serve as a kind of advance obituary. She has “the biggest heart in broadcasting,” Lauer said on the show, calling her “incredibly talented” and more concerned about other people “than anyone I’ve met.” Without prompting from Deutsch, Lauer went on to say that he took responsibility for the show’s recent ratings struggles. “When people start to write articles about what might be wrong with the Today show you know where you should point the finger, point it at me because I have been there the longest,” he said. He added, “I truly feel that way, and that’s why I stick around, because I think there’s more I can do, I can do it better.” Kopf, the Today spokeswoman who was trying to manage Hale’s column, sent him the transcript of Lauer’s interview, and he ended up including the finger-​pointing quote.

  Bell also praised Curry in an interview with Hale, calling her “one of the great journalists.” Bell continued, “People nitpick certain details, but she is known and loved by our colleagues and our viewers, she’s been doing this a very long time, she’s had some moments that I don’t think anyone else could have pulled off.”

  The TV screen told a much different tale. A few days after Lauer’s interview on CNN, he flew to London for special coverage of Queen Elizabeth II’s Diamond Jubilee. So did Roker and their old colleague Vieira, now a “special correspondent” for the network. But Curry didn’t come along. She had Monday and Tuesday morning off; she was said to be picking up her teenage son from boarding school. Her absence was glaring—​all the more so because the announcer said she’d be “live from Studio 1A” while Lauer was live at Buckingham Palace. Lauer had to correct the announcement. “Ann has the morning off,” he said curtly.

  Lauer and Vieira joked and teased each other all morning, reminding many viewers of their good old days—and rekindling rumors in the industry that NBC had approached Vieira about coming back to cohost, succeeding the woman who had succeeded her a ye
ar earlier. In fact, after they had casually taken Vieira’s temperature by asking through her agent, Michael Glantz, if she would ever consider a comeback, and received a firm no, NBC executives dropped the matter of Vieira. They sensed she had several reasons for not wanting to return, among them a strong disinclination to be seen as hurting Curry. “There’s no way she’s going to help them with their Ann problem,” said one of her friends.

  Meanwhile, viewers of the highly rated jubilee coverage were left wondering: Where in the World Is Ann Curry? Kopf’s in-box was a magnet for questions from reporters. “It’s fucking unbelievable that she wasn’t on,” an NBC executive exclaimed that day, fed up with the mixed signals the network was sending about their still-sorta-new cohost.

  Curry was back on Today on Wednesday, June 6. It was calm, sometimes even fun in the show’s control room when I stopped by at the end of the week.

  “All right, we’re on,” the jokester director Joe Michaels bellowed a minute into the show. “What do you want to do now?”

  Snippets of conversation flew back and forth like code, almost indecipherable to an observer. “Talent heading in,” someone said over a walkie-talkie. “Take Syria B-roll,” a woman said from the back row during a news segment. “Just have her throw to Al,” a man said to Michaels. Later, Roker and Michaels pretended to spar when Michaels showed two weather graphics out of order. Roker yelled through his microphone with a smile, “Do I have to come down there and staple the rundown to your forehead?” Michaels joked, “I’d like to start over. Can we start over?”

  Come to think of it, their banter would make good TV.