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

by Brian Stelter

  Meanwhile GMA, strengthened by the addition of contributors like Joan Lunden and Geraldo Rivera, inched toward Today in the ratings. Was NBC, the network that had invented morning TV, worried? It certainly looked that way by the time Silverman, who changed channels more often than your sister’s preschooler, became president of NBC in June 1978. He immediately shook up the Today show, said Paul Friedman, then the executive producer of Today: “He insisted that we program more segments at shorter length, as GMA was doing, and that we do more ‘news you can use’—particularly medical and consumer news—and pop culture segments.” In four words: be more like GMA.

  Today’s main obstacle in this regard was that it couldn’t clone Hartman. In 1979, as GMA closed the gap with Today, audience research commissioned by NBC showed that Hartman (then cohosting with Sandy Hill) was considered more relatable and approachable than Hartz’s successor Tom Brokaw, who was perceived, fairly or not, as being eager to show off his journalistic chops at every opportunity. “The audience rated the two shows equally in terms of content and style, but was in love with David Hartman,” Friedman said. “He was ‘everyman,’ and he was the difference.”

  NBC execs were so flustered that at lunch they often pushed away their clams casino half eaten and flubbed their lips in their martinis. At a meeting convened by Silverman to discuss the morning show war, Friedman mused that perhaps the money expended on all the research should instead have been spent to hire a hit man to kill Hartman. Silverman didn’t laugh. But the joke exposed a question that haunted all the morning shows: what influenced viewers’ choices more, the content of the shows or the chemistry of the cohosts? Most people thought chemistry triumphed, a view backed up by NBC’s research and the ratings race. In January 1980 the once-unthinkable happened and GMA started to beat Today some mornings. A month later ABC televised the highly rated Lake Placid Winter Olympics (think Miracle on Ice), giving GMA another lift that lasted into the morning hours. As GMA pulled ahead decisively, reporters used words like surrender to describe NBC’s underwhelming response. Decades of dominance by NBC, dating back to the dawn of television, when chimpanzees strode the morning landscape—those were no more.

  This is when the gentlemanly competition among network executives who sat next to each other on the commuter trains from Connecticut and Westchester each morning, and drank and played cards with each other in those same smoke-filled cars each night, boiled over into mortal combat. The three best fights of 1980 were two Roberto Durán/Sugar Ray Leonard battles, and Today versus GMA. In the control rooms and on the sets, staffers from one show talked about the other guys like boxers describing an adversary. They took the rivalry personally. Hartman and his cohost Joan Lunden might have made a handsome living from their plenteous pleasantness, but “I view them as trying to take my mortgage away, stop me from eating. I view them as the enemy,” Steve Friedman, the fast-talking, heavyset producer (no relation to Paul) who ran Today in the 1980s said in one of his buck-up-the-troops staff meetings. This wasn’t hyperbole, he said decades later: “I thought they were trying to kill me and I tried to kill them.”

  Sometimes he did it with money. “Those were the days when you’d spend your way to win,” Friedman said, referring to a tactic much easier to employ at a time when there were only a few television networks divvying up all of Madison Avenue’s cash. Under Friedman, Today started traveling around the world—spending weeks in Russia, Italy, Argentina, Australia—and stopped recycling so much of the prior day’s NBC Nightly News. “It became really the Today show, and not the What Happened Yesterday show,” Friedman said.

  An age-old law of morning TV states that you don’t only help yourself to better ratings, you are also boosted by the sloth and incompetence of your rivals. Good fortune runs one way, then the other, seemingly in cycles. By the late 1970s Today was stale; GMA surged ahead. But by the mid-eighties GMA was the stale one, a condition blamed, fairly or not, on Hartman. Friedman, who called Hartman “potato face,” assured his staff that their enemy’s star would soon fade, and he was right. By 1986 Today had once again taken command in the ratings, and by 1987 Hartman had announced that he wanted to spend more time with his family.

  But when you’re talking morning television, there is always another twist to the tale. In this case it’s a Gibson with a twist. Charles Gibson, the anchor who replaced Hartman, was a child of privilege (Sidwell Friends, Princeton) whom average Americans nevertheless liked, the way you might actually if grudgingly like a guy who pays you to blow the snow out of his long, winding, tree-lined driveway, or tune his Jaguar. As soon as he arrived at the show, the audience research and the ratings started changing in ways that got the Today folks worried, and with good reason, because even those who “watched” Today through a closed bathroom door could tell that, despite its top spot in the ratings, it was at that time more than a bit of a mess. That’s why, in the summer of 1988, Today producer Marty Ryan asked Gumbel, then in his sixth year as host, to write a memo detailing what was wrong with their show and what they might do to keep GMA at bay. Gumbel responded with a scathing novella that criticized Ryan and almost everyone connected with the show (except Pauley, whom he was already known to dislike). Gene Shalit was always late with his movie reviews and did bad interviews, Gumbel opined. The talent department was hampered by “a lazy broad who uses bad judgment.” Of weather-weeble Willard Scott the cohost said, “He holds the show hostage to his assortment of whims, wishes, birthdays and bad taste.” We know all this because someone leaked Gumbel’s put-downs to Newsday reporter Kevin Goldman, who published the highlights. Said The New York Times’ Walter Goodman: “The commotion over the Gumbel memo offers the watchers of early-morning television a fresh perspective on the form.…Mr. Gumbel’s criticism of one co-worker for dumb carryings on and of others for unoriginality gave him the appearance of a vaudeville piano player clucking his tongue over how the jugglers are distracting the customers from his Liszt concertos.” NBC News president Michael Gartner condemned the leak but expressed little sympathy for Gumbel, who said he didn’t feel there was “a proper expression of support from the executive side.” To paraphrase Tolstoy, every unhappy family is unhappy in a way that repels morning TV viewers. The internal discord at Today drove many thousands over to GMA.

  But the best was still to come for the ABC show, for now NBC took dead aim at the foot it had not yet shot itself in. In the summer of 1989, Dick Ebersol, who had been brought over from the sports division to solve the problems at Today, in part because he was a friend of Gumbel’s, thought it would be a peachy idea to bring in Deborah Norville, the anchor of the early-​morning newscast NBC News at Sunrise, to become the Today show’s news anchor. He was wrong about that the way Liza Minnelli was wrong about David Gest, the way AOL was wrong about Time Warner. Norville was an obviously ambitious, obviously stunning and sexy young blonde whose very presence at the news anchor desk, near the traditional fake husband-and-wife combo of Gumbel and Pauley, was just as likely to annoy the mostly female viewers of Today as to enchant them.

  But Ebersol, with his Minnelli-like wisdom, didn’t put her at the news desk; he put her right next to Gumbel and Pauley in an arrangement that took on the air of a sheepish threesome the morning after. To Today show loyalists it screamed, “Man, wife, and mistress”; by the thousands they called and wrote to the network about the odd bigwig-fantasy-made-flesh, with most defending the lovely but soccer-mom-ish Pauley and eviscerating Norville as a home-wrecker. About seven weeks later Pauley, who was as unhappy with the arrangement as anyone else, announced that she was leaving the show. Making a nod to the bad press, she calmly told viewers, “It has hurt to see two of my friends, Bryant and Deborah, assigned roles in this that they did not play.” But the obvious follow-up question—what roles did they play, Pauley?—was never answered sufficiently by anyone in a position to know. (NBC would make this mistake again in 2012.)

  Norville’s debut as cohost, in January 1990, tipped the already weak show into second pl
ace for the first time since 1986. Within a few months Ebersol had issued a rare mea culpa for the furor—“I wanted to send a very clear signal that there was someone who would stand up and take responsibility,” he told the Los Angeles Times—and returned to NBC Sports full-time. In short, it was a heartwarming moment for the once-again-first-place GMA, and no one could have faulted its staffers for celebrating—​and yet their joy in retrospect seems sadly misplaced, their champagne popped under false pretenses. Yes, the departure of Norville thirteen months later—she left to have a baby and never came back—caused even more bad press. Today’s ratings sank so low that NBC’s own stations tried to wrestle the eight a.m. hour away from the network so they could air their own programming! “There is nobody in America who wants to see this show for two hours anymore, nobody,” the stations chief bellowed. But he was wrong, just as GMA was wrong to chug champagne and let its guard down. For the departure of Norville also led to the ascension of Katie Couric, a misleadingly cheery-looking former cheerleader from Arlington, Virginia, who would kick their asses for many years to come.

  Chapter 7

  A Hole Dug Deep

  From the mid-seventies, when GMA was born, until the mid-nineties, the two main morning TV shows were like gaily colored merry-go-round horses moving side by side. Their crazy-eyed expressions remained frozen but their positions constantly changed. When one was high, the other was low. (CBS, in our metaphor, can be thought of as that flightless swan chair that nobody ever sits in.) Instead of being driven by a clockwork mechanism, though, Today and GMA rose and fell according to how well their hosts were demonstrating that ineffable thing called chemistry, or how misguided their producers were when it came to anticipating the audience’s desires. Errors played as large a role as home runs in the grand scheme of things, and the upward stroke was always a prelude to the downward. Since fantastic amounts of advertising revenue, and many careers, hung in the balance, the suspense over the Nielsen numbers remained a nauseating constant, especially if like most people in TV you thought in terms of failure and punishment. For about twenty years it was bad to be down and not much better to be up, the one sure sign you’d be down again presently. And then one day one of the carousel steeds turned into Secretariat and galloped right off the ride.

  There was no magic involved, though; in morning TV, except for the mysterious coming and going of on-screen chemistry, there never is. No, what the Today show did to change the dynamics of the so-called morning wars, and start its unprecedented streak of victorious weeks, was and remains fairly obvious: its producers put Deborah Norville on permanent maternity leave, teamed Katie Couric with Bryant Gumbel, built a new street-level studio in midtown Manhattan, and set Jeff Zucker loose on the joint. But because, as any life coach worth her masters in Russian lit will tell you, you always learn more from losing than from winning, let us focus on what GMA, starting in the early nineties, got so gloriously wrong, for it was the size of the hole it dug that made the show’s climb to daylight, sixteen years later, so amazing.

  First a word about the way the game was played in those days. It was played, in one very important way, like chess. If you look at the morning show record from back in those less-diverse days you’ll see there was a direct connection between Nielsen success and how well you managed your blondes. Protect the queen! Walters, Pauley, Norville, Couric, Diane Sawyer—these women all had a powerful impact, one way or the other, upon the ratings, and you had to handle them with care. GMA went platinum in 1980 when it promoted Joan Lunden, a California bottle-blonde born Joan Blunden, to the chair beside Hartman, replacing Sandy Hill, who let us just say does not today have her own Wikipedia page. Lunden got her big break on the show, as a last-minute substitute host, in 42nd Street fashion, when both regulars came down with laryngitis one morning, and the audience loved her from her storybook start. When Gibson replaced Hartman in 1987, she made a seamless transition from one potato-faced partner to the next. Profiting from the Norville debacle at Today, the Gibson-Lunden team helped lead GMA back to the top in the ratings and helped keep it there for five years. They didn’t sizzle, but they made you feel warm and safe. “Charlie used to say we were like an old married couple,” Lunden said. “We could finish each other’s sentences but we didn’t have sex.” Still, when Today countered with Couric in 1991, ABC could not prevail in that epic battle of the blondes. Today caught up to GMA at the end of 1994 and started trading off turns at number one. At the end of 1995 the seesawing stopped and the Today show streak began. The crazy talk about taking away the eight a.m. hour was silenced, thank God.

  A lot of the credit for this went to Today, specifically Jeff Zucker, for latching on to the Trial of the Century of 1995, the O. J. Simpson murder trial. Zucker said he loved what the trial “said at every level about race and crime and status in society. So I used the trial to cover all those things, and I wrapped a bow around it and made people think we were doing the smartest coverage of the trial.” Not just salacious—smart. GMA consciously decided not to dwell on the trial, and suffered mightily for it. But Lunden, it must be said, was not entirely innocent of blame. She had, over the course of the previous decade, committed the cardinal sin of getting older. GMA had aged, too, and so was perceived by some as having gone stale—especially when put up against the younger, fresher Today. “Viewers gulp down early-morning TV like a first cup of coffee,” Frazier Moore of the Associated Press wrote in early 1997. “But while Today delivers the sought-after kick, Good Morning America is strictly decaf”—and, he couldn’t resist adding, “a dull grind.” Interviewed for the story, Alan Wurtzel, an ABC executive who oversaw GMA, seemed happy to slam his own show: ABC, he said, “stayed too long with a very, very successful program.”

  Morning, as a category, makes mere mortals of the best TV minds. Pat Weaver went with a chimp as a cohost of the 1950s Today, Ebersol chose Norville—and in the mid 1990s Roone Arledge, after long resisting the idea, at last agreed to take GMA off the hands of the entertainment division and absorb it into ABC News, of which he was then president, though he had not a clue about how to make it better, nor did he realize that, the way things would work out, financially speaking he was doing the news division a possibly lifesaving favor. “We could hardly do worse than Entertainment, I figured, and in the spirit of helping a beleaguered program, we went for it,” Arledge, who simply didn’t get morning TV, wrote in his 2004 memoir. The Walt Disney Company, which was then in the process of acquiring the network, didn’t know what to do with GMA either. But Gibson and Lunden had been around the TV business long enough to know that they should get out of the way of the inevitable fix-it crews.

  It took the network a while to find the seemingly perfect Lunden substitute: Lisa McRee—blonde, California-bred, pretty in a Lunden sort of way but born in 1961 as opposed to 1950. Lunden signed off on a Friday and McRee took over on a Monday in September 1997. No doubt some people who didn’t follow TV news all that closely thought that Lunden had had a little work done over the weekend. The look was that similar—but man, the chemistry wasn’t. “At the time, Lisa was thought to be the future for the franchise,” said David Westin, Arledge’s successor atop ABC News. But the show, already in second place, sagged further in the ratings, and something like panic started to set in. “After several months, it was clear on the air and behind the scenes that Charlie and Lisa were not a good fit,” Westin said. Making matters worse, mutual disdain between the news and entertainment divisions had made the handover to ABC News much harder than it had to be. There was so much finger-pointing you could lose an eye walking from Gibson’s office to Westin’s.

  Not knowing what to try next, the executives tried everything. “We went through three or four different show structures behind the scenes,” recalled Tom Touchet, who joined the staff in 1995 and was later promoted to be a senior producer. Management, he said, “didn’t have a vision for what the show should be. Therefore, almost every week, you’d have these wild swings.” One week the staff would be to
ld to pursue serious news stories; the next they’d be told to soften up the show with fun features. “I think viewers ended up with whiplash,” Touchet said. “We lost the continuity of what made the show work, and we weren’t building toward anything new.”

  Gibson was the next casualty. On the first day of May 1998, GMA said goodbye to him the same way it had to Lunden the prior fall—that is, sentimentally, with a lot of fanfare, beginning with a videotaped message from President Bill Clinton. At the end of the two-hour tribute show, Gibson thanked the audience for watching GMA, then looked off camera and said, “Lisa, Kevin, take care of it.”

  They didn’t. Nothing was right, singly or in combination, about McRee and her new cohost Kevin Newman, a pleasant but bland Canadian who had been made the news anchor on GMA the prior fall. They hardly knew each other, and it showed—“It was a shotgun marriage,” Newman said later. The audience didn’t know them either—nor did it have any desire to watch them perch uncomfortably on their new, cold, hard, chrome-heavy set, for which ABC had spent three million dollars. By the end of the year GMA had dropped dangerously close to third place in the morning race. Looking back on the period, Newman said he sensed disaster from the moment Westin called and breathlessly offered him a job that even he knew he was unprepared for. He regretted ignoring his gut instinct, which was to say no to the high-paying, high-profile position. “Too much change in TV is never a good thing,” he said.