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

by Brian Stelter

  At the airport, Elliott, who sometimes describes himself as a foodie, grabbed a copy of GQ because the cover promoted the magazine’s list of the best new restaurants in America. Flipping through to the feature, he saw that the New York pick was Lincoln, a contemporary Italian spot that had opened near ABC a few months earlier. He made what he called a “note to self” to check out the restaurant soon.

  Seated on the flight, Elliott saw that one of the movie choices was Charlie St. Cloud, which he remembered as the film made from Sherwood’s novel. He also recalled that at his lunch with Entelis she had said, “Ben might want to have a drink with you someday”—and thought he should get up to speed with Sherwood’s work. So he watched the movie and then, like any enterprising journalist, logged on to the in-flight Wi-Fi and dug up the Wikipedia page listing what was different about the book version. This, he figured, would allow him to bring up the subject of how Hollywood plays fast and loose with your work.

  It was a good thing that he did this, because as soon as he got back to his home in Connecticut, at around midnight…well, it’s best explained in his own words.

  “I log on my e-mail and the first e-mail, sent at 11:05 that night, is from Amy Entelis. ‘Can you meet Ben Sherwood for dinner?’ It was sort of mind-boggling. So I write back, ‘Hey, absolutely.’ And she’s like, ‘I’m copying Ben so you two can talk.’ So he sends me an e-mail, ‘Looking forward to it. My son’s not going to believe that I’m actually having dinner with you. How’s Lincoln?’ And I was like, ‘There’s no fucking way this is happening.’”

  Sherwood and Elliott’s dinner at Lincoln was scheduled for seven thirty p.m. on January 4, 2011, a snowy night in New York City. Elliott was planning to meet up with some friends at eight thirty. “He must be so busy,” Elliott recalled thinking. “I took a straw poll of people who might know, and they said, ‘You’re lucky if you get forty-five minutes.’”

  Sherwood was right on time. When a hostess sat them at a table at the center of the restaurant, Sherwood asked for a booth instead, so they could have a little privacy. Maybe, thought Elliott, this was going to last more than forty-five minutes after all.

  “You’re probably wondering why, on the third day of my tenure at ABC News, I want to have dinner with an anchor from ESPN,” Sherwood said.

  “Actually, yes I was,” Elliott said, laughing.

  Sherwood responded with a story about his then-six-year-old son.

  Will Sherwood had started to show an interest in professional sports when he was four years old, the news chief said. So his parents turned on SportsCenter for him at six in the morning, before nursery school. This happened to be the time when Elliott and Storm were cohosting live on the East Coast. Sherwood wasn’t watching—he was spending his early mornings writing The Survivors Club in another corner of the house. But he noticed that Will started periodically spouting off random facts about baseball players like Melky Cabrera and CC Sabathia and Manny Ramirez.

  “How’d you know that Manny Ramirez grew up in Washington Heights in the shadows of Yankee Stadium?” his father asked.

  “Josh told me,” Will answered.

  “Who’s Josh?”

  “He’s the guy on ESPN.”

  After a while Sherwood began to watch SportsCenter, too. Will, he noticed, “was completely captivated by Josh.” So was Sherwood’s wife Karen.

  As Sherwood told this story at dinner, Elliott thought to himself, “Just take a snapshot.” Through the snow-speckled windows of the restaurant he could see Juilliard, the school for musicians, actors, and dancers, some of whom went on to be world-renowned, and others to be forgotten. “Just take a snapshot,” he thought, “because this is not going to happen. Nothing will come of this, so just enjoy this moment.” But as dinner proceeded far past the forty-five-minute mark, and the two men talked in detail about the chemistry and the connective tissue that make great television shows, it was harder and harder for Elliott not to get his hopes up.

  When dinner finally ended at ten thirty, Sherwood asked, “I know this sounds odd, but can we take a picture and send it to Will? He’d think it’s great.”

  Of course, said Elliott, who adored kids and had a two-year-old daughter, Sarina, at home. The restaurant maître d’ took a cell phone photo of the two of them and Sherwood sent it to his wife, then called her. It was seven thirty in LA, where Will was about to go to sleep.

  “Did he get it?… Oh, that’s great, that’s good.”

  Then Karen wondered: would Elliott say hello to Will?

  “Sure, I totally will,” Elliott said, reaching for the phone. “Hey, buddy!” Elliott and Will dove right into talk about the Dodgers and the Lakers. Knowing the Sherwood family was probably moving to New York soon, Elliott joked, “Do not let them turn you into a Yankees fan, OK? Do not let them turn you into a Knicks fan.”

  Then, as Elliott recalled it later, he turned serious for a second.

  “You know what, Will? I just want to tell you this. And I know you’re not going to understand it. It’s not going to make any sense at all. But, you know, I just want to thank you for maybe changing my life.”

  There was a pause on the other end of the phone. And then Will responded, “You’re welcome.” Elliott started laughing.

  Sherwood said of the phone conversation, “It took my breath away.”

  No job was discussed that night. But in short order Elliott had dinner with James Goldston, the Nightline producer who was about to replace Jim Murphy as the executive producer of GMA. Then Elliott, Goldston, and Sherwood all had dinner together—back at Lincoln—​and talked in detail about where they saw GMA going.

  When Sherwood first talked to him about taking over GMA in January 2010, Goldston, who had been the producer of Nightline for five years, was not interested; he had his sights set higher, on a VP job with oversight of all the news division’s shows—essentially second in command to Sherwood. Sherwood had the same thought, but first he needed Goldston in the trenches, so to speak, to retool GMA with an eye toward putting it back in first place. “James had to be convinced,” Sherwood said, chuckling.

  Goldston’s heavy British accent was a kind of warning to anyone at ABC who might bring up “the way we’ve always done it.” He wasn’t very interested in that, especially if what ABC had always done wasn’t winning the time slot. Goldston, a former BBC and ITV producer, had many credits to his name, including Iraq war coverage, but the one mentioned most often was Living with Michael Jackson, an unsettling documentary that detailed the pop star’s habit of sharing his bed with children. Originally produced for ITV, it drew twenty-seven million viewers when shown on ABC in 2003. Two years later Goldston was tapped to remake Nightline as Ted Koppel was retiring. Goldston, depending on your vantage point, either guided Nightline into the new century or presided over its decline. One thing was for sure: it had a bigger share of network television eyeballs when he was done.

  As Goldston hashed out what changes might need to be made to GMA, he did not see the goal as the cloning of Today, which had been a basic premise of the competition for many of the previous thirty-six years. He’s “a brilliant showman,” said Victor Neufeld, a former executive producer of 20/20 who credited Goldston with having “little regard to the stale formulas that preceded him.” Goldston wanted to create a looser kind of morning show, one that was, above all else, entertaining and inviting to the audience. That didn’t mean ignoring major news stories that viewers needed to know about, but it meant emphasizing the stories that viewers wanted to know about—the toy recalls, the messy celebrity divorces, the girls gone missing—especially on the days, and there were many, when this or that disaster didn’t dominate the headlines. “The aim was relevance in everything we did,” he said.

  Meanwhile, Sherwood wanted to get the chemistry just right. Rather than removing one or both of the stars, as some staffers had speculated he would, he was adding supporting actors—creating an ensemble that looked more like The View than like a traditional two-pe
rson morning show.

  The other addition, Lara Spencer, was already close to signing with ABC. Sherwood’s predecessor David Westin had wanted Spencer, a mother of two (her husband, David Haffenreffer, is a real estate broker and former television anchor), to be “the social butterfly and the ‘mom’ of the show,” according to a GMA producer. But don’t be fooled by Spencer’s maternal air. She was a fiercely competitive diver at Penn State, where a professor suggested she try out sports reporting. Soon she was filing stories for the school’s TV station and applying to be an NBC page. She’d been all over the map since: she’d covered the crash of TWA Flight 800 for WABC, the ABC station in New York; hosted Antiques Roadshow on PBS (she cold-called the producers to get the gig); and created a short-lived game show with Cedric the Entertainer for NBC. Spencer had been a correspondent for GMA in the early 2000s, specializing in entertainment and family stories, but she was persuaded to leave in 2005 to host The Insider, a tabloid-y news show that was spun off from Entertainment Tonight. Now she wanted to come home. Picking up the discussion where Westin had left off, Sherwood met with Spencer on New Year’s Eve, days before he dined with Elliott. He envisioned her as the lifestyle anchor, a new title at the new GMA. She’d come on during the eight a.m. hour for segments about parenting, health, fitness, and entertainment—all the sorts of stories that Roberts and Stephanopoulos weren’t eager to cover. “The moment Ben Sherwood arrived [at ABC News], you could feel the momentum,” Spencer said. “I wanted in. I wanted in.”

  So did Elliott. He was in the backyard of his home in Connecticut, kicking the soccer ball around with his daughter Sarina (his marriage ended in divorce in 2010) when Sherwood called in March to formally offer him the job. “He offered it,” Elliott said, “and I looked up in the sky, and then I said to him, ‘You know what? I appreciate what you’re doing in offering me this. There’s really no other way for it to end well other than that they’ll think you are the smartest man in television. Because it’s the only way it works out.’ Or it could have ended miserably. It was a roll of the dice.”

  In an interview later, Sherwood said that he wasn’t worried about Elliott’s hiring working out, because of something his future news anchor had said during their first dinner together. Elliott had told him that he used to study improv. And the lesson Elliott came away with, he said, was “Never let it drop.”

  “The skill required to keep an improv going is considerable,” said Sherwood, whose brother-in-law Steve teaches companies how to apply improvisational techniques to the workplace. “And Josh’s love of keeping it going, not letting it drop, stood out to me. The hosts of the Today show, in its heyday, were excellent at the television equivalent of Hacky Sack. They could kick the Hacky Sack around and it never dropped. And they could do incredible tricks. And just when you thought it was gonna drop, bang, Katie would pop it up in the air or Matt would catch it on his shoulders or Al would bump it over to Ann and Ann would somehow get it back in the air. At GMA, we did not have that. We had a lot of things, but we did not have that improv.”

  Could these new players change that? Elliott and Spencer both started in May 2011, but Spencer got off to a rocky start. She’d gone from being the sole host of a half-hour show to being the fifth host of a two-hour show. And no one seemed to know what her newly made-up “lifestyle anchor” role entailed. “To be a part of this ensemble with these incredibly talented people and to not know exactly what my role was, was intimidating,” she said. “And I hadn’t felt intimidated in a long time. I wondered, How is this going to work?”

  Sherwood sensed she was adrift when they met in June in his fifth-floor office. He likes to adapt his analogies to the person he’s conversing with, so with Spencer, a former competitive diver, he thought sports. Not having aquatic analogies at his fingertips, he resorted to basketball. “Look, Spencer,” he said to her, “I want you to think of yourself as Lamar Odom.”

  At the time Spencer and Sherwood had just moved back to New York from LA, and Odom was the sixth man on the LA Lakers—the recent recipient, in fact, of the NBA’s Sixth Man of the Year Award. He was the guy who, coming off the bench first among the nonstarters, helped the Lakers to a division championship four years in a row. “In those days,” Sherwood said later, “when Lamar had a good night, the Lakers won. When Lamar didn’t have a good night, the Lakers didn’t win.”

  Sherwood said he wanted Spencer to think of herself as GMA’s sixth man. “You know what?” he said. “Every single game, Coach Phil [  Jackson] knows he can count on Lamar to score twelve to fourteen points. And that’s what I need you to do. If you start swooshing and getting me those twelve to fourteen points then I’m going to give you the opportunity to score sixteen points.”

  The hardest part of many jobs is having to talk to the boss. Still, Spencer said the Odom analogy calmed her down. It was “a really easy way for me to digest it,” she said. “I’m not kidding you, every single day I was like, ‘I got to get my points.’ And I pretty much think that from that day forward that I got my points every game.” She even started signing her e-mails to Sherwood as “#7,” Odom’s number on the Lakers.

  At around the same time GMA added a new segment for Spencer, the “Pop News Heat Index,” that brought a bit of her old show, The Insider, to GMA. A creation of Goldston’s, “Pop News” followed Elliott’s news headlines segment at eight a.m. and provided a dedicated place for the showbizzy and gossipy headlines that viewers craved. In fact, GMA sometimes saw a spike in its minute-by-minute ratings when the segment came on. (“It’s the one segment everyone watches, and no one admits to watching,” one staffer said.)

  Spencer and one of the show’s writers e-mailed each other at all hours with conversation starters for the segment. The constant goal: to avoid Goldston’s dismissing this or that story as “boooooring,” a word he wielded like a weapon. “It fills a need on the show,” Spencer said of “Pop News.” “People want the headlines in the world of Hollywood and fashion and all things ‘pop.’ And it gave me a defined role.” (Maybe NBC should share in the credit. A few days before “Pop News” premiered in mid-June 2011, Today unveiled an almost identical pop-culture wrap-up called “What’s Trending Today.” Likewise, later in the year GMA introduced a bargain-hunting segment called “Deals and Steals” that sure sounded inspired by the Today show’s “Steals and Deals.”)

  Josh Elliott’s job already had a definition—news anchors read the news—and he got off to a strong start by reporting on man-on-the-street reactions to the assassination of Osama bin Laden, which had taken place the night before his first show. Still, Goldston added another segment for him as well, “Play of the Day,” to make him a fuller member of the cast. Elliott, joined by his cohosts, introduced a funny or outrageous viral video—a hero pig saving a baby goat, a dancing ping-pong player, an emu wandering down a highway—and laughed about it with his TV pals. It was a quick segment, sometimes just twenty seconds long, but it was scheduled at the same time every morning and became a bridge between the news rundown at seven a.m. and the more freewheeling portion of the show at eight a.m.

  “Each one of these things had a very specific purpose,” Goldston said. “It was to signal a new approach to the audience, and it was also to kind of cement Lara and Josh in their roles.” All of the hosts, he said, “locked in to it incredibly fast. Within four or five weeks you could see it on air. Then of course the audience—well, that process takes much, much longer.”

  But something was happening out there in TV land. On the Wednesday morning in June 2011 that Today said farewell to Meredith Vieira, GMA lost by 1.2 million viewers. That was to be expected—smooth transitions are rewarded with temporary spikes in the ratings. By mid-June, however, the gap returned to about six hundred thousand viewers, right back where it had been before Vieira left. And after the Fourth of July it contracted even more, dipping below the psychologically significant five-hundred-thousand-viewer mark.

  There was in truth a little trickery behind GMA’s
momentum. Taking a page from the playbook of the Today show—which had been known to cut out all national commercials after eight a.m. to inflate the ratings on close days—GMA one morning in May started to move its last national commercial up by several minutes, thereby making the rated portion of the show a few minutes shorter. The dodge boosted the ratings a bit, giving GMA some psychological momentum (you gotta give ’em hope) while at the same time Today suffered from what would later be diagnosed as a slow fade. GMA ended the month of July—the first full month since “Play of the Day” and “Pop News” were added to the rundown—with 497,000 fewer viewers than Today. It was the closest GMA had come to number one in six years. It was also Ann Curry’s first full month next to Lauer on Today.

  Chapter 10

  Morning Joe

  Was 2011 the most interesting year yet in the history of the so-called morning wars? Quite likely. Think about it: you had at GMA a master alchemist mixing together a uniquely televisable team of personalities assembled not just to keep the show going as best they could, but to take back the top spot in the ratings after sixteen years. Simultaneously you had the Today show seemingly trying to help GMA toward its audacious goal by first propping up and then plotting to tear down Ann Curry as if she were a statue of Saddam Hussein. When the a.m. TV titans do battle, as we’ve seen, it usually comes to one show beating up on a show that is concurrently beating up itself. Go figure. The morning wars are weird that way.

  But what of the non-titans, the more focused or indie-style a.m. entries designed for edgier or more eccentric tastes? How did they affect the larger scene as GMA rose up and Today did its slow fade? There are a lot of peculiar little programs these days, a dozen in all, many of them harboring dreams of becoming like Morning Joe, the cultlike MSNBC show that almost everyone in the industry speaks of with reverence. “You’re the most talked-about show that no one watches,” Today boss Jim Bell once said to his Morning Joe counterpart Chris Licht. To which Licht responded, “You’re the most watched show that no one talks about.” If Morning Joe were a guitar player, it would be James Burton.