“I’ll keep the seat warm,” Couric responded.
“Do that!” Roberts said.
Reflecting on the sequence of events later, Roberts said, “Never had an anchor going on vacation been so public. We had the whole campaign, like, ‘Katie’s filling in, here are the keys.’ That had never been done before. Again, I understand the reasoning behind it, but it was kind of like, ‘Geez, really? Oh-kay.’”
If she hadn’t been waiting anxiously for the results of those bone marrow tests, Roberts might have been more troubled about the way Couric Week was going down. Did she fear that GMA would win without her? “It wasn’t a ‘fear,’” she said a few months later. “It was kind of like…I and others, we had been fighting fighting fighting fighting. And knowing that the headline would have been ‘Katie Beats,’ not ‘Good Morning America Beats.’ So it was more of like, ‘Wow, we, who have been here, will not get the credit.’ But I didn’t fault her or ABC management—because they wanted to keep us in the game. They wanted to keep the momentum going. So I understood. But yeah, at the time, it was kinda like…” (insert loud groan here).
Couric, to be fair, mostly stayed above the fray and had fun with her temporary return to morning TV, pretending at one point to mistakenly call Stephanopoulos “Matt.” By turns flirty and self-deprecating and inquisitive, she was at ease in the mornings, no matter what network she was on, and it showed. Something else showed, too: that the Today show could, in fact, step up its game when threatened. It reacted to Couric Week by hyping a “mystery guest” on Couric’s first day (it turned out to be Meredith Vieira), bringing in Sarah Palin to guest-host with Lauer on Tuesday, and flying in Ryan Seacrest on Wednesday. (The chimp idea was abandoned because animal experts warned that chimps are not accepted anymore as entertainers. PETA would have been protesting outside Studio 1A.)
But no one at ABC thought that NBC, in reacting to Couric Week, got it right. Goldston, in the control room a day later, spoke of the competition’s “fatal mistake.” By acting desperate, he thought, Today had alerted more people to the morning race and had encouraged its fans to channel-flip, to see what all the fuss was about.
NBC, however, had to fight back. What was it going to do, roll over and let GMA win? “We didn’t know whether Today would win or lose the week, but we wanted to be armed with the best programming possible,” said Don Nash.
But by bringing back Vieira in a time of crisis, Today had underlined how much the show had suffered without her and inadvertently drawn new scrutiny onto Curry and Lauer’s nonexistent relationship. The New York Times television critic Alessandra Stanley wrote the following on Monday afternoon:
Monday’s display was more savage than a ratings contest or a booking war; at times it looked as intimate and creepily intrusive as the elimination rounds of a particularly cutthroat reality show. It’s been a long time since NBC put Deborah Norville on the couch alongside Jane Pauley and Bryant Gumbel and turned “Today” into a morning show version of “All About Eve.”
These days it is Ann Curry, who inherited Ms. Vieira’s place but not her popularity, who looks vulnerable.
Ms. Curry had to sit, silent and smiling, on the “Today” set on Monday, alongside Matt Lauer as he urged Ms. Vieira to announce that she would help cover the 2012 summer Olympics and be his co-host, with Bob Costas, for the opening ceremony of the London games. (He did not say what role Ms. Curry would play, if any.)
Earlier, when Mr. Lauer began announcing that Ms. Palin would be a guest host, Ms. Curry smiled grimly, then looked down at her desk, patting papers.
The USA Today TV critic Robert Bianco noticed it, too: “If there’s a loser in all this, it’s Today’s current co-host, the unctuous, floundering Ann Curry.”
In the end the week was a wash. Couric hadn’t led a charge to the summit, exactly, but neither had GMA lost any ground during a week when its most beloved cohost was absent. “I’m surprised Katie did as well as she did, because NBC threw the fucking kitchen sink at her,” said an ABC executive.
* * *
The record shows that it was actually April 9 to 13, 2012, the week after Couric’s appearance, that mattered more to the future of morning television. This was also the week that Capus was quoted in The New York Times saying that GMA beating Today was a hypothetical that was “not going to happen.” Lauer, having just re-upped, was on vacation, which guaranteed that it would not be a banner week for Today. In fact, on Monday it beat GMA by a now-routine 150,000 viewers—but at ABC some executives saw something encouraging in the quarter-hour ratings. GMA won from seven forty-five a.m. all the way through to eight thirty a.m. (Neither show was rated after about 8:20 a.m.) That meant, as one producer there said, “If we can add seven thirty, we win.”
During his year running the show Goldston had adopted a backward strategy. Rather than rebuilding GMA from seven a.m. on, Goldston had concentrated at first on the eight thirty a.m. half hour—the back door instead of the front door. Goldston believed that many viewers would start out watching Today, then switch to GMA in the second hour because it did the fun stuff better. By gradually moving up the moment people switched, he felt, GMA could eventually win the entire two-hour time slot. This latest ratings breakdown seemed to vindicate his thinking.
GMA fared worse on Tuesday, a day when Today was helped by NBC’s airing of its only really high-rated show, The Voice, the night before. But on Wednesday the momentum started to shift, assisted by ABC’s airing of Dancing with the Stars, which the night before had featured the surprise elimination of contestant Sherri Shepherd, cohost of The View. Shepherd appeared on GMA Wednesday morning to react to her dismissal—and the show subsequently beat Today by more than 360,000 viewers! It even won the seven a.m. quarter hour! Yes, the exclamation marks and “holy shits” were flying. By Wednesday, Today was averaging just fifty thousand more viewers per day for the week.
That kind of gap could be closed in a few days. The GMA bosses thought they had a chance to win the week—and when they learned that NBC wasn’t bringing Lauer back from vacation on Friday morning to stave off a possible loss, they thought they had an even better chance. GMA that day featured a heavily promoted interview with Jets quarterback Tim Tebow during which he discussed his Christian faith with Roberts. With a little help from up above, the show could be, for the first time in sixteen years, the number one morning show in television. The weekend-long wait for the ratings had never been so excruciating.
“This winning streak dates to 1995,” Jeff Zucker had said in an e-mail to me a few days before GMA’s arrival at this precipice. “Every week, ‘Today.’ Every week. There has never been anything like it in television and there never will be again. Even if it only gets broken one week, it’s over. ‘GMA’ only needs to win once.”
* * *
On the surface, Monday, April 16, seemed like business as usual—except the eternally chatty executives at both networks had little to say. They were just standing by for news from Nielsen, which would render a verdict on the previous week around twelve thirty p.m.
GMA had ripped up its rundown overnight. British socialite Pippa Middleton—Kate’s sister—had been snapped in a car with three male friends, one of whom appeared to be pointing a gun at the photographer. By Monday night her friends were saying it was just a toy pistol, but GMA led its show Monday morning with the “Pippa paparazzi scandal,” first with a live report from Paris, then with an interview of a royal expert. The half hour ended with Roberts promising “more on those shocking photos” later in the show. Today, meanwhile, stuck with its lead story about Secret Service officers caught up in a sex scandal in Colombia.
Then the staffs of the two shows just waited. And waited. Ben Sherwood, the ABC News president, was at his desk working with a colleague on the division’s long-range plan when Amy Miller called him with the figures. GMA had won Friday by 330,000 viewers, enough to win the whole week by an average of thirteen thousand. It was a true squeaker, but the streak appeared to be over after 852 weeks. Sherwo
od immediately e-mailed Goldston, who was in Las Vegas for a television industry conference: “Call me now.”
Cibrowski was standing on West Seventy-Ninth Street with his daughter Caroline, waiting to take the crosstown bus to her preschool on the East Side of Manhattan, when Sherwood e-mailed him the ratings. Looking down at his BlackBerry, Cibrowski thought of the ten years during which he had woken up before dawn for GMA, and of what he’d told himself while entertaining the notion of a job with better, saner hours: “Well, if I hang on a little longer I might win the lottery.”
Now that had happened. He had the urge to tell someone, but there was only his daughter.
“Caroline,” he said, “something really great has happened to Daddy.”
“What happened?” she asked.
He thought for a moment, then said, “Daddy’s work won.”
Caroline smiled, then said, “Daddy’s work won, yay!”
Chapter 13
Inevitable
April 14 and 15 had added up to a tough weekend for Robin Roberts, too, but not just because of the impending Nielsen news.
On April 9, a few days after flying back from her vacation home on Key West, Roberts had conferred with her doctor and received the results of the bone marrow test. That’s when she first heard the phrase myelodysplastic syndromes. MDS is a rare and complicated group of diseases that occur when a person’s body does not produce enough healthy blood cells. It was once called preleukemia because it can lead to leukemia and other blood disorders. The list of famous patients includes writer Susan Sontag, astronomer Carl Sagan, and Frank Newhauser, who in 1925 won the first National Spelling Bee. But Roberts’s doctor wasn’t yet 100 percent sure that she had MDS, and her uncertainty led to further tests and more waiting. She was terrified.
On Tuesday the seventeenth of April, Roberts met Sam Champion and Josh Elliott for lunch at Landmarc, one of the restaurants in Time Warner Center, the upscale urban mall that straddles Columbus Circle in Manhattan. Champion, who had known Roberts for about a decade (they met while filling in on GMA) arrived before Elliott. As soon as she greeted him and sat down, Champion sensed that something wasn’t right. “Sam looked at me as only he can, and I started crying,” she said. She hesitated to say, “MDS,” but eventually told him about her doctor’s strong suspicions that she had the disease, though the diagnosis wouldn’t be confirmed for a few more days. Champion later recalled that “I felt like I’d heard some bad news about my mother or my sister.”
“Don’t say anything to anybody,” Roberts said to Champion before Elliott arrived. She didn’t want to spoil what was supposed to be a celebratory week.
On Monday, after dropping his daughter Caroline off at preschool, Cibrowski couldn’t get back to work fast enough. He was elated, but he knew he shouldn’t be—these ratings were the equivalent of a rough draft. On a conference call with Sherwood and Goldston, the three executives agreed to be circumspect about the win until the final ratings arrived on Thursday, April 19. It was possible, though not likely, that the week would flip back in the Today show’s favor then, since the margin between the two shows was so slight. Cibrowski’s statement to the media at one fifteen p.m. read, “This is an exciting day but we will save any celebrating for when the final numbers come in.”
It was all but impossible, though, to stifle the emotions that were welling up in staffers who used to slap each other on the back and go out for drinks when GMA came within 350,000 viewers of Today. Now they really had a reason to get drunk. One young producer sarcastically renamed Today “the Yesterday show,” while a GMA veteran bombastically said that this early-April win was just a “warning shot” across NBC’s bow, and that they, the ABC guys, had barely begun to fight. After all, they’d won a month and a half before the week in May that Cibrowski had targeted.
There were in truth a few not-so-minor technicalities for the GMA people to ponder. Their victory had been extremely slim, and in the “demo,” the group of twenty-five-to-fifty-four-year-old men and women most coveted by advertisers, they had, in fact, lost to Today by something like 254,000. Still, these complications didn’t change the basic fact of the matter, even in the eyes of the Today show’s Jim Bell, who issued a statement to the media at 1:25 p.m. that read like an elegy for the streak.
Today’s 852-week winning streak had taken on a life of its own and as odd as it is to see it end, we should acknowledge just how remarkable it has been. So as we tip our caps to the team at Good Morning America, we can also take a bow ourselves and recognize the work done by countless staffers for so long. It is not an overstatement to call it one of the most incredible achievements in television history, one that is not likely to ever happen again. While the streak has been wonderful affirmation of our work, it has never defined us, and we will continue to innovate, take chances and lead the way.
According to a colleague, when Capus saw the statement, he “flipped” and screamed at Bell over the phone. The final ratings weren’t even in yet! Capus would have been even angrier had he known that over at GMA, George Stephanopoulos was standing in the reception area outside Cibrowski’s office and reading Bell’s statement aloud to colleagues. Stephanopoulos was the first to recognize its significance. “He just conceded!”
But Bell was preoccupied: his top deputy, Don Nash, was on vacation, and he had a long-planned lunch with Bob Costas to talk about the Summer Olympics. In the wake of the loss, Bell and his colleagues tried to keep up appearances. “It’s business as usual,” here, said one publicist; “Nobody’s crying here,” said another. The party line was that what had happened was inevitable. “We knew it was going to happen sooner or later. It couldn’t go on forever,” Al Roker said later. Capus, looking back, said similarly, “There is no question that there was some slippage in the ratings and they were going to pass us at some point.” But Capus had said just a few days before that the streak would never end.
As will happen in such circumstances, a conspiracy theory took root: Bell, it was said, had accepted—or perhaps even cunningly engineered—a temporary dive in the ratings to pave the way for Curry’s removal, assuming the ratings would bounce right back afterward. Others at NBC heaped the blame on the network’s new parent, Comcast, for not taking the war as seriously as its previous parent, General Electric. Why didn’t Comcast yank national commercials from Today on Friday, repeating the dirty trick used against GMA in 2005? Why didn’t someone drag Lauer back from vacation? Still others at the network credited ABC for simply wanting the win more. That explanation was the most honest of them all.
In the second wave of spin, NBC people said—as Joe DiMaggio had in 1941, when his record hitting streak came to an end—that coming up short after all that time was actually a good thing. Capus, at a party two weeks later, told me that GMA’s one-off victory “frees us of the burden of the streak.” (“Now that the streak is over,” the great DiMaggio had said, “I just want to get out there and keep helping to win ball games.”)
After the loss there was—strangely, in the opinion of some—no rally-the-troops meeting at NBC. “Jim’s just not that kind of guy,” one of his allies said. There was instead a kind of stoic silence, a lot of closed doors and quiet cubicles. The mood was summarized by a replica of a British World War II propaganda poster hanging on the wall in the production offices between two rows of cubicles. It read, “Keep Calm and Carry On.” Capus, who had held a town hall a week earlier, fumed that Bell didn’t do more to motivate his staff.
At GMA, meanwhile, they were planning their Thursday-night party—but keeping the details a secret, in case the revised numbers, due early that morning, left them with nothing to celebrate. Jeffrey Schneider, the top spokesman for ABC News, wouldn’t let anyone buy champagne ahead of time, lest they jinx themselves. “We were optimistic,” he said later, “but didn’t want to get caught out between the early numbers and the final numbers.” Schneider, a twelve-year veteran of ABC, took the war especially personally, since he’d absorbed a lot of the bullets fi
red by NBC—and fired even more back. That’s why it was stunning, yet entirely sensible, for NBC to try to poach him. Today needed a lot of things, and aggressiveness was one of them. An NBC executive had called a few days earlier, right after Lauren Kapp, the news division’s PR chief, said she was leaving. But Schneider had made it clear that he bled ABC News blue. He’d invested too much in GMA to leave now, when the show was on the cusp of becoming number one.
On April 19, a week after that call, Schneider was huddled in his office with Julie Townsend, his No. 2. The final ratings were due between eight and nine a.m. The two PR people sounded like political speechwriters crafting two speeches, one for victory and one for a remotely possible defeat. “I don’t think I can take it if this goes south,” Schneider told Townsend. “I’m so tense right now that if I got a paper cut I’d bleed to death.”
Townsend tried to tell him it’d be all right. “No,” Schneider said. “It’s going to suck worse than anything. The world already believes that we won.” That much was true. To the reporters who covered television, Thursday was just a formality—unless, of course, Today came back from the dead and beat GMA for week 853.
A mile south at the GMA studio, Cibrowski joked that it was just “another day at the office,” and in some ways it was. Both GMA and Today led with the death of broadcasting legend Dick Clark. GMA later had an update on “Gungate,” as they called the Pippa Middleton photo scandal. Just after the eight a.m. break, the five hosts were in Times Square teasing a discount shopping segment. At 8:28 a.m., as they were walking back into the studio, Roberts whooped loudly and said, “Oh my God!” Elliott, who had been just ahead of her on the sidewalk, was so startled he nearly left his feet.
Cibrowski had just told Roberts, through her earpiece, that the absolutely official results were in and GMA had won the week by thirty-one thousand viewers, about twice as many as Nielsen had originally estimated.
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