Eighteen months had passed since Burke had taken over NBC, and it seemed fair to say he wasn’t having much fun yet. NBC News, he told his colleagues, had turned out to be a time sink. It had consumed countless hours thanks to the Today show contract negotiations, the conflict between Bell and Capus, and other miscellaneous botherations. So Burke had decided to combine NBC News, MSNBC, and CNBC under a new umbrella group, the same way he had strung together the company’s various sports units. He named it the NBCUniversal News Group. To run it he’d picked Fili, one of his most trusted administrators. Internally the pick was hugely important, because it signaled that neither Capus nor Bell was being promoted. Capus would now have to report to her, not Burke. It was time for him to consider packing up his office.
While Fili watched Today work its production magic at the Tower of London, the final ratings for the prior week, July 16 through 20, reached BlackBerrys there and in New York. There had been some special concern about the numbers recently, since NBC had run its streak of winning demo weeks to 898, and reaching the big round number of 900 would be a psychologically significant moment—empowering for Today, deflating for GMA. But when the powers that be looked down at their handheld devices, they saw that in week 899 Today and GMA had…tied. According to Nielsen’s estimate, each show had averaged 1,737,000 viewers in the demo.
Both shows immediately claimed a victory, calling to mind the famous headline “Harvard beats Yale 29–29.” At a press conference (previously scheduled with TV critics, part of a twice-annual event in Los Angeles) ABC News president Ben Sherwood purposely peppered his remarks with Olympics references, adding up all of GMA’s “silver-medal finishes” before saying his cast now stood “at the gold-medal podium.” The last time GMA had been number one in the demo, he said, “I think the Lillehammer games had just finished the year before.” He didn’t “think” that; he knew. Almost lost in all the gloating was GMA’s huge win among total viewers: the gap between the two shows was 353,000, the widest yet.
For NBC there was worse news to come. In the days leading up to the opening ceremony, July 23 through 27, Today did everything it could to stomp out GMA. That’s why it produced elaborate shows from the Tower of London and Olympic Park with famous contributors like Vieira and Seacrest. It at first seemed to work—the rough drafts of the ratings put Today ahead in the demo for most of the week. Even the staff of GMA thought their show would win again among total viewers but lose in the demo. So ABC employees were stunned on Thursday, August 2, when Sherwood sent them an e-mail with this subject line:
LAST WEEK—VICTORY IN THE DEMO! AND TOTAL VIEWERS! THE 25-54 STREAK IS OVER!!
Sherwood himself was shocked. The rough drafts had undercounted GMA’s audience, especially in the twenty-five-to-fifty-four-year-old demographic. This final draft showed that GMA had eked out a twelve-thousand-viewer win over Today in the demo—ending the streak-within-the-streak that dated back nine hundred weeks to 1995.
Cibrowski was at Bomboloni, an Italian coffee and dessert shop on Columbus Avenue a few blocks north of the ABC News office, with Chris Vlasto and two other colleagues. They were waiting for their orders and talking about how tough Thursdays are in the land of morning TV (they’re the worst—everyone is tired but everyone knows the weekend is still a full day away) when Cibrowski saw the e-mail from Sherwood. In large type highlighted in yellow, it read:
TOTAL VICTORY!!
Demo 25-54: 12K+
Total viewers: 542K+ !
FIRST TIME IN 2 DECADES TO WIN THE WEEK BEFORE OLYMPICS SINCE 1992 (BARCELONA)!
Cibrowski smiled and held up his iPhone so the others could read it. “No more ties now,” he said. Vlasto wondered about NBC: “How are they going to spin this one?”
The answer was, as hard as they could. In its press release a few hours later, the network claimed—absurdly—that its streak continued into week nine hundred because the two shows had received the same ratings point, a 1.5. The problem with that argument is that, as people in the business know, ratings points are imprecise—like measuring a person’s height in feet rather than inches. GMA won outright, surpassing Today by twelve thousand viewers in the demo, even though the ratings points rounded up to the same number. No knowledgeable industry observers were buying NBC’s version of events.
This was Cibrowski’s e-mail to the staff:
GMA WINS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
#1 MORNING SHOW TOPS TODAY IN THE 25-54 DEMO OUTRIGHT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
YOU DID IT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
I LOVE YOU ALL!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
The morning game had been upended in the year since Curry had succeeded Vieira. In July 2011, Curry’s second month as cohost, Today had won by about seven hundred thousand viewers. But in July 2012, Guthrie’s first month, the show lost by nearly half a million—a swing of 1.2 million viewers. To put it another way, before Curry’s exit Today was number one in the ratings; after it Today was number two. It would be cruel to begrudge Cibrowski his hard-earned exclamation points, yet the bungling of Operation Bambi was arguably just as responsible for GMA’s new success as anything he, Sherwood, or Goldston had done.
As the demo victory sunk in, Sherwood was the first to acknowledge that twelve thousand viewers ages twenty-five to fifty-four, in a country of 312 million, wasn’t a meaningful amount. Then again, as he also pointed out, GMA’s first victory in the total viewer category had been by a mere thirty-one thousand viewers. Now GMA was winning in that category by more than half a million. You have to start somewhere. At lunchtime Sherwood e-mailed all of ABC News to declare GMA to be “the Undisputed Champion of the Morning.”
When the Olympics started, the Today show’s ratings soared, as expected, as the games steered tens of millions of viewers to NBC in the evenings and the athletes showed off their medals to Lauer and company in the mornings. Kopf issued a press release after just one weekday of Olympics coverage, celebrating the fact that Today had “crushed” GMA by 1.5 million viewers. But Today was supposed to crush GMA during the Olympics. That wasn’t news. Besides, as ABC happily pointed out, the Today show’s lead over GMA had been wider during the 2008 Summer Games in Beijing. The real test would come after the closing ceremony. Would viewers stay with Today or come back to GMA?
Even with its ratings success, the Olympics were not a particularly blissful time for NBC. Bell was a superb producer of the prime-time broadcasts, but he and his colleagues were mercilessly criticized on Twitter and radio call-in shows for NBC’s decision to tape-delay some big Olympic sports like swimming and track and field until prime time in the US. The fact that tape-delay seemed to work wonders for NBC—by encouraging prime-time viewership, the network broke Olympics ratings records and even eked out a profit after forecasting a loss—did not appease anyone except NBC employees and shareholders. And then there was that concurrent and somewhat distracting little side event that might be called the Ann Curry Games. Many had wondered whether Curry would show up in London, as Lauer on her goodbye broadcast had assured viewers that she would. Before her demotion she had been working on stories that were supposed to air during the Games, but those had been scrapped. There had also been talk about having her travel to the Syrian border the first week of the Games to cover the conflict there from her warmhearted perspective. But that didn’t pan out, and Curry wasn’t seen once on NBC during the first week of the Games.
She was eventually heard from, though. On August 1 she popped up on Twitter, writing at 6:51 a.m., “Good morning Twitterverse. Your unbelievable kindness resonates. You have made me love YOU even more.” She posted a couple of Gandhi quotes, including one of her favorites—“When I despair I remember that throughout history, truth and love have always won”—and replied to a follower who asked her to tweet when she knew she’d be back on TV. “PROMISE,” she wrote. She was, it seemed, hosting her own little morning show online.
Curry finally made an appearance on the Today
show on August 9, fronting a story about a sports photographer. This was supposed to be another moment for healing—Lauer planned in advance to say some nice words about Curry. But there was nothing nice about this. Curry walked onto the show’s indoor-outdoor set at Olympic Park with her head down, hiding tears. Lauer, perhaps picking up on her body language, didn’t stand up to shake her hand or hug her. Once the show came back from commercial, Lauer went out of his way to seem welcoming, saying it was good to see her and mentioning her own photography skills. Naturally NBC executives later went out of their way to point out how nice he had been. But Curry, perhaps assuming Lauer was just playing to the cameras, didn’t reciprocate. No one seemed to sense just how much pain she was still in. Television critics called the reunion “icy,” “tense,” and “awkward,” and most everyone agreed that it probably set the healing process back considerably. It would be another month before she would make another Today appearance.
Today came back to New York on August 13 with a new sense of optimism about the ratings race. It had spent two refreshing weeks back at number one, and in front of an audience that ranged between five and six million it had shown its best face and promoted its new lineup of hosts. During its first week back in Studio 1A the show featured an all-star cast of Olympian contributors and five straight days of concerts by acts like the Fray and Nicki Minaj. Today felt good about its chances, as did the top producers of GMA, who thought Today would benefit from a few weeks of Olympics afterglow and stay at least that long at number one.
But the audience had other ideas, and once the closing ceremonies were over it promptly resumed carrying its grudge. Said an ABC executive of the Olympics fans, “They came, they watched, they left.” On Monday the thirteenth Today had 4.5 million viewers, about three hundred thousand more than GMA. But the next day, Tuesday the fourteenth, Today slipped to 4.2 million and GMA regained the lead. On Wednesday, buoyed by actor Robert Pattinson’s first interview since the revelations about his girlfriend Kristen Stewart’s affair, GMA won by half a million viewers. It was all the more notable because Roberts, the biggest star of GMA, was on vacation. Maybe the ensemble was becoming the “star.”
Today that day dipped below the four-million-viewer mark for the first time in more years than anyone cared to count. When numbers like that happen, somebody usually has to be taken out back and shot. With Curry gone, the morbid attention was now focused on Al Roker, who was patently guilty of having been on the show longer than anyone but Lauer. A personal friend of Curry’s, he had been horrified by the way she was treated. On Thursday, August 16, four days after the London Games ended, he and Lauer interviewed members of the rowing team from the Olympics. When the athletes mentioned their tradition of celebrating a win by throwing teammates in the water, Roker said to Lauer, “Which is different than our tradition…which is you throw one of us under the bus, but that’s another story.” A moment of awkward laughter followed, and then, mercifully, a commercial break. “Mr. Roker!” Guthrie exclaimed, as if she were a schoolteacher chastising a student. Roker later claimed it was an innocent joke, one he had made on the show dozens of times before. But his colleagues knew better. Right after the segment he said to a staffer in the control room, through his microphone, “I thought you’d like that.” TMZ quickly picked up on Roker’s jab, and then dozens of other media outlets did, too. ABC’s early-morning newscast even mentioned it, which pissed off Roker so much he tweeted about it. “Some competitors are classier than others,” he wrote. All the media outlets seemed to be framing it as a kind of Freudian ad lib aimed at Lauer for forcing Curry’s departure.
On Thursday night, while Roker’s remark made the rounds, an NBC executive ordered a round of drinks at a bar a safe distance from 30 Rock and brought up the prior day’s resounding loss to GMA. A gap of half a million viewers, three days after the Olympics? It was worse than anyone had imagined. “This is rejection. This is rejection,” the executive said, raising his voice. “It’s over. We’re in second place.”
Chapter 18
The Empty Chair
Could the billion-dollar Today show franchise be fixed? Bell and the other executives and producers there could not rewind and edit “the Ann situation,” as Bell had called it in his memo of July 10, out of their once-glorious history, but could they make improvements that, as time passed and the audience’s anger gradually faded, would result in the re-summiting of Mount Nielsen?
While Bell was busy producing the Olympics in London, Capus and his top lieutenant in New York, former Nightly News producer Alex Wallace, started looking into the matter. As we know by now, Capus and Bell had never seen eye to eye about what The Problem at the Today show really was. For Bell it was Curry’s incompetence as a cohost; as a Today correspondent put it, “He thought it was Ann and Ann alone. He didn’t see structural problems, he saw one problem.” Capus, on the other hand, did not think Curry had been the main issue. Neither did Wallace, the highest-ranking female executive in the news division. Their point of view was gaining traction within 30 Rock: after all, Curry was gone, a patently more adept replacement had been found in the form of Savannah Guthrie, and the ratings were still shrinking faster than Al Roker after his stomach-stapling.
At Capus’s behest Wallace poked around Today during the Olympics, treating the show as if it were some rogue unit operating within NBC News (which in some ways it was). The assignment was uncomfortable both for her and for Bell’s loyal staffers. “I know I’m not supposed to be here,” she is said to have remarked at one point. But Capus wanted her there, and so did Fili, the new woman in charge.
Wallace held a meeting in early August, while the Americans were still racking up gold medals in London, to strategize over what Today should do after the Olympics. To Don Nash, who called in to the confab from London, the answer was obvious: more attention-grabbing stories. According to people with knowledge of the meeting, Nash told Wallace and the half dozen producers gathered with her, “GMA can do buzzier stories than we can, because Matt won’t let us.” He recalled giving Lauer a heads-up about an interview Natalie Morales was pursuing with the family of a young American man who was mauled by a chimp in South Africa. The family later decided not to talk with Today, but Nash said that Lauer, who was thought to have been exerting more editorial influence since signing his new contract in April, responded, “After the Olympics, I don’t know if that’s going to be our show.” (Nash denies making either of these statements. The show did air the chimp attack.)
Although the alleged exchange may seem insignificant—just another chimp conversation in a genre of television that seems to play the chimp card (funny chimp, savage chimp, hero chimp, endangered chimp, even possible mystery-guest chimp) every time it doesn’t have a Missing Blonde Girl to turn to—it was evidence of nothing less than the battle for the soul of the Today show. Of course Today’s biggest problem could have simply been that GMA lusted more fiercely after victory. That GMA was hungrier. Consider that night in late November 2011, when GMA was still firmly in second place, and a freelance ABC producer spent a lousy night sleeping on the hallway floor outside Gary Giordano’s room at the Ritz-Carlton. He was guarding against the possibility that the Today show might come in the night and try to steal Giordano. “Of course there’s Robin, who’s famous, George, who’s famous, and these new hosts, and they are the show, no doubt,” said Ben Sherwood. “But it is not an exaggeration to say that the kid who slept on the floor to protect that interview is a hero. That kid is the difference between winning and not winning.”
Perhaps the other difference was on display not far from Lauer’s home in the Hamptons on a Saturday afternoon in July, when Josh Elliott and Sam Champion attended an ovarian cancer charity event that counted Spencer as one of the hosts. Spencer brought her husband; Champion brought his boyfriend. (Champion got married in December, becoming the first openly gay cohost of a network morning show.) At the charity event Denise Rehrig bumped into one of her counterparts at Today, Debbie Kosofsky.
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br /> “I don’t get it,” Kosofsky remarked to Rehrig when she saw the three GMA hosts hanging out together on a day off. “Did everyone just meet here?”
“No,” Rehrig said, “everyone came together.”
Kosofsky gave her a quizzical look. She asked, “Are you shooting something for the show?”
It took a little while for Kosofsky to suspend her disbelief. But this was just a typical Saturday afternoon, not some setup for a future segment on GMA.
Then Kosofsky gave Rehrig this look of awe. She said, “That’s why you guys are winning.”
But Lauer attributed the Today show’s ratings weakness largely to content choices, not chemistry: he still felt the show relied too heavily on sensational, scandalous stories of the sort that could be found all over GMA. A worldly man of fifty-four, he had basically zero interest in silly stories about performers who were often less than half his age. He wanted his show to concentrate on more substantial subject matter—like the notably chimp-less 2012 presidential election—and thereby raise the level of the competition. Arguably what he wanted was a return to the newsier Today of the 1990s, when he was the new cohost, Jeff Zucker was the producer, and the winning streak was born. The day of the meeting, Nash is said to have remarked, “I think he’d rather go to number two than have one more person tell him at a cocktail party that they do too many tabloid stories.”
Producers like Nash—who had to answer for the ratings just as the cohosts did, but didn’t have twenty-five-million-dollar contracts to fall back on—just wanted to win, baby, even if that meant bringing a stop-the-presses prominence to news of Jennifer Aniston’s engagement, as Lauer found himself expected to do at the beginning of his first show after the Olympics. Natalie Morales’s story about the actress’s impending marriage to Justin Theroux led the seven thirty a.m. half hour. “Matt and Savannah, I’m sure you’ll all be invited,” Morales said, leading Guthrie to quip, “Matt has been so worried about this.” Tellingly, when GMA cohost Lara Spencer covered the same engagement news ten minutes later, there was not a drop of sarcasm. “We are so happy for her,” Spencer said before teasing a story about Miley Cyrus’s makeover.
Top of the Morning: Inside the Cutthroat World of Morning TV Page 25