And that was the problem right there: Today was still covering celebrity weddings and lurid crimes and the like, but without the verve or sincerity of GMA. Today, in fact, wasn’t all-in on any specific strategy, despite Lauer’s wise admonition at one point that “we need to get on the same page” because “the guys across the street are already on the same page.”
Amid these internal debates, GMA just racked up wins. The week of August 20, GMA beat the former champ by more than half a million viewers; the following week it won by more than eight hundred thousand, and, more importantly, it returned to first place in the demo. Indeed, its lead in that sweet spot was now 150,000 viewers—an exponential improvement over the month before, when GMA had won by just twelve thousand for a week. Now ABC could begin hiking its advertising rates. ABC News president Sherwood sent the numbers to the hosts and ended his e-mails with “Keep it going. Play your game.” Despite all the progress, he still wanted them to play as if they were a half million viewers behind.
Over at 30 Rock, it was as if Bell and his lieutenants thought the ratings crisis would subside if they just pretended it didn’t exist in the first place. The Today show production offices were remarkably tranquil—far too tranquil, in the view of many ordinary staff members. Where was the “brawl” Sherwood had predicted back in April? Today fought back for a little while, then seemed to stop. At cocktail parties, Sherwood asked his old friends from NBC, “What’s happening?” He almost sounded disappointed, as if ABC was winning too easily.
Back at NBC, “there is no leadership” was the phrase I heard more than any other. Bell was keeping a low profile (and squeezing in a little vacation after the Olympics) as rumors revved up that he would soon be replaced at Today. He didn’t take a side in the debate over the show’s future direction until the first week of September, when he spoke out for Lauer’s vision in no uncertain terms. “We have to make the anchor happy,” one of Bell’s staff members recalled him saying. The change was almost instantly apparent on air: in the fall of 2012, Today spent more time on politics and foreign policy and less time on entertainment, particularly in the first hour of the show. But the ratings needle barely budged—and to the extent that it did, it was at the Today show’s expense.
* * *
Robin Roberts’s last week on GMA—the week of August 27—was the first week of her show’s winning streak in the twenty-five-to-fifty-four-year-old demographic. Roberts had been planning on saying, “See you soon”—not goodbye—on Friday the thirty-first. But on Wednesday night her sister Sally-Ann called and said their eighty-eight-year-old mother Lucimarian’s health was failing (she’d had a stroke in July). Roberts couldn’t fly home to Mississippi that night because the airports were shut down while Hurricane Isaac came ashore in Louisiana. So she booked a flight for Thursday morning, right after GMA was to wrap, which meant she would be starting her leave for her bone marrow transplant a day sooner than she had planned.
Cibrowski and the other producers scrambled to rearrange Thursday’s show and make time for Roberts’s sign-off. Two of the hosts were out of town—Champion was in Louisiana covering the hurricane, and Stephanopoulos was in Tampa for the Republican National Convention—but they would participate via remote hookups. Fortunately country star Martina McBride, a friend of Roberts’s, was already scheduled to perform a song for her on Thursday’s show, so the producers built around that, scheduling time for the hosts to give Roberts gifts and for Roberts to interview her doctor.
“Everyone should head downstairs now,” senior broadcast producer Denise Rehrig said in the control room a little after eight thirty. The staff hurried to the studio and gathered behind the couch where Roberts was seated with Elliott and Spencer. As they looked on with barely contained emotion, Cibrowski made a rare on-camera appearance to present her with a bound book of handwritten letters from her coworkers. “We will be with you every step of the way,” Cibrowski said, squeezing her hand. “We are Team Robin.”
Then Cibrowski stepped off set while McBride sang “I’m Gonna Love You Through It,” a song she had written a year earlier for breast cancer survivors like Roberts. He looked at Sherwood, who was standing next to him, and pursed his lips, trying to hold back tears. Sherwood, also welling up, patted Cibrowski’s shoulder.
There hadn’t been time to script what each host was going to say, so the end of the show was ad-libbed. Each of the hosts gave Roberts a gift for her hospital stay—matching pajamas for her and Sally-Ann, a studio prop to remind her of the show, etc.—and then she had a few seconds to sign off. A stage manager crouched underneath her camera shot and counted down from ten to one with his fingers.
“George, Sam, Lara, Josh, my GMA family”—six seconds—“My family there at home: I love you”—three seconds—
Roberts held her fist in the air, striking the same pose as on April 19 when GMA was named number one and she was diagnosed with MDS. She looked directly into the camera. “And I’ll see you soon.”
Roberts, Elliott, and Spencer hugged as the staff applauded—two seconds, one second, and then the broadcast faded to a commercial break. “We’re off,” a stagehand said.
Then Roberts stood up and said what she really wanted to say. “Now that the cameras are off”—she paused and looked around at the staff—“I want you to continue to kick ass!”
The staff laughed; the tension was eased. Roberts bowed her head and spoke the prayer that her mother had taught her as a child: “The light of God surrounds me; the love of God enfolds me. The power of God protects me; the presence of God watches over me; wherever I am, God is.”
Then she looked up and said, “God bless; Godspeed; and I’ll get back to you just as soon as I can.”
Stepping off the stage, she immediately looked for Sherwood, who was standing near the doorway to the lobby. The two hugged for a long time. He whispered in her ear and she nodded her head. Then they let go, and he wiped a tear from his eye.
Roberts’s mother Lucimarian died that night with both her daughters by her side. “Wasn’t easy to get here, but glad I made it,” Roberts wrote in an e-mail. Cibrowski notified the staff at midnight so they could begin planning a televised tribute for the next morning. Roberts’s transplant was delayed for a few days so she could attend her mother’s funeral in Gulfport, Mississippi. Stephanopoulos flew in from the Democratic National Convention in Charlotte so he could attend, too. Then Roberts returned to New York and braced herself for the surgery. She was admitted to the hospital on September 10 and put through eight days of chemotherapy before the transplant on the twentieth. The bone marrow procedure itself lasted just a few minutes. If you understand how GMA operated, you know this just had to be a TV moment. Diane Sawyer and Sam Champion were in the room, along with one ABC camera. “I will now wait and anxiously watch and see what happens,” Roberts said, looking straight into the camera.
GMA aired the video the next morning. After that the anchors mentioned her every half hour, every day, reminding viewers that this was still Roberts’s show—even though no one could say when she would return. It would be much easier to keep winning what Sherwood called “the championship” with her there: boosted by her “see you soon” broadcast, GMA beat Today that week in August by an average of 882,000 daily viewers, its biggest margin since 1994. But GMA had demonstrated earlier in August, when Roberts was on vacation, that if it had to, it could win without her, too. The future depended not just on whether they could keep their fizz from going flat—but on whether Today could recover the formula that had once sold like Coca-Cola.
Some at NBC began to speculate that Lauer was The Problem. His theories about the content of Today, and the bossiness he’d projected since renewing his contract, put him at odds with many of his colleagues, who worried, especially after NBC laid off twenty workers from The Tonight Show with Jay Leno, that they might lose their jobs if ratings remained low—and that Lauer wouldn’t take a salary cut to save jobs, the way Leno had. But these grumblers became insignificant when c
ompared to the dozens and sometimes hundreds who demonized the cohost daily on Twitter and Facebook, or who sent scathing e-mails directly to the show. This Web site comment spoke for the rest of them: “Sadly when I see Matt Lauer on Today I say to myself. ‘Where in the World is my Remote.’” The mainstream press mostly went easy on Lauer, but on September 16 the New York Post’s Page Six column called him the “anchor animal” and quoted an anonymous source who said, “He has gone so crazy about ratings that staff on ‘Today’ are not even allowed to mention ‘GMA’ to him.” (Said Lauer in response: “Please print this story—it’s the most interesting and dangerous I've ever sounded!”) When the Daily News reported that his Q Score had dropped 25 percent in the last year, it also quoted Lauer as saying, “Is it only 25 percent? Because it feels much worse.” It was one of the unintended side effects of Operation Bambi that Lauer, but not Bell and Capus and Burke, was seen as the villain in the plot against Curry. This was partly because Lauer was not exactly the hero of the tale—although he never demanded that she be pushed out, he could have done so much more to help her—and partly because relatively few people knew who the warring executives were. Outside of a very few upper-level staffers at the Today show, no one grasped the important subtleties of the story.
Among the powerful few who did have inside information, however, Bell was in trouble—not at all unlike the trouble Ann Curry had been in months before the ax finally fell. Playing the role of Jim Bell, this time, was Pat Fili, the woman brought in by Steve Burke in July to oversee all of NBC’s news brands—NBC News, MSNBC, and CNBC. Fili had let there be no doubt that job number one was fixing Today. She sized up the show and right away saw an institution that had fallen for its own propaganda. “It just hasn’t evolved,” she told associates matter-of-factly—echoing what so many outsiders had been saying for years. Fili believed in changing the show’s pacing, its story selection, even its set, but she knew she needed to start backstage—with Bell.
By taking that view, remember, Fili was siding with Capus—the man who had wanted to replace Bell for a while now. Capus was one of her direct reports. Fili, perhaps influenced by him, wondered if Bell, after seven years on the job, had become too much of an expert on how things are done, and cared too little about how they might be done differently. According to Fili’s allies, about a month after the Summer Olympics were over she met with Bell and said, in effect, “You have a choice to make.” Fili told Bell that he could produce Today or he could produce future Olympics broadcasts—but he couldn’t do both. Not anymore.
Her allies say Bell balked at first, as Curry had when Bell proposed she leave the Today show’s cohost chair.
“I can do both,” he said.
“No, you cannot do both,” Fili responded.
Fili was unyielding. Today needed someone who was prepared to sit through no small number of therapy sessions to make “America’s first family” whole again. That’s what fucked-up families have to do sometimes. “You need to do some soul-searching,” Fili told him, “to decide if you have the energy to evolve this show.” If Bell didn’t want to or didn’t think such a thing was necessary, that was fine by Fili. NBC Sports wanted him.
Bell could feel his autonomy being stolen away. Already his staff members were whispering that it had been Fili, not Bell, who’d sided with Lauer’s vision for the show and forced everyone else to fall in line. “Jim just tried to make it sound like his decision,” said one. Now it looked as if he was losing one of his two jobs. “He’s having a hard time coming to grips with the fact that he’s being demoted,” an associate of Bell’s said shortly after his initial meeting with Fili. The whole affair reminded a lot of people of 1990, when Bell’s mentor Ebersol returned to NBC Sports after blaming himself for the Deborah Norville disaster at Today.
But Bell’s allies tell a different version of this tale. Bell, some say, knew when he took the Summer Olympics job that the arrangement was temporary: eventually he’d have to choose one or the other. Others say he knew when he took the job that he would be coming back to sports full-time. But Bell never said that publicly, and he declined to comment here. In any case, Fili may have made it a nondecision (to borrow the phrase used for Curry’s promotion) by convincing Burke that Today needed a change at the top. “Pat wanted her own person” running Today, one of Bell’s friends said.
Bell had at least the illusion of choice in September, when Fili and Capus started interviewing candidates for his chair in the control room underneath Studio 1A. On September 26, in a move that surprised many who cover the television business, he summoned a string of reporters by telephone to ask him anything—about Curry’s exit, about Lauer’s level of involvement, about his own future running the Today show. What made this slightly shocking was that Bell had been turning down all interview requests for three months. He had said next to nothing about the circumstances of Curry’s departure, which had allowed a thousand rumors to bloom, many of them reflecting badly on Lauer. “Jim had been shirking responsibility at every turn,” one of Capus’s allies complained.
The day Bell picked for his series of one-on-one interviews coincided with Yom Kippur, the Jewish day of atonement. Bell is a Christian, but atoning is what he was doing nevertheless. “It was all my fault,” he said in essence, over and over again to The New York Times, the Associated Press, the Hollywood Reporter, TV Guide, and others. Don’t blame Lauer or anyone else for the Curry disaster, he said, blame me. “It was definitely not Matt’s call,” Bell said to The Times, of Curry’s dismissal. “He is the host and does not have management responsibility. It was not his call. That was my call.”
Was Bell very belatedly trying to take the heat off Lauer, perhaps at Lauer’s behest? Was he campaigning to keep his job? Those were the theories at the show. But it was hard to say for sure. In the interviews, Bell didn’t express any regret for removing Curry—“it was the best thing for the show”—but he admitted it “didn’t go quite as we had hoped.” When the Hollywood Reporter asked if he had “cleared the air” with Curry, he claimed he had, when in reality she still felt betrayed by him. The Reporter followed up by saying, “But no one seems to want to let the transition go.” Said Bell, “Well, I’m encouraging you to be the first one! Let’s start moving forward.” In practically every interview he did that day, Bell only sort of denied the rumors of his imminent departure, saying suspiciously often of his present position that it was “the best job in the world.”
Fili talked to almost twenty candidates for that “best job.” Herself an example of female leadership in a male-dominated industry, she was keen on hiring a woman or two to remake Today. Chief among the candidates was Izzy Povich, a former producer for The Maury Povich Show (where she’d met her future husband, Maury’s nephew Andrew) who’d worked at MSNBC since 1996. Povich’s biggest claim to fame was running Countdown, the prime-time show hosted by the famously combustible Keith Olbermann. If she could manage him, the thinking went, she could manage anyone! Povich met with Lauer in mid-September for a job interview of sorts—though no one at NBC dared call it that, since the party line was that Lauer was an artiste and had no management involvement. Then she, like all the other candidates, waited to see what Fili would do.
* * *
In addition to ratings, Robin Roberts had a whole new set of numbers to wonder about: her blood counts. After the transplant “I was in a pain I had never experienced before, physically and mentally,” she told People magazine. “I was in a coma-like state. I truly felt I was slipping away.” But her sister Sally-Ann’s stem cells were doing their job of rebooting her bodily systems, piece by painful piece. On October 3, two weeks after the transplant, Elliott and Champion (wearing surgical gloves and masks to protect Roberts from germs) visited her hospital suite for the first time. The next day there was great news back at work: GMA had beaten Today for the entire month of September. In those same weeks Today had hit twenty-year lows. Roberts, for one, said she was not surprised. “I know we consistently have the best
show,” she told me in an e-mail, “and viewers know we care for one another.” Yes, even in the hospital, she was still watching the show every morning and scrutinizing the daily ratings e-mails.
Roberts was released on October 11. For at least three months she would have to stay at home in isolation, to decrease the risk of her getting an infection when her immunity was so low. Elizabeth Vargas and a new hire from NBC, Amy Robach, took turns filling in for her. On October 25, when Oprah Winfrey was guest-cohosting in her absence, Roberts called in to the show for the first time. “I am so incredibly blessed to be doing as well as I am,” she told Winfrey and the cast. Seeming to address the whispered suggestions that GMA was exploiting her illness, she also said, “I think of my dear mother, and she taught me well. It is about being a service to others. It would be a whole lot easier to not be so public when you are going through things like this. The people I have met, who are going through this, their family members who are so appreciative of what we as a family are doing. It’s a privilege to be a messenger.”
* * *
In September, NBC’s marketing unit commissioned Sterling Brands, a consulting firm that helps companies figure out what they are and what they aren’t, to conduct a study that would do just that for Today. Sterling interviewed twelve people, including Lauer and Guthrie (but not Roker or Morales); Capus, Bell, and Nash; Jackie Levin, the senior producer in charge of author bookings; and John Kelly, the head of ad sales for NBC News. The product of the interviews, a thirty-six-page report called “Positioning Today,” was delivered to select members of the show’s staff on October 4.
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