Knowing they wouldn’t be quoted by name, the twelve had spoken freely about what they felt was right and wrong about the show. They seemed happy to talk, like a worrywart who has to wait two weeks for a therapy appointment: “There was consistent support for the project,” Sterling noted in the report, “as a way to come together around a clear and shared sense of purpose.” For some it seemed a much-needed chance to gripe: “If I look at the show, I am not sure I’d know what year it is,” said one. “I want to feel like we are watching 2012.” But everyone seemed to be expressing thoughts that they had considered and refined over time—and no one denied that they were facing problems larger and more fundamental than the miscasting of Ann Curry. “We must acknowledge the shift in the kinds of stories people want,” one subject said, “but how do we do this while remaining TODAY?”
On page one of the report, the researchers listed ten “insights” on which there seemed to be a consensus:
we are proud of our tradition
at our best, the whole is greater than the sum of our parts
we’re currently losing the war
we’re open to change, but it’s about focusing more so than changing
our family needs to be fun again
we must define our purpose, and it can’t be their purpose
we must deliver a wide variety of stories and payoffs, but with a through line
we’re most “TODAY” when we advance the story
we’ve lost sight of our audience
our passion shows best when our co-anchors connect to the story
Sterling’s researchers commented on the fact that the twelve Today interviewees barely talked about the viewers at home whose wants and needs they presumably tried to anticipate. The twelve talked in vague terms about “the demo,” but not about serving its members in specific ways. “This is a problem for a show whose success is measured daily by its ability to capture the hearts and minds of Americans,” the report stated.
But if the participants seemed aloof, they were not oblivious to the way relationships among staffers—and between talent and viewers—had deteriorated. “Our sense of family is broken,” one said. “Matt is being blamed, and some in our audience see Savannah as the younger replacement wife,” another said. The researchers concluded that “Ann Curry’s departure was a public airing of family business that’s negatively affected trust in our talent and desire for our viewers to welcome us into their lives. It’s also hurt morale internally.” Still, there was danger in getting too Curry-centric in analyzing the problems. Said one interviewee, “Ann was only 50 percent of the problem; people were leaving for the content, too.”
The main beneficiary of all this misery and miscalculation, everyone involved seemed to acknowledge, was GMA. “There are many aspects of GMA’s family that we may not hold in the highest esteem,” a member of the Today staff told Sterling, “but everyone agrees on one thing: they look like they are having more fun, and we need to bring the fun back!” A big part of having fun came down to relaxing and not caring so much what GMA did. “We are all over the map,” one of the twelve said. “We have to stop reacting and [stop] just doing what they’re doing!” “GMA beat us with a surgery story at 7:42, we copied and it didn’t work.”
A good deal of anger came through in the interviews. “‘GMA’ is a boy band,” one person said; “we’re a group of professional musicians.” But some people noted that the competition had shown a better sense of the zeitgeist. “They went light, just as we were spending too much time on the dark stuff,” said one of the interviewees. Another said of GMA, “They may be ice cream, but we can’t become vegetables.”
Sterling found two schools of thought about how the show should change. The first it called the “look at others” school: “Look outside, especially at GMA, to guide how we should change.” The second, which they called the “back to the future school,” was the one Lauer personified, the one that said the team should “re-discover our sense of self and innovate forward from there.” Sterling stated the obvious: that Today currently suffered from a lack of a clear self-identity. Conjuring up the voice of the staff, it said, “We know we want to be north of ‘GMA’ and south of ‘60 Minutes,’ but then we have trouble defining exactly who we are.” The consultants seemed to throw their weight behind the more high-toned vision of the show’s future espoused by Lauer. “Part of the American viewing diet will always be an appetite for tabloid style journalism,” reads the report. “But this appetite can be fully whetted elsewhere. Tabloid journalism is corrosive to our positioning. Corrosive to our soul. They are not who we are.” According to a producer who read the report, “Sterling dismissed GMA as ‘fluff,’ merely a guilty pleasure.”
“They are an entertainment show that covers the news,” the consultants wrote. “We are a news show that tells compelling stories, and we need to be better at this than we have ever been before.”
Not everyone who saw the report agreed with Sterling’s conclusions. To some it sounded as if the consultants wanted Today to morph into CBS This Morning: as one staffer put it, “To get back to number one, imitate number three.” Sterling had little to say about talent, even though talent was arguably the reason Today was failing the Sound-Off Test, something propounded by Fili and countless other television executives to see how two shows stack up against one another. Turn off the sound and watch the shows side by side, they’d say: see which team is having more fun. See which team you’d rather spend time with. The answer in 2012 was GMA.
Fili knew that. And that’s one of the reasons why, as the fall wore on, it began to look more and more as if Bell would not be part of Today’s future. It was not an easy time for the man who had once run a show that had a string of victories going back to the Clinton administration. As Curry had in the months leading up to her sign-off, he resisted the inevitable, avoiding conversations about a new job, talking in public about how much he loved Today, and showing up for work every day despite suspecting that his boss—in this case Fili—wanted him gone. The Olympics job was a hugely important job, but it was awfully hard to give up Today.
That Bell should wind up a loser in the morning game was, to some observers, ironic, since a strong case could be made that he had jump-started the Today show’s recovery. Not only did he take out Curry—a hard but necessary thing, many believed—but he brought in both Savannah Guthrie and her friend and occasional fill-in Willie Geist, who was about to join the cast full-time as the cohost of the nine a.m. hour. Both of those hires, almost everyone agreed, had made Today better.
Geist, thirty-seven, was perhaps the single biggest beneficiary of Don Imus’s stupid 2007 slur. “In the span of five seconds, Don Imus talking about the Rutgers women’s basketball team changed my life forever,” Geist said. The son of CBS correspondent Bill Geist, Will had already worked all the grunt jobs of TV—he’d logged plays, edited tapes, produced interviews, written jokes, brainstormed shows for CNN and Fox Sports Net. He’d been hired by MSNBC in 2005 to help produce a late-night show for the conservative commentator Tucker Carlson. At the end of every episode of this show, which was titled The Situation with Tucker Carlson, Geist came on camera to sum up the day’s pop-culture news in a segment with Carlson called “The Cutting Room Floor.” “I definitely had the bug,” he said. But Geist wasn’t on a mission to become TV “talent.” It just sort of happened. Olbermann asked him to tape a couple stories for Countdown. Joe Scarborough, who was still on in prime time, asked him to do the same. “They were closer to the Onion than Nightly News,” Geist said. But the segments impressed the right people. When Imus was fired, Geist was on Scarborough’s list of suggested costars for a new show called Morning Joe.
Geist was initially Scarborough’s sidekick, a source of comic relief amid serious political debates. But gradually he refashioned himself into the kind of calm voice of reason that perfectly suited the upbeat and aggressively unthreatening environment of the Today show. Geist started filling in for Laue
r in 2011 and seemed like the designated sub in 2012, just as Geist’s contract was coming up for renewal. NBC persuaded Geist to stay by offering him a package deal: he’d helm the nine a.m. hour, continue to fill in for Lauer, and contribute to NBC Sports and its Olympics coverage. He’d even continue to cohost the six a.m. hour of Morning Joe, televised across the street.
Capus, Fili, Burke, and even Tom Brokaw were all involved in keeping Geist at NBC, but Bell got to announce the young cohost’s promotion. Geist, a beneficiary of Curry’s fall (since Guthrie’s rise opened up the nine a.m. time slot for him), tried to paper over all the terribleness. “Right now I see a moment of great opportunity,” Geist told me the day his promotion was announced. “And the great news is that everybody over there at the Today show feels the same way, too.”
Bell by this point was all but gone. By late October, according to people at NBC News, he had stopped resisting Fili’s order and started negotiating with NBC Sports for a new contract. He told colleagues that he was opting for “stability,” his word, in sports after a stressful year (or seven of them) in news. Fili and Capus, meanwhile, had settled on a new, two-tiered management structure for Today. They’d appoint Alex Wallace, the female VP who had conducted an assessment of the show while Bell was producing the Olympics—and whose responsibilities included overseeing Curry’s reporting unit—to be the executive in charge. They would also appoint someone—it was unclear who, but Povich was in contention—to be the show’s executive producer. This system had worked back in 2005, the last time GMA was a threat, when Bell was the producer and Phil Griffin was the executive in charge.
Change was in the air of the Today show control room in early November. Bell’s deputies put out feelers for work elsewhere, thinking they might fall victim to a corporate bloodbath. His longtime No. 2 Don Nash inquired with ABC about work on Saturday the tenth. And then the shake-up finally started to, you know, shake. When Wallace’s role leaked on Monday the twelfth, NBC confirmed the by-now-obvious: that Bell was leaving. He’d have the same responsibilities he’d had over the summer, executive-producing NBC’s Olympics coverage, only now he’d have them full-time. The official line, which had also been the official line with Curry, was that he was being matched with a job at which he excelled and relieved of burdens that were almost beneath a person of his extraordinary talents. Bell said the change was bittersweet. “When you start to look at the truly special franchises in television, the ones that have stood the test of time and the ones that continue to not just be relevant but really thrive, it’s a very short list,” he told Sports Business Daily. “The Olympics are on that list. And the Today show is on that list.”
NBC told reporters that it would be able to name a new Today executive producer by the end of the week. First, though, it had to pick one. Fili was intrigued by a pairing of Povich and Tammy Filler, the producer of the ten a.m. hour. It would have been an all-female team, and an innovative one, too. Today needed innovation. But Fili encountered resistance—from Lauer, some said. An NBC executive said, “Matt had no veto power,” but admitted, “we weren’t going to put somebody in that Lauer completely disagreed with.” Povich and Filler were never offered the jobs; Fili accepted that such a move might be too disruptive. Instead, Fili and Capus decided to promote from within. Don Nash was in his car, heading home to Connecticut at around four o’clock the next day, when Capus called and offered him the job. “I was overcome with emotion,” Nash said. “I was thrilled, I was humbled, I was excited. It was almost a surreal experience.”
Nash very much wasn’t what some people thought the show needed—a break from the past. He was the past. A mild-mannered twenty-three-year Today veteran, he had been passed over for the executive producer job in 2005 when Zucker went out and recruited Bell from NBC Sports. He’d reached out to ABC recently when he suspected he was going to be passed over again. But in his conversations with Fili and Capus, Nash had said all the right things about the future: specifically, that Today “needed to evolve.” “I’m easily bored. I have the attention span of a gnat,” he told me on the day of his promotion. “I think one of the reasons why I got the job is, I’m always looking for the next thing.”
For Capus, Nash’s appointment was a big victory—a long-awaited vanquishing of Bell. He couldn’t wait to get the news out. The prose in his press release sounded boilerplate: “I am thrilled for Don and for Today,” the statement read. “I know firsthand the show will benefit from Don’s unmatched morning television experience, control room skill and leadership.” But when Capus introduced Nash as Today’s new boss at a two p.m. staff meeting amid the show’s rows of cubicles on Wednesday the fourteenth, the applause was loud and sustained and the expressions genuinely joyful. “The feeling,” said one staffer, “was ‘One of our own is up there. He gets the show. He’s not gonna come in here and tell us we suck. He’s gonna look out for us.’” Lauer and Nash had their share of disagreements, but at least they knew and respected each other.
But simply appointing a well-liked producer was no more a solution for Today’s problems than removing Curry had been. The solution lay deeper, somewhere in the shifting reasons viewers reach for the remote control—or don’t—when they wake up. Fili alluded to it when she talked to a reporter from the Wall Street Journal on the fourteenth. “People wake up with their smartphones, that’s their alarm,” she said, “so when you are presenting the ‘Today’ show, we have to keep that in mind.” The world had changed, and Today had to, too.
* * *
One thing had changed already: the arrogant edge was off the voices of producers and bookers handling pitches from book, film, and would-be guests’ publicists. The aura of invincibility was gone. Instead of thumping its chest about the ratings, NBC issued weekly press releases noting that it was “closing the gap” with GMA. Closing the gap! Imagine how hard those words are to write if you’ve spent the past sixteen years issuing pompous press releases about your gargantuan winning streak. It was true that, with a mix of somewhat more substantial stories (but still with plenty of breaks for fun and games), Today was edging a little closer to number one in the twenty-five-to-fifty-four-year-old demographic, now and then—and it managed to beat GMA in the demo by six thousand the week that Hurricane Sandy ravaged the New York region (although that week didn’t count in the year’s ratings because of the widespread power outages related to Sandy). But the larger truth was that Today was now the number two morning show, even if it pulled off a win once in a while. On Bell’s very last day in charge, Friday, November 30, Nielsen released numbers that showed just how much the TV world had changed, and in which direction it was going. The ratings were for the November sweeps month, sweeps being a vestige of a time when ratings were collected just a few times a year, not every second of every day. During the November sweeps in 2010, Today had won by nearly 942,000 viewers. During the sweeps in 2011, it had won by 663,000 viewers. And this November? Today lost by 466,000 viewers—a swing of more than a million in one year.
Kopf, the spokeswoman, countered that bad news with the only positive piece of information she could scrounge up: Today had won in the demo for the three days leading up to Thanksgiving. After that, though, Today looked as deflated as a Macy’s parade balloon on Black Friday. Lauer looked exactly the same way. Viewers—make that former viewers—continued to assail him for his role in Operation Bambi. And he continued to avoid questions about what his role had really been. Online commenters even ganged up on him when he mispronounced the name of the George and Ira Gershwin song “’S Wonderful” while hosting the Thanksgiving parade. Seriously. He said “S-Wonderful.” A week later, a Page Six story provided the year’s best reminder of how badly Today had been mismanaged, and how seriously Lauer had been hurt by it all. The story was a rebuttal to another gossip column’s claim that Lauer would be fired if the show’s ratings didn’t rebound soon. “There is absolutely no truth to this,” Alex Wallace told Page Six.
Of course there wasn’t. Today was still Th
e Matt Lauer Show. But that the question had to be asked—“Will Matt survive?”—and answered by NBC—“Yes”—was nothing short of astonishing. Even Ben Sherwood couldn’t have scripted it.
GMA returned to first place in the demo the week after Thanksgiving and stayed there for the rest of 2012. This was in spite of ABC’s prime-time schedule, not because of it: the network’s audience at night was minuscule, while NBC was enjoying a resurgence, yet people were still switching the channel to GMA in the morning. America had chosen.
Nash officially took over on Monday, December 3. But Bell came back that day for a televised toast. The cast, equipped with champagne glasses, congregated in the control room at eight thirty a.m., where Bell was sitting at his old desk in the middle of the room. Nash was still standing in his former spot in the front row, running the minute-by-minute production of the show. The body language was telling. Bell didn’t bother to stand up while Lauer congratulated him for “seven fantastic years” and Guthrie told him to “enjoy sleeping in.” Like a lot of Today segments from the last few years, it seemed like something you’d seen already. But Bell clinked his glass with all the cast members and said thanks. Then Lauer, as he had done with Curry, asked Bell to assure him that they would surely work together again, at the next Olympics.
“We’ll see you in Sochi, right?” Lauer said.
“Russia and Rio,” Bell affirmed.
After the toast, Roker invited viewers to see what was happening in their neck of the woods and Lauer hurried upstairs for an interview in the studio. The other hosts told Bell again how much they appreciated his management over the years. Morales, who speaks Spanish and Portuguese, said, “If you ever need a translator, you know who to call.” Roker shook Bell’s hand and said, “I’ll follow you to the ends of the Earth, baby.” All the while viewers were still seeing a local weather report—at least that’s what the Today hosts thought. Lauer wasn’t in place for the interview yet so Guthrie, acknowledging the awkwardness of Bell’s goodbye, deadpanned, “Jim would love to be interviewed a little further.” Bell laughed and said, “Yes!”
Top of the Morning: Inside the Cutthroat World of Morning TV Page 27