Read Top of the Morning: Inside the Cutthroat World of Morning TV Online
Authors: Brian Stelter
Tags: #Non-Fiction
From the mid-seventies, when
GMA
was born, until the mid-nineties, the two main morning TV shows were like gaily colored merry-go-round horses moving side by side. Their crazy-eyed expressions remained frozen but their positions constantly changed. When one was high, the other was low. (CBS, in our metaphor, can be thought of as that flightless swan chair that nobody ever sits in.) Instead of being driven by a clockwork mechanism, though,
Today
and
GMA
rose and fell according to how well their hosts were demonstrating that ineffable thing called chemistry, or how misguided their producers were when it came to anticipating the audience’s desires. Errors played as large a role as home runs in the grand scheme of things, and the upward stroke was always a prelude to the downward. Since fantastic amounts of advertising revenue, and many careers, hung in the balance, the suspense over the Nielsen numbers remained a nauseating constant, especially if like most people in TV you thought in terms of failure and punishment. For about twenty years it was bad to be down and not much better to be up, the one sure sign you’d be down again presently. And then one day one of the carousel steeds turned into Secretariat and galloped right off the ride.
There was no magic involved, though; in morning TV, except for the mysterious coming and going of on-screen chemistry, there never is. No, what the
Today
show did to change the dynamics of the so-called morning wars, and start its unprecedented streak of victorious weeks, was and remains fairly obvious: its producers put Deborah Norville on permanent maternity leave, teamed Katie Couric with Bryant Gumbel, built a new street-level studio in midtown Manhattan, and set Jeff Zucker loose on the joint. But because, as any life coach worth her masters in Russian lit will tell you, you always learn more from losing than from winning, let us focus on what
GMA
, starting in the early nineties, got so gloriously wrong, for it was the size of the hole it dug that made the show’s climb to daylight, sixteen years later, so amazing.
First a word about the way the game was played in those days. It was played, in one very important way, like chess. If you look at the morning show record from back in those less-diverse days you’ll see there was a direct connection between Nielsen success and how well you managed your blondes. Protect the queen! Walters, Pauley, Norville, Couric, Diane Sawyer—these women all had a powerful impact, one way or the other, upon the ratings, and you had to handle them with care.
GMA
went platinum in 1980 when it promoted Joan Lunden, a California bottle-blonde born Joan Blunden, to the chair beside Hartman, replacing Sandy Hill, who let us just say does not today have her own Wikipedia page. Lunden got her big break on the show, as a last-minute substitute host, in
42nd Street
fashion, when both regulars came down with laryngitis one morning, and the audience loved her from her storybook start. When Gibson replaced Hartman in 1987, she made a seamless transition from one potato-faced partner to the next. Profiting from the Norville debacle at
Today
, the Gibson-Lunden team helped lead
GMA
back to the top in the ratings and helped keep it there for five years. They didn’t sizzle, but they made you feel warm and safe. “Charlie used to say we were like an old married couple,” Lunden said. “We could finish each other’s sentences but we didn’t have sex.” Still, when
Today
countered with Couric in 1991, ABC could not prevail in that epic battle of the blondes.
Today
caught up to
GMA
at the end of 1994 and started trading off turns at number one. At the end of 1995 the seesawing stopped and the
Today
show streak began. The crazy talk about taking away the eight a.m. hour was silenced, thank God.
A lot of the credit for this went to
Today
, specifically Jeff Zucker, for latching on to the Trial of the Century of 1995, the O. J. Simpson murder trial. Zucker said he loved what the trial “said at every level about race and crime and status in society. So I used the trial to cover all those things, and I wrapped a bow around it and made people think we were doing the smartest coverage of the trial.” Not just salacious—smart.
GMA
consciously decided not to dwell on the trial, and suffered mightily for it. But Lunden, it must be said, was not entirely innocent of blame. She had, over the course of the previous decade, committed the cardinal sin of getting older.
GMA
had aged, too, and so was perceived by some as having gone stale—especially when put up against the younger, fresher
Today
. “Viewers gulp down early-morning TV like a first cup of coffee,” Frazier Moore of the Associated Press wrote in early 1997. “But while Today delivers the sought-after kick, Good Morning America is strictly decaf”—and, he couldn’t resist adding, “a dull grind.” Interviewed for the story, Alan Wurtzel, an ABC executive who oversaw
GMA
, seemed happy to slam his own show: ABC, he said, “stayed too long with a very, very successful program.”
Morning, as a category, makes mere mortals of the best TV minds. Pat Weaver went with a chimp as a cohost of the 1950s
Today
, Ebersol chose Norville—and in the mid 1990s Roone Arledge, after long resisting the idea, at last agreed to take
GMA
off the hands of the entertainment division and absorb it into ABC News, of which he was then president, though he had not a clue about how to make it better, nor did he realize that, the way things would work out, financially speaking he was doing the news division a possibly lifesaving favor. “We could hardly do worse than Entertainment, I figured, and in the spirit of helping a beleaguered program, we went for it,” Arledge, who simply didn’t get morning TV, wrote in his 2004 memoir. The Walt Disney Company, which was then in the process of acquiring the network, didn’t know what to do with
GMA
either. But Gibson and Lunden had been around the TV business long enough to know that they should get out of the way of the inevitable fix-it crews.
It took the network a while to find the seemingly perfect Lunden substitute: Lisa McRee—blonde, California-bred, pretty in a Lunden sort of way but born in 1961 as opposed to 1950. Lunden signed off on a Friday and McRee took over on a Monday in September 1997. No doubt some people who didn’t follow TV news all that closely thought that Lunden had had a little work done over the weekend. The look was that similar—but man, the chemistry wasn’t. “At the time, Lisa was thought to be the future for the franchise,” said David Westin, Arledge’s successor atop ABC News. But the show, already in second place, sagged further in the ratings, and something like panic started to set in. “After several months, it was clear on the air and behind the scenes that Charlie and Lisa were not a good fit,” Westin said. Making matters worse, mutual disdain between the news and entertainment divisions had made the handover to ABC News much harder than it had to be. There was so much finger-pointing you could lose an eye walking from Gibson’s office to Westin’s.
Not knowing what to try next, the executives tried everything. “We went through three or four different show structures behind the scenes,” recalled Tom Touchet, who joined the staff in 1995 and was later promoted to be a senior producer. Management, he said, “didn’t have a vision for what the show should be. Therefore, almost every week, you’d have these wild swings.” One week the staff would be told to pursue serious news stories; the next they’d be told to soften up the show with fun features. “I think viewers ended up with whiplash,” Touchet said. “We lost the continuity of what made the show work, and we weren’t building toward anything new.”
Gibson was the next casualty. On the first day of May 1998,
GMA
said goodbye to him the same way it had to Lunden the prior fall—that is, sentimentally, with a lot of fanfare, beginning with a videotaped message from President Bill Clinton. At the end of the two-hour tribute show, Gibson thanked the audience for watching
GMA
, then looked off camera and said, “Lisa, Kevin, take care of it.”
They didn’t. Nothing was right, singly or in combination, about McRee and her new cohost Kevin Newman, a pleasant but bland Canadian who had been made the news anchor on
GMA
the prior fall. They hardly knew each other, and it showed—“It was a shotgun marriage,” Newman said later. The audience didn’t know them either—nor did it have any desire to watch them perch uncomfortably on their new, cold, hard, chrome-heavy set, for which ABC had spent three million dollars. By the end of the year
GMA
had dropped dangerously close to third place in the morning race. Looking back on the period, Newman said he sensed disaster from the moment Westin called and breathlessly offered him a job that even he knew he was unprepared for. He regretted ignoring his gut instinct, which was to say no to the high-paying, high-profile position. “Too much change in TV is never a good thing,” he said.
He was right about that, but more change was to come. As viewers fled, Westin knew he had to do something. There was talk about scrapping the
GMA
format altogether and running an hour of news followed by an hour of
The View
, the new eleven a.m. talk show that was quickly turning into a hit. Gibson thought that was such a bad idea he went to Westin to protest it.
“You’ve got more than twenty years invested in this concept,” Gibson said. “You’ve got the best-named program in the history of TV. This is a tried-and-true formula if you have the right people.”
“Well,” Westin said, “would you come back and host again?”
The idea sounded as outlandish then as it does now. Thus Gibson declined, but when he heard whom he’d be paired with—Diane Sawyer, then in her tenth year of hosting ABC’s
Primetime Live
—he started to reconsider. Many stars of ABC News had shunned
GMA
in the past, but Sawyer’s presence, he predicted, would change that. As it turned out, Sawyer caused an attitudinal change over at
Today
, too. “I remember thinking, ‘That’s a big move’ when they brought them on,” said Don Nash, who was a West Coast producer for
Today
at the time. “Game on,” Nash and his colleagues thought.
Newman and McRee, as you might have guessed, were replaced faster than you can say
severance
. McRee returned to California, gained a lot of weight, then lost it, and now runs a weight-loss Web site. Newman returned to Canada, where he now hosts a newsmagazine. When
GMA
celebrated its thirty-fifth anniversary in 2010, “Lisa and I were nowhere to be found in its official history,” he wrote in a magazine essay. “We never happened.”
Sawyer and Gibson (who at first said they’d host the show for only a few months—maybe to protect themselves in case the ratings went even further south) made for a dramatic and almost instantaneous improvement in both the quality of
GMA
and the quantity of its viewers. He calmed her down and she revved him up. “Charlie was the key,” Sawyer said. “Charlie was the institutional memory for the audience. I was new energy for Charlie.”
But others at the network believed that it was Sawyer who was the secret of
GMA
’s recovery, and credited new show producer Shelley Ross, one of the few women ever to make it to the upper reaches of morning TV, for bringing out the best in her. Sawyer and Ross were constantly searching for the special something (crime stories? inspirational interviews? overseas trips?) that would restore
GMA
to first place. They had endless amounts of energy.
Today
withstood the challenges and continued winning every single week. Years passed and as the streak was further cemented, it became the stuff of legend—completely unprecedented in the television industry. But the funny thing was, it didn’t yet feel unbeatable. Especially after a forty-year-old producer named Ben Sherwood took over
GMA
in 2004, there were half hours and then days and then weeks to feel good about; there were causes for hope. In morning TV, you gotta give ’em hope.
* * *
Sherwood is one of those highbrows who is not afraid to go low and aim for the emotional labonza, to hit the groundlings where they live. He graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Harvard, then spent several years at Oxford as a Rhodes scholar before working his way up through the news divisions at NBC and ABC. He’s written a best-selling novel that was made into a movie, and a substantial work of nonfiction brought out by the publisher of the book you hold in your hands. He probably likes classical music and stuff. But when he focused on
GMA
as its executive producer, practically the first thing he saw was a chance for the shameless promotion of
Desperate Housewives
, one of his network’s cheesiest and most successful prime-time entries. Over the course of nine months, Gibson, an easily lathered fan of the nighttime soap, and Sawyer interviewed no fewer than five of the show’s MILFy stars. The effect on the ratings—and on the equally besotted
GMA
staff—was nothing short of electrifying. After Gibson’s hard-hitting chitchat with
Housewives
narrator Brenda Strong in February 2005, the cast and crew gave them a standing ovation. “It’s funny,” Strong told the
New York Observer
afterward, “because I didn’t really realize kind of the far-reaching impact that our show had until I went on and Charles actually said, ‘You know, you guys don’t understand—it’s even trickling down to the news department. The entire network feels like it’s gotten a fresh surge of optimism.’”
The
Observer
called the
GMA
hype-fest a “slightly sloppy, gushingly passionate intra-network hug,” and some people at
Today
rolled their eyes at the utter crassness of ABC running virtual infomercials for its own prime-time programming. But the idea of jumping on the company bandwagon, and trading exclusive access for fawning coverage, was nothing new—NBC did it often, too, with the casts of
ER
,
Friends
, and the other hit series it had in the days before it was a nocturnal also-ran. “The thing is, they pioneered using the prime-time schedule to advantage in the morning,” Sherwood said of NBC. “And, you know, we were lucky in 2004–2005 to have a couple of great shows come along and help us.”