Top of the Morning: Inside the Cutthroat World of Morning TV (34 page)

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.

“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.

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.