Top of the Morning: Inside the Cutthroat World of Morning TV (19 page)

In an interview later, Sherwood said that he wasn’t worried about Elliott’s hiring working out, because of something his future news anchor had said during their first dinner together. Elliott had told him that he used to study improv. And the lesson Elliott came away with, he said, was “Never let it drop.”

“The skill required to keep an improv going is considerable,” said Sherwood, whose brother-in-law Steve teaches companies how to apply improvisational techniques to the workplace. “And Josh’s love of keeping it going, not letting it drop, stood out to me. The hosts of the
Today
show, in its heyday, were excellent at the television equivalent of Hacky Sack. They could kick the Hacky Sack around and it never dropped. And they could do incredible tricks. And just when you thought it was gonna drop, bang, Katie would pop it up in the air or Matt would catch it on his shoulders or Al would bump it over to Ann and Ann would somehow get it back in the air. At
GMA
, we did not have that. We had a lot of things, but we did not have that improv.”

Could these new players change that? Elliott and Spencer both started in May 2011, but Spencer got off to a rocky start. She’d gone from being the sole host of a half-hour show to being the fifth host of a two-hour show. And no one seemed to know what her newly made-up “lifestyle anchor” role entailed. “To be a part of this ensemble with these incredibly talented people and to not know exactly what my role was, was intimidating,” she said. “And I hadn’t felt intimidated in a long time. I wondered, How is this going to work?”

Sherwood sensed she was adrift when they met in June in his fifth-floor office. He likes to adapt his analogies to the person he’s conversing with, so with Spencer, a former competitive diver, he thought sports. Not having aquatic analogies at his fingertips, he resorted to basketball. “Look, Spencer,” he said to her, “I want you to think of yourself as Lamar Odom.”

At the time Spencer and Sherwood had just moved back to New York from LA, and Odom was the sixth man on the LA Lakers—the recent recipient, in fact, of the NBA’s Sixth Man of the Year Award. He was the guy who, coming off the bench first among the nonstarters, helped the Lakers to a division championship four years in a row. “In those days,” Sherwood said later, “when Lamar had a good night, the Lakers won. When Lamar didn’t have a good night, the Lakers didn’t win.”

Sherwood said he wanted Spencer to think of herself as
GMA
’s sixth man. “You know what?” he said. “Every single game, Coach Phil [  Jackson] knows he can count on Lamar to score twelve to fourteen points. And that’s what I need you to do. If you start swooshing and getting me those twelve to fourteen points then I’m going to give you the opportunity to score sixteen points.”

The hardest part of many jobs is having to talk to the boss. Still, Spencer said the Odom analogy calmed her down. It was “a really easy way for me to digest it,” she said. “I’m not kidding you, every single day I was like, ‘I got to get my points.’ And I pretty much think that from that day forward that I got my points every game.” She even started signing her e-mails to Sherwood as “#7,” Odom’s number on the Lakers.

At around the same time
GMA
added a new segment for Spencer, the “Pop News Heat Index,” that brought a bit of her old show,
The Insider
, to
GMA
. A creation of Goldston’s, “Pop News” followed Elliott’s news headlines segment at eight a.m. and provided a dedicated place for the showbizzy and gossipy headlines that viewers craved. In fact,
GMA
sometimes saw a spike in its minute-by-minute ratings when the segment came on. (“It’s the one segment everyone watches, and no one admits to watching,” one staffer said.)

Spencer and one of the show’s writers e-mailed each other at all hours with conversation starters for the segment. The constant goal: to avoid Goldston’s dismissing this or that story as “boooooring,” a word he wielded like a weapon. “It fills a need on the show,” Spencer said of “Pop News.” “People want the headlines in the world of Hollywood and fashion and all things ‘pop.’ And it gave me a defined role.” (Maybe NBC should share in the credit. A few days before “Pop News” premiered in mid-June 2011,
Today
unveiled an almost identical pop-culture wrap-up called “What’s Trending Today.” Likewise, later in the year
GMA
introduced a bargain-hunting segment called “Deals and Steals” that sure sounded inspired by the
Today
show’s “Steals and Deals.”)

Josh Elliott’s job already had a definition—news anchors read the news—and he got off to a strong start by reporting on man-on-the-street reactions to the assassination of Osama bin Laden, which had taken place the night before his first show. Still, Goldston added another segment for him as well, “Play of the Day,” to make him a fuller member of the cast. Elliott, joined by his cohosts, introduced a funny or outrageous viral video—a hero pig saving a baby goat, a dancing ping-pong player, an emu wandering down a highway—and laughed about it with his TV pals. It was a quick segment, sometimes just twenty seconds long, but it was scheduled at the same time every morning and became a bridge between the news rundown at seven a.m. and the more freewheeling portion of the show at eight a.m.

“Each one of these things had a very specific purpose,” Goldston said. “It was to signal a new approach to the audience, and it was also to kind of cement Lara and Josh in their roles.” All of the hosts, he said, “locked in to it incredibly fast. Within four or five weeks you could see it on air. Then of course the audience—well, that process takes much, much longer.”

But something was happening out there in TV land. On the Wednesday morning in June 2011 that
Today
said farewell to Meredith Vieira,
GMA
lost by 1.2 million viewers. That was to be expected—smooth transitions are rewarded with temporary spikes in the ratings. By mid-June, however, the gap returned to about six hundred thousand viewers, right back where it had been before Vieira left. And after the Fourth of July it contracted even more, dipping below the psychologically significant five-hundred-thousand-viewer mark.

There was in truth a little trickery behind
GMA
’s momentum. Taking a page from the playbook of the
Today
show—which had been known to cut out all national commercials after eight a.m. to inflate the ratings on close days—
GMA
one morning in May started to move its last national commercial up by several minutes, thereby making the rated portion of the show a few minutes shorter. The dodge boosted the ratings a bit, giving
GMA
some psychological momentum (you gotta give ’em hope) while at the same time
Today
suffered from what would later be diagnosed as a slow fade.
GMA
ended the month of July—the first full month since “Play of the Day” and “Pop News” were added to the rundown—with 497,000 fewer viewers than
Today
. It was the closest
GMA
had come to number one in six years. It was also Ann Curry’s first full month next to Lauer on
Today
.

Chapter 10

Morning Joe

Was 2011 the most interesting year yet in the history of the so-called morning wars? Quite likely. Think about it: you had at
GMA
a master alchemist mixing together a uniquely televisable team of personalities assembled not just to keep the show going as best they could, but to take back the top spot in the ratings after sixteen years. Simultaneously you had the
Today
show seemingly trying to help
GMA
toward its audacious goal by first propping up and then plotting to tear down Ann Curry as if she were a statue of Saddam Hussein. When the a.m. TV titans do battle, as we’ve seen, it usually comes to one show beating up on a show that is concurrently beating up itself. Go figure. The morning wars are weird that way.

But what of the non-titans, the more focused or indie-style a.m. entries designed for edgier or more eccentric tastes? How did they affect the larger scene as
GMA
rose up and
Today
did its slow fade? There are a lot of peculiar little programs these days, a dozen in all, many of them harboring dreams of becoming like
Morning Joe
, the cultlike MSNBC show that almost everyone in the industry speaks of with reverence. “You’re the most talked-about show that no one watches,”
Today
boss Jim Bell once said to his
Morning Joe
counterpart Chris Licht. To which Licht responded, “You’re the most watched show that no one talks about.” If
Morning Joe
were a guitar player, it would be James Burton.

As anyone reading this book probably knows,
Morning Joe
is a three-hour-long political talk show cohosted by Joe Scarborough, a former Republican congressman from the Florida panhandle, and Mika Brzezinski, a journalist and the daughter of former National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski. Conceived by Scarborough in 2007,
Joe
is arguably the most innovative thing to happen to morning television since
Today
opened its street-level studio in 1994. The freewheeling show, which also features a cast of regular characters like Mike Barnicle and Mark Halperin, strips away some of the conventions of morning TV—like scripted and rehearsed “banter”—and gives guests far more airtime than the network shows normally allot.

“We don’t play ‘TV,’” Scarborough said.

They don’t always play nice, either. Said Brzezinski, “If someone like [actor and former
People
Sexiest Man Alive] Bradley Cooper comes on the set, I’m going to tell him that his movie is the worst movie I have ever seen and I walked out of it. Then Joe’s going to be like, ‘You don’t say that,’ but it’s the truth and that’s how I feel and that’s exactly who I am.”

“And if I’m tired,” Scarborough said, “do you know what I do? I slouch. And you know what? If Mika’s on Ambien from the night before, she says, ‘Sorry, I’m on Ambien from the night before.’”

The physical production of the show helps foster this feeling of spontaneity. The three main cameras are robotic and rarely move around, which makes the set on the third floor of 30 Rock feel a little bit less like a cold television studio and more like a meet-up of highly caffeinated political pals. Indeed, when Brzezinski senses that guests are nervous she will lean across the table before the camera goes on and say, “We’re your friends, we’re around the breakfast table. Let’s just have a conversation.”

And then she tells them how badly their movie sucks.

Before
Morning Joe
, Brzezinski (who’s married to television reporter Jim Hoffer) was underemployed, to put it delicately. She had spent most of the prior ten years as a correspondent and substitute anchor for CBS News. But on her thirty-ninth birthday, in 2006, she was fired. She struggled to find another job, and when she finally did seven months later, it was on the bottom rung of the TV ladder, reading brief news updates between programs on MSNBC. She was freelance, meaning she had no contract and no health benefits from the channel. She spent her fortieth birthday on the overnight shift there, feeling as if things couldn’t get worse.

And then they did. Scarborough, in early 2007, unwittingly took away a bit of Brzezinski’s airtime. He was the host of
Scarborough Country
, the channel’s nine p.m. talk show. “There used to be a minute-long news update,” he recalled. “I cut it down to thirty seconds and I had no idea I was cutting Mika’s job in half.” (“Nor did I,” she said, “because I didn’t care.”)

Scarborough was a conservative—a poor man’s Bill O’Reilly, some said—on a channel that was moving toward an all-liberal lineup in prime time, and on a show that was like a paint-by-numbers parody of cable TV. “I was looking for a way to get out of cable news prime time,” he said. Added Licht, his producer at the time, “I think we all knew our days were numbered.”

But where else could they go? Certainly not to the mornings. For MSNBC’s first eleven years, a simulcast of the Don Imus radio show had taken up the six-to-nine a.m. time slot. Cheap and nonthreatening to the company’s main morning product, the
Today
show,
Imus in the Morning
was convenient filler for MSNBC—until Imus said on April 4, 2007, that he thought the players on the Rutgers University women’s basketball team looked like “rough girls” and “nappy-headed hoes.” One week later, on April 11, the simulcast was canceled. The executive in charge of MSNBC, Phil Griffin, and the channel’s general manager, Dan Abrams, suddenly had a three-hour void in their weekday schedule. And Scarborough suddenly had a way out of
Scarborough Country
. When Scarborough, sitting on his couch in Pensacola, heard that Imus was out, he called Licht.

“I want to make a play for the morning show,” he said.

“Why the fuck would you want to do that?”

Licht was wary because he knew the hours would be hard, and because the Imus time slot that he’d be inheriting was even lower-rated than
Scarborough Country
. (Scarborough’s wife, Susan, and his parents were just as skeptical.) But the producer said he’d help if he could. On his home computer Scarborough mocked up a one-page pitch and a promotional poster for his imagined morning show. “The past week has been difficult for the entire NBC family,” the pitch began, “but the morning opening also gives MSNBC the opportunity to create the morning newscast of the future.” And, he added, a chance for MSNBC to beat CNN. The poster showed Scarborough’s face and possible cast members, including Willie Geist, who had contributed stories to
Scarborough Country
, and Ana Marie Cox, who had founded the DC blog Wonkette and been a regular on Imus. It had a clip-art picture of a coffee mug with the words “Morning Joe” on it. Scarborough e-mailed the poster to Licht on Saturday, April 14, and said he wanted to get it to management “first thing Monday morning.” Then he uploaded the poster to a FedEx Kinko’s in midtown Manhattan so it could be delivered in person.