Top of the Morning: Inside the Cutthroat World of Morning TV (22 page)

King left the meeting intrigued enough to talk it through with Winfrey. What should she do, King wondered, if they offered her the job? She worried that OWN would garner more bad press if she left. But Winfrey told her, “You must take it! You must, you must!” Said King, “She knew it was a huge opportunity and it was tailor-made for me.”

The next time the trio convened, about a month later, it was in a private room at the Capital Grille. There the executives dropped Rose’s name for the first time. “I was like, ‘Wow, wow, wow’—capital letters, exclamation points, and flashing,” she recalled.

By this time nearly all of Rose’s friends, including Mayor Bloomberg, were telling him not to do the CBS show, saying he could not possibly juggle both it and his nightly interview program, and that the latter should be considered sacrosanct. Rose responded by saying that everything in his career had prepared him for this. He talked of “reimagining the morning” and bringing his brand of in-depth interviews to the breakfast hour. If he and King were a marriage made in the mind of Les Moonves, neither he nor anyone else at CBS seemed to care. “I knew a big part of us getting any kind of traction,” said Licht, “would be about viewers saying, ‘That’s unexpected. I’m going to actually tune in to see what that looks like.’”

The competition thought they knew very well what it would look like. “Insanity,” said the CEO of a rival network. “People are doing a happy dance over here,” said a senior executive at ABC. “When you’re CBS, you have two choices: try to get a bigger slice of the existing pie, or bake a new pie,” said Steve Friedman, the
Today
producer in the eighties who had tried twice to resuscitate CBS’s morning show in the 2000s. But he saw the Rose-King show as a third alternative: “No pie.” Retrenchment.

Of course, there’s nothing like a chorus of doubters to motivate a new team, which saw itself as pivoting back to the basics. Licht told his staff that he wanted to beat the
Today
show by 2015, giving them three years to do it. At a November 15 news conference to introduce Rose, King, and Erica Hill, who’d been spared execution as part of
The Early Show
, the big shots were almost giddy as they described how they’d be breaking the conventions of twenty-first-century morning TV by eliminating all the silly stuff. “Where will the weatherman sit? Oh…wait,” said Licht, pretending to forget that the show would have no weatherman. There was no kitchen for cooking segments, either. “Watch the
Today
show if you want that,” Licht said. “They’re great at that stuff. Or watch the Food Network.”

*  *  *

So much for those who don’t know how it is done—assuming by
it
you mean not necessarily putting on the most intellectually stimulating show but gathering eyeballs in sufficient quantity to get you into first place in the ratings.
CBS This Morning
is a great show. But you couldn’t win the morning game in 2012 by trotting out Charlie Rose and telling people to go watch something else if that’s what they want, not when the numbers indicate all too clearly that America is already focused on the many other options beyond your time slot—not just other shows, but Web sites, apps, or simply sleeping in—and when so many of its citizens would truly like to find out how to caramelize onions. If the growing success of
GMA
was teaching us anything from mid-2011 onward about the unwritten rules of morning TV, it was that, whether you imitate
Today
or not, you’ve got to play to the heart of America as much as the mind. You’re helping teachers and lawyers and secretaries wake up in the morning—and that takes a lot of skills that aren’t taught in any journalism classroom in this country. There’s no one on the staff of
Today
or
GMA
—where, by the way, some producers make two hundred thousand dollars a year and show-runners make over a million with ratings bonuses—who has not heard an exasperated parent say, “Ohmygod, for this you went to college?” Yet their parents almost always watch every morning—and can’t wait to hang out backstage when they visit New York.

Would you like to take a little tour?

It’s May 22, 2012, a typical Tuesday in some ways and yet in others a very special evening for
GMA
. The season finale of
Dancing with the Stars
is being broadcast live on ABC, and eighteen million viewers, the network’s biggest prime-time audience in months, are expected to tune in to see Donald Driver, Katherine Jenkins, and William Levy compete for the show’s mirror-ball trophy.
GMA
will get an automatic boost in its ratings by virtue of all the televisions that will still be tuned to its network when people turn their sets back on in the morning. But the real bonanza, the real benefit of there no longer being thick walls separating self-promotion, entertainment, and journalism, will come as a result of exclusive interviews with the winners and losers at the studio in New York City the next morning, after the competitors are flown overnight from the West Coast but before Americans have had a chance to gather ’round the water cooler and hash out what happened.

Dancing with the Stars
ends at eleven p.m. East Coast time, and the charter flight with the valuable payload of guests is supposed to touch down at Teterboro Airport in New Jersey at six a.m. During the broadcast Ariane Nalty, a
GMA
producer in charge of getting the dancers onto the plane, calls Jay Shaylor, the overnight producer, with good news. Len Goodman, the competition’s persnickety British judge, has, after a little bit of cajoling, agreed to say, “Coming up next, the
Good Morning America
dance party.” This to you may pale in comparison to, say, the victory of General P. G. T. Beauregard at First Manassas, but when you work the graveyard shift in morning television, it’s the little wins that get you through the night.

Postgame interviews with reality show stars are the stuff of which ratings coups are constructed. They are one of those things, like chocolate, that always work. CBS has done them with
Survivor
and
Big Brother
.
GMA
has been doing them with
Dancing
for years. (NBC, inexplicably, doesn’t do them with
The Voice
as well as it should.) But this time, just to keep things fresh and fancy, the producers want to stage an early-morning red-carpet arrival at the
GMA
studio in Times Square. They want to turn it into an “event.” That is, if the plane arrives on time.

In the almost-empty sixth-floor production office of
GMA
, twenty blocks north of Times Square,
Dancing
is playing silently on an overhead TV. So far it’s a slow news night—though Shaylor, superstitious in the manner of many TV producers, won’t say the word
slow
aloud.

At 11:25 p.m. Shaylor is about a third of the way through his workday, and the show is falling into place, as neatly as it ever does. A special preview of the movie
Men in Black 3
is ready to go; a news story about Facebook’s bungled IPO is about half-finished. There are still a couple of blanks on the rundown. That’s by design: Shaylor has to leave space for the unexpected.

Shaylor, a talkative Columbia Journalism School grad wearing black-rimmed glasses, a T-shirt, and jeans (the dress code is one of the perks of this shift) is about to screen a rough cut of a story about a missing Louisiana girl when a production assistant tells him to pick up the phone. “The dog,” he says, “is having a problem.”

“
GMA
, this is Jay.”

The dog is a two-year-old coonhound named Maddie who has achieved online fame for standing atop things—canoes, trucks, cabinets, people. Yep, just standing there on four legs, on top of things. Maddie is morning show gold—just the kind of surprise in-studio guest who will keep people watching even as they text their friends and tell them they ought to watch, too. Morning show viewers love animals, especially dogs. (Even Stephanopoulos, who feels it is his job to lobby for more serious segments, sometimes e-mails his wife when there’s a cute dog coming up. “Tell the girls,” he writes.) The dog, like the dancers, was a go for the next morning’s show, but now Shaylor can’t believe what he’s hearing.

There is no way to sugarcoat this, gentle reader. Josh Elliott’s “Play of the Day” segment may be in danger.

On the line is Theron Humphrey, a thirty-year-old photographer who is Maddie’s proud and opportunistic owner. When
GMA
discovered Maddie on the Web and asked to have her on the show, Humphrey rushed Maddie to Los Angeles International Airport on his own dime, ready and willing to take a red-eye flight to New York for a TV appearance that will last three minutes at most. But at the gate he discovered that Delta requires the owners of pets to have a health certificate from a veterinarian, even if the beast travels with the luggage. After years of booking lizards and turkeys and cats and dogs, some heroes, others more into tricks and such, no one at
GMA
had known about the requirement. Now it looks as if it’ll prevent Maddie from arriving in time for the show. Suddenly there’s a poignant, dog-shaped hole where Segment 7 used to be.

“How is that possible?” asks Shaylor. “I mean, people fly with their pets all the time…”

With the help of Humphrey, Shaylor calmly but persistently wrangles a Delta representative, Jerry Hughes, onto the phone and begins his negotiations. “How can I get this dog on the plane?” he asks with practiced seriousness. Skilled in the ways of fluff-management, he’s listening for inconsistencies and gradually applying more and more pressure.

“Where is this in the paperwork? I’ve never heard of this…”

Pause while he listens.

“If I go across the street to United or American are they going to treat me this way?…”

Pause.

“I’m platinum on Delta. Happy to give you my number…”

Shaylor wants to find a “creative way,” as he puts it, to fly Maddie to New York. If you’ve ever been stopped for speeding in northern Georgia, or Sardinia, you may have heard yourself saying this same sort of thing. But the Delta rep isn’t wavering, in fact is claiming that by federal law he can’t waver—and time is running out. It’s 11:34 p.m. now, and the flight is scheduled to take off in fifty-six minutes. If Maddie misses this flight, Shaylor tells the Delta man “then the dog will miss its hit time,” as if an airline customer-service rep might know what that meant. The man then asks if Shaylor can hold. Things are not looking good, and yet whatever happens with Maddie, tonight will probably not go down as a night of historically bad proportions. It will not rival the time in 2005 that a
GMA
producer was detained for trying to stop the
Today
show from interviewing the hostage victim he thought he had booked first. Or the time in 2011 when
GMA
landed the first big interview with Gary Giordano, the suspect in the disappearance of his female companion on a trip to Aruba, but Giordano wouldn’t leave his hotel room. A producer sped to the Ritz-Carlton, coaxed him outside, and delivered him to the studio with just about two minutes to spare.

A minute later Shaylor is still on hold. While he waits he explains to me that this, right here, is why he never says the word S-L-O-W.

*  *  *

Like its main rival,
GMA
is on a twenty-four-hour clock. The first formal meeting of the day starts at ten a.m., when the top producers gather in the office of Tom Cibrowski to get their assignments. Cibrowski, a bald, fatherly guy who could talk anyone off a ledge, became the executive producer of
GMA
in March 2012 when Goldston moved up to the VP job he had wanted all along. Goldston remained involved, but it was understood that the show was now Cibrowski’s baby.

The top producers reconvene at four p.m., this time to speak more specifically about their expectations for each segment—how to approach the story, how to sell it to viewers, how to get it done by airtime. They also talk holistically about the mix of segments planned. Is the balance of “light” and “dark” right? Is there time baked in for chitchat between the hosts, showing off their chemistry?

Some of these producers, like Cibrowski, have been up since four a.m., so they head home by five or six p.m. Senior producer Angela Ellis oversees things until Shaylor arrives at about eight thirty. Before Ellis leaves they run through the stories being stitched together overnight, like the correspondent Bill Weir’s segment about Facebook. “I think Cibrowski likes it as the lead,” Ellis says.

“Totally,” Shaylor says.

Shaylor’s night is always busy. He edits the scripts submitted by producers and screens early versions of the next morning’s pieces. Besides making sure that no story will bore the audience at home, he looks for legal and ethical booby traps: Have we licensed that video? Have we called that lawyer for comment? Have we included both sides?

“We want our viewers to wake up to something they haven’t heard,” Shaylor explains. So in scripts he crosses out words like
yesterday
, and encourages the correspondents to say what happened “overnight” or what’s going to happen “later today.”

Shaylor’s been on the overnight shift for a little more than a year. He sees it, just as his predecessors did, as a stepping-stone to a job with better hours.

Until then, he has to solve the late-night dog dilemmas.

Thinking synergy, Shaylor wonders if he can get Maddie on the charter flight that’s whisking the
Dancing with the Stars
entertainers to New York in a few hours. But as it turns out the charter is full.

In a few moments he is back with Delta Guy. “Can we carry the dog on?” he asks. “What if we put a raincoat and a hat on the dog?”

“For that, you’d have to go through passenger service,” the rep mysteriously says.

Then Shaylor thinks, If it’s a health certificate that the dog needs, let’s find a damn veterinarian.

By 11:54, Shaylor is on the phone with a vet in Los Angeles. “They’re willing to accept faxed paperwork,” he says, but the doctor says he must physically examine the dog.