Top of the Morning: Inside the Cutthroat World of Morning TV (25 page)

If she hadn’t been waiting anxiously for the results of those bone marrow tests, Roberts might have been more troubled about the way Couric Week was going down. Did she fear that
GMA
would win without her? “It wasn’t a ‘fear,’” she said a few months later. “It was kind of like…I and others, we had been fighting fighting fighting fighting. And knowing that the headline would have been ‘Katie Beats,’ not ‘
Good Morning America
Beats.’ So it was more of like, ‘Wow,
we
, who have been here, will not get the credit.’ But I didn’t fault her or ABC management—because they wanted to keep us in the game. They wanted to keep the momentum going. So I understood. But yeah, at the time, it was kinda like…” (insert loud groan here).

Couric, to be fair, mostly stayed above the fray and had fun with her temporary return to morning TV, pretending at one point to mistakenly call Stephanopoulos “Matt.” By turns flirty and self-deprecating and inquisitive, she was at ease in the mornings, no matter what network she was on, and it showed. Something else showed, too: that the
Today
show could, in fact, step up its game when threatened. It reacted to Couric Week by hyping a “mystery guest” on Couric’s first day (it turned out to be Meredith Vieira), bringing in Sarah Palin to guest-host with Lauer on Tuesday, and flying in Ryan Seacrest on Wednesday. (The chimp idea was abandoned because animal experts warned that chimps are not accepted anymore as entertainers. PETA would have been protesting outside Studio 1A.)

But no one at ABC thought that NBC, in reacting to Couric Week, got it right. Goldston, in the control room a day later, spoke of the competition’s “fatal mistake.” By acting desperate, he thought,
Today
had alerted more people to the morning race and had encouraged its fans to channel-flip, to see what all the fuss was about.

NBC, however, had to fight back. What was it going to do, roll over and let
GMA
win? “We didn’t know whether
Today
would win or lose the week, but we wanted to be armed with the best programming possible,” said Don Nash.

But by bringing back Vieira in a time of crisis,
Today
had underlined how much the show had suffered without her and inadvertently drawn new scrutiny onto Curry and Lauer’s nonexistent relationship.
The New York Times
television critic Alessandra Stanley wrote the following on Monday afternoon:

Monday’s display was more savage than a ratings contest or a booking war; at times it looked as intimate and creepily intrusive as the elimination rounds of a particularly cutthroat reality show. It’s been a long time since NBC put Deborah Norville on the couch alongside Jane Pauley and Bryant Gumbel and turned “Today” into a morning show version of “All About Eve.”

These days it is Ann Curry, who inherited Ms. Vieira’s place but not her popularity, who looks vulnerable.

Ms. Curry had to sit, silent and smiling, on the “Today” set on Monday, alongside Matt Lauer as he urged Ms. Vieira to announce that she would help cover the 2012 summer Olympics and be his co-host, with Bob Costas, for the opening ceremony of the London games. (He did not say what role Ms. Curry would play, if any.)

Earlier, when Mr. Lauer began announcing that Ms. Palin would be a guest host, Ms. Curry smiled grimly, then looked down at her desk, patting papers.

The
USA Today
TV critic Robert Bianco noticed it, too: “If there’s a loser in all this, it’s
Today
’s current co-host, the unctuous, floundering Ann Curry.”

In the end the week was a wash. Couric hadn’t led a charge to the summit, exactly, but neither had
GMA
lost any ground during a week when its most beloved cohost was absent. “I’m surprised Katie did as well as she did, because NBC threw the fucking kitchen sink at her,” said an ABC executive.

*  *  *

The record shows that it was actually April 9 to 13, 2012, the week after Couric’s appearance, that mattered more to the future of morning television. This was also the week that Capus was quoted in
The New York Times
saying that
GMA
beating
Today
was a hypothetical that was “not going to happen.” Lauer, having just re-upped, was on vacation, which guaranteed that it would not be a banner week for
Today
. In fact, on Monday it beat
GMA
by a now-routine 150,000 viewers—but at ABC some executives saw something encouraging in the quarter-hour ratings.
GMA
won from seven forty-five a.m. all the way through to eight thirty a.m. (Neither show was rated after about 8:20 a.m.) That meant, as one producer there said, “If we can add seven thirty, we win.”

During his year running the show Goldston had adopted a backward strategy. Rather than rebuilding
GMA
from seven a.m. on, Goldston had concentrated at first on the eight thirty a.m. half hour—the back door instead of the front door. Goldston believed that many viewers would start out watching
Today
, then switch to
GMA
in the second hour because it did the fun stuff better. By gradually moving up the moment people switched, he felt,
GMA
could eventually win the entire two-hour time slot. This latest ratings breakdown seemed to vindicate his thinking.

GMA
fared worse on Tuesday, a day when
Today
was helped by NBC’s airing of its only really high-rated show,
The Voice
, the night before. But on Wednesday the momentum started to shift, assisted by ABC’s airing of
Dancing with the Stars
, which the night before had featured the surprise elimination of contestant Sherri Shepherd, cohost of
The View
. Shepherd appeared on
GMA
Wednesday morning to react to her dismissal—and the show subsequently beat
Today
by more than 360,000 viewers! It even won the seven a.m. quarter hour! Yes, the exclamation marks and “holy shits” were flying. By Wednesday,
Today
was averaging just fifty thousand more viewers per day for the week.

That kind of gap could be closed in a few days. The
GMA
bosses thought they had a chance to win the week—and when they learned that NBC wasn’t bringing Lauer back from vacation on Friday morning to stave off a possible loss, they thought they had an even better chance.
GMA
that day featured a heavily promoted interview with Jets quarterback Tim Tebow during which he discussed his Christian faith with Roberts. With a little help from up above, the show could be, for the first time in sixteen years, the number one morning show in television. The weekend-long wait for the ratings had never been so excruciating.

“This winning streak dates to 1995,” Jeff Zucker had said in an e-mail to me a few days before
GMA
’s arrival at this precipice. “Every week, ‘Today.’ Every week. There has never been anything like it in television and there never will be again. Even if it only gets broken one week, it’s over. ‘GMA’ only needs to win once.”

*  *  *

On the surface, Monday, April 16, seemed like business as usual—except the eternally chatty executives at both networks had little to say. They were just standing by for news from Nielsen, which would render a verdict on the previous week around twelve thirty p.m.

GMA
had ripped up its rundown overnight. British socialite Pippa Middleton—Kate’s sister—had been snapped in a car with three male friends, one of whom appeared to be pointing a gun at the photographer. By Monday night her friends were saying it was just a toy pistol, but
GMA
led its show Monday morning with the “Pippa paparazzi scandal,” first with a live report from Paris, then with an interview of a royal expert. The half hour ended with Roberts promising “more on those shocking photos” later in the show.
Today
, meanwhile, stuck with its lead story about Secret Service officers caught up in a sex scandal in Colombia.

Then the staffs of the two shows just waited. And waited. Ben Sherwood, the ABC News president, was at his desk working with a colleague on the division’s long-range plan when Amy Miller called him with the figures.
GMA
had won Friday by 330,000 viewers, enough to win the whole week by an average of thirteen thousand. It was a true squeaker, but the streak appeared to be over after 852 weeks. Sherwood immediately e-mailed Goldston, who was in Las Vegas for a television industry conference: “Call me now.”

Cibrowski was standing on West Seventy-Ninth Street with his daughter Caroline, waiting to take the crosstown bus to her preschool on the East Side of Manhattan, when Sherwood e-mailed him the ratings. Looking down at his BlackBerry, Cibrowski thought of the ten years during which he had woken up before dawn for
GMA
, and of what he’d told himself while entertaining the notion of a job with better, saner hours: “Well, if I hang on a little longer I might win the lottery.”

Now that had happened. He had the urge to tell someone, but there was only his daughter.

“Caroline,” he said, “something really great has happened to Daddy.”

“What happened?” she asked.

He thought for a moment, then said, “Daddy’s work won.”

Caroline smiled, then said, “Daddy’s work won, yay!”

Chapter 13

Inevitable

April 14 and 15 had added up to a tough weekend for Robin Roberts, too, but not just because of the impending Nielsen news.

On April 9, a few days after flying back from her vacation home on Key West, Roberts had conferred with her doctor and received the results of the bone marrow test. That’s when she first heard the phrase
myelodysplastic syndromes
. MDS is a rare and complicated group of diseases that occur when a person’s body does not produce enough healthy blood cells. It was once called preleukemia because it can lead to leukemia and other blood disorders. The list of famous patients includes writer Susan Sontag, astronomer Carl Sagan, and Frank Newhauser, who in 1925 won the first National Spelling Bee. But Roberts’s doctor wasn’t yet 100 percent sure that she had MDS, and her uncertainty led to further tests and more waiting. She was terrified.

On Tuesday the seventeenth of April, Roberts met Sam Champion and Josh Elliott for lunch at Landmarc, one of the restaurants in Time Warner Center, the upscale urban mall that straddles Columbus Circle in Manhattan. Champion, who had known Roberts for about a decade (they met while filling in on
GMA
) arrived before Elliott. As soon as she greeted him and sat down, Champion sensed that something wasn’t right. “Sam looked at me as only he can, and I started crying,” she said. She hesitated to say, “MDS,” but eventually told him about her doctor’s strong suspicions that she had the disease, though the diagnosis wouldn’t be confirmed for a few more days. Champion later recalled that “I felt like I’d heard some bad news about my mother or my sister.”

“Don’t say anything to anybody,” Roberts said to Champion before Elliott arrived. She didn’t want to spoil what was supposed to be a celebratory week.

On Monday, after dropping his daughter Caroline off at preschool, Cibrowski couldn’t get back to work fast enough. He was elated, but he knew he shouldn’t be—these ratings were the equivalent of a rough draft. On a conference call with Sherwood and Goldston, the three executives agreed to be circumspect about the win until the final ratings arrived on Thursday, April 19. It was possible, though not likely, that the week would flip back in the
Today
show’s favor then, since the margin between the two shows was so slight. Cibrowski’s statement to the media at one fifteen p.m. read, “This is an exciting day but we will save any celebrating for when the final numbers come in.”

It was all but impossible, though, to stifle the emotions that were welling up in staffers who used to slap each other on the back and go out for drinks when
GMA
came within 350,000 viewers of
Today
. Now they
really
had a reason to get drunk. One young producer sarcastically renamed
Today
“the
Yesterday
show,” while a
GMA
veteran bombastically said that this early-April win was just a “warning shot” across NBC’s bow, and that they, the ABC guys, had barely begun to fight. After all, they’d won a month and a half before the week in May that Cibrowski had targeted.

There were in truth a few not-so-minor technicalities for the
GMA
people to ponder. Their victory had been extremely slim, and in the “demo,” the group of twenty-five-to-fifty-four-year-old men and women most coveted by advertisers, they had, in fact, lost to
Today
by something like 254,000. Still, these complications didn’t change the basic fact of the matter, even in the eyes of the
Today
show’s Jim Bell, who issued a statement to the media at 1:25 p.m. that read like an elegy for the streak.

Today
’s 852-week winning streak had taken on a life of its own and as odd as it is to see it end, we should acknowledge just how remarkable it has been. So as we tip our caps to the team at
Good Morning America
, we can also take a bow ourselves and recognize the work done by countless staffers for so long. It is not an overstatement to call it one of the most incredible achievements in television history, one that is not likely to ever happen again. While the streak has been wonderful affirmation of our work, it has never defined us, and we will continue to innovate, take chances and lead the way.

According to a colleague, when Capus saw the statement, he “flipped” and screamed at Bell over the phone. The final ratings weren’t even in yet! Capus would have been even angrier had he known that over at
GMA
, George Stephanopoulos was standing in the reception area outside Cibrowski’s office and reading Bell’s statement aloud to colleagues. Stephanopoulos was the first to recognize its significance. “He just conceded!”