Top of the Morning: Inside the Cutthroat World of Morning TV (35 page)

Some at NBC began to speculate that Lauer was The Problem. His theories about the content of
Today
, and the bossiness he’d projected since renewing his contract, put him at odds with many of his colleagues, who worried, especially after NBC laid off twenty workers from
The Tonight Show with Jay Leno
, that they might lose their jobs if ratings remained low—and that Lauer wouldn’t take a salary cut to save jobs, the way Leno had. But these grumblers became insignificant when compared to the dozens and sometimes hundreds who demonized the cohost daily on Twitter and Facebook, or who sent scathing e-mails directly to the show. This Web site comment spoke for the rest of them: “Sadly when I see Matt Lauer on Today I say to myself. ‘Where in the World is my Remote.’” The mainstream press mostly went easy on Lauer, but on September 16 the
New York Post
’s Page Six column called him the “anchor animal” and quoted an anonymous source who said, “He has gone so crazy about ratings that staff on ‘Today’ are not even allowed to mention ‘GMA’ to him.” (Said Lauer in response: “Please print this story—it’s the most interesting and dangerous I've ever sounded!”) When the
Daily News
reported that his Q Score had dropped 25 percent in the last year, it also quoted Lauer as saying, “Is it only 25 percent? Because it feels much worse.” It was one of the unintended side effects of Operation Bambi that Lauer, but not Bell and Capus and Burke, was seen as the villain in the plot against Curry. This was partly because Lauer was not exactly the hero of the tale—although he never demanded that she be pushed out, he could have done so much more to help her—and partly because relatively few people knew who the warring executives were. Outside of a very few upper-level staffers at the
Today
show, no one grasped the important subtleties of the story.

Among the powerful few who did have inside information, however, Bell was in trouble—not at all unlike the trouble Ann Curry had been in months before the ax finally fell. Playing the role of Jim Bell, this time, was Pat Fili, the woman brought in by Steve Burke in July to oversee all of NBC’s news brands—NBC News, MSNBC, and CNBC. Fili had let there be no doubt that job number one was fixing
Today
. She sized up the show and right away saw an institution that had fallen for its own propaganda. “It just hasn’t evolved,” she told associates matter-of-factly—echoing what so many outsiders had been saying for years. Fili believed in changing the show’s pacing, its story selection, even its set, but she knew she needed to start backstage—with Bell.

By taking that view, remember, Fili was siding with Capus—the man who had wanted to replace Bell for a while now. Capus was one of her direct reports. Fili, perhaps influenced by him, wondered if Bell, after seven years on the job, had become too much of an expert on how things are done, and cared too little about how they might be done differently. According to Fili’s allies, about a month after the Summer Olympics were over she met with Bell and said, in effect, “You have a choice to make.” Fili told Bell that he could produce
Today
or he could produce future Olympics broadcasts—but he couldn’t do both. Not anymore.

Her allies say Bell balked at first, as Curry had when Bell proposed she leave the
Today
show’s cohost chair.

“I can do both,” he said.

“No, you cannot do both,” Fili responded.

Fili was unyielding.
Today
needed someone who was prepared to sit through no small number of therapy sessions to make “America’s first family” whole again. That’s what fucked-up families have to do sometimes. “You need to do some soul-searching,” Fili told him, “to decide if you have the energy to evolve this show.” If Bell didn’t want to or didn’t think such a thing was necessary, that was fine by Fili. NBC Sports wanted him.

Bell could feel his autonomy being stolen away. Already his staff members were whispering that it had been Fili, not Bell, who’d sided with Lauer’s vision for the show and forced everyone else to fall in line. “Jim just tried to make it sound like his decision,” said one. Now it looked as if he was losing one of his two jobs. “He’s having a hard time coming to grips with the fact that he’s being demoted,” an associate of Bell’s said shortly after his initial meeting with Fili. The whole affair reminded a lot of people of 1990, when Bell’s mentor Ebersol returned to NBC Sports after blaming himself for the Deborah Norville disaster at
Today
.

But Bell’s allies tell a different version of this tale. Bell, some say, knew when he took the Summer Olympics job that the arrangement was temporary: eventually he’d have to choose one or the other. Others say he knew when he took the job that he would be coming back to sports full-time. But Bell never said that publicly, and he declined to comment here. In any case, Fili may have made it a nondecision (to borrow the phrase used for Curry’s promotion) by convincing Burke that
Today
needed a change at the top. “Pat wanted her own person” running
Today
, one of Bell’s friends said.

Bell had at least the illusion of choice in September, when Fili and Capus started interviewing candidates for his chair in the control room underneath Studio 1A. On September 26, in a move that surprised many who cover the television business, he summoned a string of reporters by telephone to ask him anything—about Curry’s exit, about Lauer’s level of involvement, about his own future running the
Today
show. What made this slightly shocking was that Bell had been turning down all interview requests for three months. He had said next to nothing about the circumstances of Curry’s departure, which had allowed a thousand rumors to bloom, many of them reflecting badly on Lauer. “Jim had been shirking responsibility at every turn,” one of Capus’s allies complained.

The day Bell picked for his series of one-on-one interviews coincided with Yom Kippur, the Jewish day of atonement. Bell is a Christian, but atoning is what he was doing nevertheless. “It was all my fault,” he said in essence, over and over again to
The New York Times
, the Associated Press, the
Hollywood Reporter
,
TV Guide
, and others. Don’t blame Lauer or anyone else for the Curry disaster, he said, blame me. “It was definitely not Matt’s call,” Bell said to
The Times
, of Curry’s dismissal. “He is the host and does not have management responsibility. It was not his call. That was my call.”

Was Bell very belatedly trying to take the heat off Lauer, perhaps at Lauer’s behest? Was he campaigning to keep his job? Those were the theories at the show. But it was hard to say for sure. In the interviews, Bell didn’t express any regret for removing Curry—“it was the best thing for the show”—but he admitted it “didn’t go quite as we had hoped.” When the
Hollywood Reporter
asked if he had “cleared the air” with Curry, he claimed he had, when in reality she still felt betrayed by him. The
Reporter
followed up by saying, “But no one seems to want to let the transition go.” Said Bell, “Well, I’m encouraging you to be the first one! Let’s start moving forward.” In practically every interview he did that day, Bell only sort of denied the rumors of his imminent departure, saying suspiciously often of his present position that it was “the best job in the world.”

Fili talked to almost twenty candidates for that “best job.” Herself an example of female leadership in a male-dominated industry, she was keen on hiring a woman or two to remake
Today
. Chief among the candidates was Izzy Povich, a former producer for
The Maury Povich Show
(where she’d met her future husband, Maury’s nephew Andrew) who’d worked at MSNBC since 1996. Povich’s biggest claim to fame was running
Countdown
, the prime-time show hosted by the famously combustible Keith Olbermann. If she could manage him, the thinking went, she could manage anyone! Povich met with Lauer in mid-September for a job interview of sorts—though no one at NBC dared call it that, since the party line was that Lauer was an artiste and had no management involvement. Then she, like all the other candidates, waited to see what Fili would do.

*  *  *

In addition to ratings, Robin Roberts had a whole new set of numbers to wonder about: her blood counts. After the transplant “I was in a pain I had never experienced before, physically and mentally,” she told
People
magazine. “I was in a coma-like state. I truly felt I was slipping away.” But her sister Sally-Ann’s stem cells were doing their job of rebooting her bodily systems, piece by painful piece. On October 3, two weeks after the transplant, Elliott and Champion (wearing surgical gloves and masks to protect Roberts from germs) visited her hospital suite for the first time. The next day there was great news back at work:
GMA
had beaten
Today
for the entire month of September. In those same weeks
Today
had hit twenty-year lows. Roberts, for one, said she was not surprised. “I know we consistently have the best show,” she told me in an e-mail, “and viewers know we care for one another.” Yes, even in the hospital, she was still watching the show every morning and scrutinizing the daily ratings e-mails.

Roberts was released on October 11. For at least three months she would have to stay at home in isolation, to decrease the risk of her getting an infection when her immunity was so low. Elizabeth Vargas and a new hire from NBC, Amy Robach, took turns filling in for her. On October 25, when Oprah Winfrey was guest-cohosting in her absence, Roberts called in to the show for the first time. “I am so incredibly blessed to be doing as well as I am,” she told Winfrey and the cast. Seeming to address the whispered suggestions that
GMA
was exploiting her illness, she also said, “I think of my dear mother, and she taught me well. It is about being a service to others. It would be a whole lot easier to not be so public when you are going through things like this. The people I have met, who are going through this, their family members who are so appreciative of what we as a family are doing. It’s a privilege to be a messenger.”

*  *  *

In September, NBC’s marketing unit commissioned Sterling Brands, a consulting firm that helps companies figure out what they are and what they aren’t, to conduct a study that would do just that for
Today
. Sterling interviewed twelve people, including Lauer and Guthrie (but not Roker or Morales); Capus, Bell, and Nash; Jackie Levin, the senior producer in charge of author bookings; and John Kelly, the head of ad sales for NBC News. The product of the interviews, a thirty-six-page report called “Positioning
Today
,” was delivered to select members of the show’s staff on October 4.

Knowing they wouldn’t be quoted by name, the twelve had spoken freely about what they felt was right and wrong about the show. They seemed happy to talk, like a worrywart who has to wait two weeks for a therapy appointment: “There was consistent support for the project,” Sterling noted in the report, “as a way to come together around a clear and shared sense of purpose.” For some it seemed a much-needed chance to gripe: “If I look at the show, I am not sure I’d know what year it is,” said one. “I want to feel like we are watching 2012.” But everyone seemed to be expressing thoughts that they had considered and refined over time—and no one denied that they were facing problems larger and more fundamental than the miscasting of Ann Curry. “We must acknowledge the shift in the kinds of stories people want,” one subject said, “but how do we do this while remaining TODAY?”

On page one of the report, the researchers listed ten “insights” on which there seemed to be a consensus:

1. we are proud of our tradition
   
2. at our best, the whole is greater than the sum of our parts
   
3. we’re currently losing the war
   
4. we’re open to change, but it’s about focusing more so than changing
   
5. our family needs to be fun again
   
6. we must define our purpose, and it can’t be their purpose
   
7. we must deliver a wide variety of stories and payoffs, but with a through line
   
8. we’re most “TODAY” when we advance the story
   
9. we’ve lost sight of our audience
   
10. our passion shows best when our co-anchors connect to the story
    

Sterling’s researchers commented on the fact that the twelve
Today
interviewees barely talked about the viewers at home whose wants and needs they presumably tried to anticipate. The twelve talked in vague terms about “the demo,” but not about serving its members in specific ways. “This is a problem for a show whose success is measured daily by its ability to capture the hearts and minds of Americans,” the report stated.

But if the participants seemed aloof, they were not oblivious to the way relationships among staffers—and between talent and viewers—had deteriorated. “Our sense of family is broken,” one said. “Matt is being blamed, and some in our audience see Savannah as the younger replacement wife,” another said. The researchers concluded that “Ann Curry’s departure was a public airing of family business that’s negatively affected trust in our talent and desire for our viewers to welcome us into their lives. It’s also hurt morale internally.” Still, there was danger in getting too Curry-centric in analyzing the problems. Said one interviewee, “Ann was only 50 percent of the problem; people were leaving for the content, too.”

The main beneficiary of all this misery and miscalculation, everyone involved seemed to acknowledge, was
GMA
. “There are many aspects of
GMA
’s family that we may not hold in the highest esteem,” a member of the
Today
staff told Sterling, “but everyone agrees on one thing: they look like they are having more fun, and we need to bring the fun back!” A big part of having fun came down to relaxing and not caring so much what
GMA
did. “We are all over the map,” one of the twelve said. “We have to stop reacting and [stop] just doing what they’re doing!” “
GMA
beat us with a surgery story at 7:42, we copied and it didn’t work.”