Top of the Morning: Inside the Cutthroat World of Morning TV (24 page)

GMA
’s ratings remained elevated through Thursday, March 1, the day Tom Cibrowski formally replaced James Goldston.
GMA
was doing well because it had great guests and because it was drafting in the wake of the Oscars. But just as important to its ratings fortunes was the palpable tension on the
Today
show set between Curry and Lauer, which was making the show hard to watch for some longtime fans.
GMA
was starting to convert at least a few of them.
GMA
was probably also benefiting from the shakeup at CBS—Rose and company’s new show had premiered in January, and some viewers were now channel surfing, trying to choose who and what to wake up with in the morning.

So it was partly for things that others had done that Goldston and Cibrowski were hailed as mighty conquistadors and cheered with a champagne toast in the newsroom on Thursday. The next morning there was another cha-ching moment as Coldplay performed a Friday-morning concert. “Not bad for a first day,” Cibrowski said humbly as the band packed up, knowing that it would get big numbers. As much effort and worry as NBC put into the morning race, runner-up ABC put in even more, and one way this manifested itself was in
GMA
’s willingness to pay Nielsen thousands of dollars to get reliable overnight ratings a few hours before anyone else.
GMA
didn’t do it every day or even every week—but every time the show did, it drove
Today
a little crazy.

Four hours after Coldplay played “Paradise,” Cibrowski received this e-mail from ABC number cruncher Amy Miller:

SUBJECT: Thurs GMA - Fast Final Numbers

For the week among Total Viewers averages are as follows

ABC - 5,437,000

NBC - 5,513,000

We are behind NBC by only 76k P2+…smallest gap since the week of May 9, 2005 (Robin Roberts’ first week as co-anchor of GMA/DC security scare - plane in restricted White House air space).

One week earlier,
GMA
had been down by 519,000 viewers. But this week, after four days, it was seventy-six thousand viewers away from beating
Today
.

Cibrowski kept the numbers secret from all but a few of his senior colleagues. Managing the staff’s collective psyche was important, and he didn’t want expectations to get out of hand. He knew that Friday’s results would probably tilt back in the
Today
show’s favor—the competition tended to win on Fridays for some reason. But because the final weekly numbers didn’t come out until Monday (for
GMA
, which was paying extra—normally the weeklies didn’t come until Thursday!), he’d have to wait all weekend to find out for sure. “Makes you a bit crazy inside!” he wrote in an e-mail on Saturday.

Cibrowski’s immediate goal as
GMA
’s new boss was to win just one week on the back of promotable events like the Oscars, the
Dancing
announcement, and the Coldplay concert. Just one damn week. After that his goal would be to win another week, and so on. Although it felt daunting to put even two back-to-back wins together, he knew it was possible, because, after all,
Today
had done it for more than 840 weeks in a row.

The big test for Cibrowski would be the third week of May. He had already circled it on his calendar. That’s when the
Dancing with the Stars
finale would air on ABC, giving
GMA
a temporary bounce the next morning. With a little luck, and the right celebrity booking or two,
Dancing
could be a springboard to first place. “We store up all our ammunition,” he said, “and then we fire.” Cibrowski figured he had to fire then because—to stick for another moment with the testosterone-fueled language favored by the male network executives who strive to produce shows that will appeal to women—in July, NBC would be making its shock-and-awe move with the Summer Olympics. The Olympics have, at least since 1980, been a trump card for whatever morning show is lucky enough to be on the same network as them. The London Games this year would give
Today
a sure three weeks of wins and maybe even stop the slow fade for good. If
GMA
didn’t win a week during the spring, it might not, in 2012, win a week at all.

On Monday Cibrowski found out that
GMA
had closed out the previous week with a daily average of 5.36 million viewers, 164,000 fewer than the
Today
show. Friday had, indeed, helped
Today
widen its lead. The gap was now NASCAR-speedway-size, not football-stadium-size, as he had hoped in midweek. But the results were still encouraging.
GMA
had not been this close to its archenemy in four years.

Certainly these gains were not only due to the meshuggaas over at
Today
. The
GMA
team deserved credit for playing the game well, for remembering the venerable morning rule about good chemistry, and for seeing that the deeper we got into the twenty-first century, the more the morning audience disdained the savory in favor of the sweet. If there was ever a team for the times it was (in order of wake-up time) Stephanopoulos (2:35 a.m.), Roberts (3:45 a.m.), Champion (3:45 a.m.), Spencer (4:00 a.m.), and Elliott (4:01 a.m.; the extra minute, he said, gave him a “psychological lift”).

The
GMA
hosts had their petty differences, to be sure; they squabbled sometimes about who was hogging airtime and who would be interviewing the A-listers who rotated in and out of the studio like walking, talking billboards for their movies and albums. But that they stayed friends in the end seemed obvious on air, thanks in part to the time they spent eating and drinking together during off hours. “We like being together, we genuinely like hanging out—as difficult as people might find that to believe,” Champion, the show’s weatherman, said.

Executives at NBC tended in the early months of 2012 to mock such claims and note that the
GMA
hosts more closely resembled, to borrow a phrase from Don Imus, a pack of backstabbing weasels. Josh Elliott is clearly gunning for Stephanopoulos’s job, they would tell you, and Lara Spencer has it in for Robin Roberts. But in private those same people would sigh and say they wished their cast had the same chemistry that
GMA
’s had. The
GMA
cast even had a favorite restaurant, Café Fiorello, that they frequented after work. Sometimes the producers still at work at ABC would see their Twitter messages about hanging out together and wonder if they’d been hitting the vino a little too hard.

Stephanopoulos was the exception—he rarely hung out with the other four, citing his other job, as host of
This Week
, and his family obligations to explain his absences. But he, too, benefited from the ensemble, even though it ate into his airtime. The best advice Stephanopoulos ever got about the
GMA
gig came from, of all people, Jeff Zucker, who at the time was still the chief executive of NBC. The two men struck up a conversation at a party in New York for the Nancy Meyers film
It’s Complicated
, which Ali Wentworth had a small part in, and Zucker told him, “You truly have to be yourself.” In a word: authentic. Don’t try to fake a reaction or an opinion, Zucker told him—react the way you would naturally react off camera, “because the camera’s going to see through it anyway.” Having more people in the mix—Spencer to his right, Roberts and Elliott and Champion to his left—freed Stephanopoulos to do just that.

By the end of 2011 Zucker was working in the same building as Stephanopoulos and company, running Katie Couric’s new talk show, which ABC was producing. He was an advisor and a sounding board for his old friend Sherwood, who was lucky to have him around. Think about it: Zucker was the producer who had started
Today
’s streak in the 1990s, who arguably knew more about morning television than anyone. Now he was helping
GMA
. “You better be ready, Benjy,” Zucker would sometimes say to Sherwood. Confident in his prediction that
Today
would someday slip up, just as it had in 1980 and 1990, Zucker meant that
GMA
had better be ready to take advantage. “You better be ready. You better be great. Because you’re gonna have your chance.”

After
GMA
came within 164,000 viewers at the end of February,
Today
rebounded in the first week of March, widening the gap to 448,000 viewers. But a week later
GMA
was back within 262,000 viewers. “Ever closer…” Goldston wrote in an e-mail. As for Lauer, who was now talking to both NBC and ABC about his future, Goldston said, “We are just putting more money in his pocket!” But apart from renewing its vows with Lauer, and plotting a divorce from Curry, NBC didn’t seem to be doing much of anything about the threat. The executives at ABC were absolutely baffled by the flat-footedness. “I just don’t understand it,” Goldston said. “You can’t just expect to keep winning. The difference in energy between our show and their show is very stark.” That was true—I noticed it, and so did the publicists and crew members who had opportunities to set foot in both worlds.

As Goldston saw it, NBC was not being blasé—but rather was frozen by fear. “As we started to do better,” he said, “I think they became incredibly fearful because everything was at stake, including the streak.”

Roberts usually takes off the first week in April, to go to a home she has in Key West to watch the Final Four. She might not have done that in 2012, because the race with
Today
was getting closer and she didn’t want
GMA
to lose any momentum. But she hadn’t been feeling well since the Oscars, and had been going for checkups and tests. The results had so far been inconclusive, but her doctor advised her not to pass up her regularly scheduled break. “I felt really, really tired,” she said. On March 29, ABC announced that Katie Couric would be filling in for Roberts the following week. The network tried to bill the maneuver as simple common sense: Roberts was taking a week off, so a proven pro was coming to keep the seat warm. But the television cognoscenti thought they knew better, and the word went out that Cutthroat Katie was making another dramatic career move—and that ABC, hoping to put itself over the top in the morning, was playing along.

Here’s the truth: Couric was six months out from the premiere of her daytime talk show, to be produced and distributed by ABC, and was enjoying some time off in March when Sherwood proposed that she come fill in for Roberts. Couric was game, though she wanted her spokesman Matthew Hiltzik and his counterpart at ABC, Jeffrey Schneider, to make sure the stunt wasn’t mistaken for a run at Roberts’s job. “I really genuinely just saw it as an opportunity to help
GMA
out, and quite frankly to reintroduce me to an audience that hadn’t seen me in that format in quite a while, which would be helpful for my new show,” she said. And so April 2 through 6 would be Katie Couric Week on
GMA
. “More than anything else, this is about Ben wanting to kick
Today
’s ass,” said a confidant of Couric’s after the announcement was made—and yet, said the same person, “There’s something that she enjoys about this, too.”

Not everyone at
GMA
was happy with what was being acknowledged throughout the TV industry as a brilliant gimmick. Elizabeth Vargas, Roberts’s normal replacement, felt she was being passed over, and didn’t hide her displeasure. “She’s walking around saying that her contract has been violated because she’s supposed to be Robin’s backup anchor,” a rival network executive said during Couric Week.

The Couric announcement sideswiped NBC. None of the senior leaders of the news division were in New York when it was made. Capus was on vacation, as was Lauren Kapp, his most trusted advisor. Bell was in Stamford, Connecticut, in planning meetings for the Olympics. Now, suddenly, their underlings had to scramble to come up with counterprogramming—which put them in a foul frame of mind. “Couric’s a very rich woman thanks to the
Today
show,” one NBC employee said. “She’s trying to win a week when we’re down,” said another. “It’s a particularly personal, ugly thing.” Others called Couric a traitor outright. One of the first ideas to come out of the
Today
war room was to counter Couric with another “legend” from the
Today
show’s past: J. Fred Muggs. Since Muggs hadn’t been seen in public for years, and NBC hadn’t been successful in inviting him and his trainers to the sixtieth birthday bash in January, the producers thought to dress up some other chimp instead. “We called every zoo within forty miles of Manhattan to find a chimp to borrow,” a staff member recalled, stifling laughs at the absurdity of it all. “It reeked of desperation.”

Some thought Couric’s stint did, too. Roberts wasn’t happy that ABC was turning her absence into a buzz-making Great
GMA
Moment. “But this was a mandate from the top,” one of her colleagues said. “She couldn’t have stopped it.” Besides, she was more worried about her body than her work. Although she wouldn’t be officially diagnosed until she came back from vacation, Roberts, for the second time in five years, was seriously ill. “It was kind of funny when everyone was making a big deal about ‘Oh, Katie Couric is filling in!’ I was like, ‘Yeah, I just took a bone marrow test, so I’m not really concerned about that right now.’”

On the air, when Couric showed up for the surprise announcement, Roberts smiled and played along. “Katie, welcome!” she said almost too exuberantly. “It’s great to see you!”

Roberts tossed a faux
GMA
key to her fill-in, who went out of her way to say, “Have a great vacation!” Before Couric left, Roberts pointed at her with both hands. “You are doing me a solid, thanks.”

“I’ll keep the seat warm,” Couric responded.

“Do that!” Roberts said.

Reflecting on the sequence of events later, Roberts said, “Never had an anchor going on vacation been so public. We had the whole campaign, like, ‘Katie’s filling in, here are the keys.’ That had never been done before. Again, I understand the reasoning behind it, but it was kind of like, ‘Geez, really? Oh-kay.’”