Top of the Morning: Inside the Cutthroat World of Morning TV (27 page)

ABC didn’t hear much from NBC the week the win became official.
Today
flirted with the idea of congratulating
GMA
on air, but decided that would just draw more attention to the war. Cibrowski did get an e-mail from Bell on Thursday that said, “We want to send you something, where do we send it?” Bravely, he gave them a correct address.

Later that day a bottle of champagne showed up, not from NBC or from Bell, but from Matt Lauer. His congratulatory card called the win “a big deal” and added jokingly, “Not sure if you want to drink this or hit yourselves over the head with it.”

If Cibrowski chose the former option, he needed to chug the stuff quickly. While
GMA
was celebrating its historic victory,
Today
was…winning. Lauer and his colleagues vaulted right back to first place April 16 through 20, winning by 243,000 viewers and raising the possibility in the minds of some at NBC that the prior week’s fall to second place had just been a lucky break for ABC. NBC’s news release about the ratings noted that
Today
had been number one for “853 out of 854 weeks.” And for even longer in the twenty-five-to-fifty-four-year-old demographic: 886 weeks. The gap in the demo was 379,000—
GMA
still had a long way to go in the viewer category that mattered most.

Chapter 14

The Call from the
White House

“For new democracies,” George Stephanopoulos said in April, “the second election is more important than the first.”

The
GMA
host knew that his show’s single victory in April wouldn’t mean much to executives and advertisers unless the same result could be achieved again (and again). Which is why April 23 through 27, 2012, was one of the single most important weeks in
GMA
’s thirty-seven-year history.

“Great News!!!” the ABC researcher Amy Miller e-mailed Sherwood and the other network executives on Thursday afternoon, the twenty-sixth, when the second draft of Wednesday’s ratings arrived. She wasn’t kidding: after three days
GMA
was ahead of
Today
by 220,000 viewers and in the twenty-five-to-fifty-four-year-old demographic it trailed by only fifty-six thousand.
GMA
’s streak-breaking win earlier in the month was looking less and less fluke-ish.

ABC was going all out to win the week at hand. Robin Roberts, feeling bone-tired but trying to hide it from her colleagues, was on a flight to California when Miller’s encouraging e-mail arrived. Roberts was set to interview Mark Zuckerberg about Facebook’s new organ donation initiative for a segment that would air on
GMA
the following Tuesday. She was scheduled to talk to him in the afternoon, then sleep Thursday night at the home of close friends who lived near Facebook’s headquarters in Palo Alto. Friday she had planned to take off. She sorely needed to gather her strength. But with a second weekly win within reach, Roberts and Tom Cibrowski decided that it would be best for the show if she was back at the anchor desk in New York on Friday morning. He scurried to line up a charter flight that would get her back in time.

The brawl-for-it-all that Ben Sherwood had predicted was now on. The two shows had battled the weekend before over Meow the cat, the morbidly obese tabby.
Today
had won, and flown Meow and a veterinarian from Santa Fe to New York (the cat had its own seat) for a Tuesday-morning segment. When Cibrowski found out about that early on Monday morning, he had ordered his staff to crash a segment about Meow for his show. Using video from a New Mexico TV station, they did, and got it on the air by 7:20, beating
Today
by half an hour. True, only
Today
could boast that it had Meow in person, sprawled right next to Matt Lauer (who, sensing the sentiment of the average viewer, tut-tutted over her imperiled health). A
GMA
segment producer said semi-seriously that she had tried to steal the cat from
Today
, as producers have been known to do with guests (sending a car to the hotel sometimes works). Another producer replied playfully, “Probably hard to do a grab-and-run with Meow.”

Later that day the two shows scrambled to book a University of Colorado student, Kolbi Zerbest, who had been blamed for accidentally spilling yogurt on President Obama during a campaign stop. The photos of Obama good-naturedly cleaning up the mess with a napkin were the closest the morning shows would get that day to covering culture. But
GMA
got outfoxed by a young
Today
producer named Wesley Oliver, who spotted Zerbest’s sorority sisters writing about the incident on Twitter and contacted them there. Zerbest, they told him, was by chance being initiated into the sorority the same day; Oliver learned how to reach her and arranged for her to be on the next morning, from NBC’s station in Denver. A
Today
booker handled the follow-up, which involved pleading with Zerbest not to stay up late drinking the night before: “We can’t put you on the air drunk! You can celebrate tomorrow.” On the show, Ann Curry earnestly praised the young woman who was known for fifteen minutes or so as “Yogurt Girl” for coming forward and accepting blame for the spill.

*  *  *

With a bleary-eyed Roberts back from California, Cibrowski decided to try something new and, by morning show standards, bold on April 27: have all five hosts of
GMA
on set when the show started at seven a.m. Normally Lara Spencer didn’t appear until seven thirty or eight a.m., but Cibrowski wanted to emphasize the friendliness of his cast—all the more so since
Today
was getting grief from viewers for Lauer and Curry’s dysfunctional relationship. One
GMA
producer said that seeing the two of them together was like watching a “hostage video,” but he didn’t say which he thought was the hostage. In e-mails and tweets, said people at NBC, it was Curry who got the more unrestrained criticism. The sight of the
GMA
hosts together, Cibrowski hoped, could serve as an antidote to that toxic atmosphere. The arrangement soon became a daily thing. Chirped Spencer, “I love that we are saying from the top of the show, we are a team.”

But could they once again be the A-Team? By 6:57 a.m. on Friday the twenty-seventh, all five hosts were on set, but Spencer didn’t have the “hellos”—the partly scripted, partly ad-libbed introduction to the show. “Guys, Lara needs the hellos right now,” writer Simone Swink said. While the paper script was rushed to Spencer, Cibrowski spoke to all the hosts through their earpieces. “Lara has a very quick tease…and then we get right to the headlines.” “Here we go,” said Denise Rehrig. With ten seconds until airtime, Cibrowski spoke in the hosts’ ears one more time. “Good luck, everybody,” he said solemnly, as if addressing space-bound astronauts. With the stakes unusually high, the tension in the control room was palpable.

For the most part,
GMA
that morning stuck to its formula of teases and kills. The teases are so frequent that they can make a morning show seem like one long promise of what’s coming up in a minute; the kills are stories that start out on the rundown but get lost along the way.
GMA
is purposely overbooked to make it seem faster and more brimming with great stuff than
Today
. “If we slow down in the first half hour, people flip the channel,” a producer said matter-of-factly. A couple minutes into the Friday show, Cibrowski killed one correspondent’s introduction and told legal analyst Dan Abrams, who was on to talk about the John Edwards trial, “We’re very tight so we’re going to give you about a minute twenty.” Fifteen minutes in, with the show still running over, Rehrig, the timekeeper-in-chief, cut another intro and complained aloud when Sam Champion’s weather forecast ran a few Canadian cold fronts too long. “You’re killing me, Smalls,” she said. During a commercial break, which they miraculously hit on time, Cibrowski briefed Stephanopoulos on the
Today
show, as he did every morning. “They had a real weird hodgepodge of stuff,” Cibrowski said. “They did [alleged Travyon Martin shooter George] Zimmerman, a long segment on a missing girl in Arizona, and now they’re doing Will and Kate. And,” he added, with a note of giddiness, while staring up at a muted monitor carrying the
Today
show, “no Matt!”

It was shocking but true. Once again, as Operation Bambi slowly commenced, and
GMA
loomed ever larger as a threat, and Robin Roberts, despite a serious illness, flew back and forth across the country on successive days to be on the
GMA
set, Lauer stood firmly by his contractual right to a four-day workweek. He’d been on the show from Monday through Thursday, but was replaced this time by Carl Quintanilla, a member of CNBC’s morning lineup. Around
GMA
, these Lauer-less days only strengthened the assumption that Curry’s ouster was a fait accompli. “Is he on strike till she goes?” one producer asked.

After seven thirty,
Today
featured a live interview with a Texas couple whose three-year-old son had had a baseball snatched out of his little hands at a Rangers game earlier in the week. Cibrowski could live with that story selection, he said, because Elliott’s taped interview with the same couple had run earlier in the hour. “We felt it was worth what it was, a minute forty-five.” On
Today
the story was given about three minutes, a veritable telethon by morning show standards; it ran so long, in fact, that the child seemed to be falling asleep toward the end. “He used all his energy for
GMA
,” ABC News spokesman Jeffrey Schneider quipped. “Off camera, you know they’re hitting that kid with a cattle prod.” Said Cibrowski, sounding as if he were teaching a broadcasting class, “That’s why you tape it.”

For the full week of April 23,
GMA
surpassed
Today
by 180,000 viewers, a far better performance than the week of April 9, when it had led by only thirty-one thousand. Elliott celebrated by leasing—though not buying—a black BMW X5 at a dealership in Connecticut. (His assistant had bullied him into trading up from the Volvo he’d been driving.) Sherwood celebrated by sending this e-mail:

Congratulations, team!

You won by 180K!

Smallest demo gap (105K) since 1995.

And…GMA Saturday won the entire month of April in the demo.

Great work.

Play your game.

Keep it going.

This was the key “second election” that Stephanopoulos had described earlier. What made the win especially significant was that Lauer had been mostly present that week, unlike during the week of the first win, when he had been—as NBC never got tired of pointing out—gone the whole time.
GMA
had proven it could beat the
Today
starting lineup. (Or you could read the results another way, and say they showed that if Lauer was beatable he wasn’t worth the truckloads of money that NBC had just agreed to caravan out to his estate in the Hamptons.) To any kind of doubter, however,
Today
show spokeswoman Megan Kopf offered the same response: “We’re still winning in the demo!” True, thought Sherwood, but you’re also living in denial.

May 2012 was a seesaw month in the a.m. ratings. Some mornings,
Today
showed some of its old spunk. On April 30, for instance, the NBC show teased three exclusive interviews: the mother of a missing Fort Bragg soldier; Whitney Houston’s ex-husband Bobby Brown, in his first interview since her death; and Ryan O’Neal, Farrah Fawcett’s longtime lover, who was promoting a memoir.
GMA
, that same day, pulled off the kind of stunt that used to be a hallmark of
Today
, opening at seven a.m. with Stephanopoulos standing atop 1 World Trade Center, the skyscraper under construction in downtown Manhattan, to mark the day it became the city’s tallest building, surpassing the Empire State Building’s 102 stories. To the viewer the slugfest may have looked like a draw, and it almost was, but ultimately
Today
won by an average of seventy-six thousand viewers for the week and retook the lead.

As far as ratings went, unpredictability was now the norm. Anything could have happened the next week—until Dan Pfeiffer, the White House communications director, called ABC’s Washington bureau chief Robin Sproul on Tuesday, May 8, and offered Roberts an exclusive sit-down with President Obama the next day.

This wasn’t just any old presidential interview. Obama had been sidestepping questions about his views on same-sex marriage for several days, or ever since Vice President Joe Biden declared to NBC’s David Gregory that he himself was “absolutely comfortable” with the idea. Obama, who had said before that his views on gay marriage were “evolving,” had been planning on saying later in the year that he was in favor of such unions. But he and his aides had concluded that because Biden had been so blabby, he now had to speak out sooner.

The White House tends to rotate big interviews among the networks. In this case they wanted an interviewer who’d concentrate on the issue at hand, not horse-race politics. Rivals speculated that Roberts’s cordial relationship with the Obamas and factors like her spirituality and her race also came into play. (Religiously affiliated Americans and African Americans were more likely to oppose same-sex marriage, according to polls, and having Roberts as the vessel for the news might help politically, the theory went.) ABC naturally wanted to say yes to the offer right away and start making arrangements for Roberts’s travel to Washington. But when Pfeiffer called Sproul, Roberts was at her doctor’s office in Manhattan with a drill in her back. Another portion of her bone marrow was being extracted for testing. Cibrowski knew why Roberts wasn’t in her office that afternoon, but he couldn’t tell his colleagues, who spent three hours frantically trying to find her.