Morning TV’s Stepsister Feels the Ratings Heat

Morning TV’s Stepsister Feels the Ratings Heat

By MIKE HALE
Published: June 20, 2012
IT’S a windy May morning on the Rockefeller Center plaza where the stars of NBC’s “Today” periodically gather to perform in the open air, and for some reason Kathie Lee Gifford and Hoda Kotb are wearing hospital gowns, like a latter-day Lucy and Ethel embarked on some crazy scheme. Ms. Gifford’s explanation — it has something to do with a segment on plastic surgery — requires dramatic gestures, and with one of them she knocks a batch of notecards out of the hands of the show’s co-host Ann Curry.

While the notes scatter across the Rock Center pavement, Ms. Curry smiles, as impressively composed as you would expect for a woman who holds one of television’s most high-profile, highly scrutinized jobs. But it’s what happens next that catches my eye. Ms. Gifford stoops to gather the cards, and Ms. Curry tries to stop her but then shifts her attention to Ms. Gifford’s back. The producers switch to a side camera, and suddenly it’s clear what Ms. Curry is doing: She’s making sure that the gown is closed, that nothing embarrassing is showing while Ms. Gifford is scrambling around on all fours.

It might not win her any votes for sainthood, but that moment of concern for a colleague stood out during the grueling hurly-burly of a network morning show. It also made me feel a little guilty, since I was watching “Today” in part to test, from a television critic’s point of view, the theory that the end of the show’s astounding 16-year run atop the morning-show ratings was Ms. Curry’s fault.

I’m not a regular viewer of the morning shows; their highly engineered, ersatz intimacy, the Muzak-like ability they have to fade as far into the background as needed, isn’t usually my cup of coffee. But I spent a month monitoring “Today” after its ratings battle with ABC’s “Good Morning America” became a hot topic, and compared my own observations about the show and Ms. Curry’s place in it with those of a dozen morning-show veterans, including current and former “Today” staffers and other TV and entertainment executives.

One year into Ms. Curry’s dream job — she moved up from news reader to succeed Meredith Vieira as co-host with Matt Lauer on June 9, 2011 — “Today” had lost nearly all of what was a 780,000-viewer lead over “Good Morning America,” squeaking out a monthly ratings victory in May by a tiny 13,000-viewer margin. (The margin rebounded to 332,000 in the first week of June.) Its epochal streak of weekly victories ended at 852 in early April, and “Good Morning America” has won several more weeks since then. And while the total audiences of the shows are not huge — in the first week of June, won by “Today,” both averaged under five million viewers — the money is: “Today” earns an estimated $250 million to $300 million a year for NBC, making it one of the most profitable shows in the television industry.

An NBC executive — who, like most of the people I spoke to for this article, insisted on anonymity because of the sensitivity of the topic — acknowledged the conjunction, saying: “It’s an undeniable fact that there was an anchor change at the ‘Today’ show about a year ago, and there have been some ratings challenges while on her watch. But I don’t subscribe to the theory that this is all on Ann’s shoulders.” (Ms. Curry declined to speak with me.)

As gossip Web sites speculate about Ms. Curry’s future and make note of her every absence from the show, people both inside and outside NBC were quick to say that many factors could be contributing to the current dead heat in the morning. They include the weakness of NBC’s prime-time ratings, which are seen by many as an important factor in drawing viewers to both local evening news shows and, in turn, network morning shows; ABC’s relentless use this spring of “Good Morning America” to promote the popular reality show “Dancing With the Stars”; and the possibility that viewers fleeing “CBS This Morning,” the perennial also-ran that switched to a newsier format in January, might be gravitating to ABC.

But several of them also expressed reservations about Ms. Curry as co-host, and on June 20 The New York Times reported that, behind the scenes, NBC executives are preparing a plan to replace her. Ms. Curry’s critics don’t doubt her skills, but several of them expressed reservations about the personality she projects on screen and the rapport she seems to have with Mr. Lauer and other cast members. Ms. Curry is a seasoned news anchor and correspondent, known for her reports from international danger zones, but an entertainment executive who works with both “Today” and “Good Morning America” described her as “over the top in terms of emotions” in the softer environment of “Today,” where her job includes interviewing the latest newsworthy victims of accidents, abuse or celebrity scandal. That point was echoed by a former network news executive who said: “When she relates to people one on one, there’s a real empathy she has. Sometimes in the studio that seems overwhelming. It’s like, come on now, we’re talking serious issues.”

There’s some truth to that: Ms. Curry can appear to be not entirely comfortable yet with the abrupt shifts in tone that are required of the morning-show host (and of which Mr. Lauer is a master), where the requirement is not just to be informed and smooth but also to recalibrate your emotional pitch for each new segment. Sometimes a reporter’s doggedness shows through in situations where a more complicit, reassuring tone is probably what the morning audience, and the show’s producers, would prefer.

Over time, though, a different issue seems more important, one that several former “Today” staffers zeroed in on and that I think goes to the heart of how the show works.

If you look at the cast of “Today” as a surrogate family, keeping five million Americans company as they bolt their cereal and check their e-mail, the roles are well defined. There’s Al Roker the jolly uncle (weather), Natalie Morales the brainy, sharp-elbowed cousin (news) and Matt Lauer, Ms. Curry’s co-host, the favorite son with the sardonic sense of humor and the ability to smooth over any uncomfortable situation. Ms. Gifford and Ms. Kotb are the madcap in-laws hosting the show’s fourth-hour cocktail party. (There are no parents, because Americans don’t want their parents around in the morning. Just ask CBS.)

In this scheme Ms. Curry, 55, should figure as the sensible older sister, along the lines of Ms. Vieira, who grew up and moved out (but lately has been dropping by for important occasions, like hosting coverage of the celebrations of Queen Elizabeth II’s jubilee in London). But as you watch the show, there’s an inescapable sense that Ms. Curry is outside the group in a subtle but unmistakable way, like the stepsister Cinderella without a prince. Part of this is her on-screen rapport with Mr. Lauer, which is entirely cordial and professional but lacks an ease that he exhibited with both Ms. Vieira and her predecessor, Katie Couric.

Long before she and Mr. Lauer became co-hosts, Ms. Curry could be seen trying to find, or assert, her place in the show on a significant occasion: Ms. Couric’s last day as co-host in 2006. Ms. Couric kissed Mr. Lauer and Mr. Roker goodbye, then looked at Ms. Curry and the film critic Gene Shalit before turning back to the camera. Suddenly Ms. Curry awkwardly twisted her body around Ms. Couric’s to give her an unsolicited, unreciprocated kiss.

I don’t know what personal factors might come into play in creating an on-screen distance. You could speculate about certain things. Ms. Curry is biracial (Japanese-American) and spent part of her early childhood living overseas, a situation that has been known to generate self-reliance and reserve. (Barack Obama probably wouldn’t make the warmest of morning hosts.)

You could also ask what it must be like to take the seat next to Mr. Lauer, the golden boy of morning TV, who recently signed a long-term contract to stay with “Today” and was called “our franchise player” by Steve Capus, president of NBC News. A person with firsthand knowledge of the “Today” set said: “She’s nervous around Matt. It’s nerve-racking to sit next to him. Their relationship needs work.” Other people inside NBC disputed that characterization, saying that the co-hosts had a good working relationship. When Mr. Lauer went on “Piers Morgan Tonight” recently to discuss the ratings travails of “Today,” he told the guest host Donny Deutsch: “When people start to write articles about what might be wrong with the ‘Today’ show, you know where you should point the finger, point it at me because I have been there the longest. And it’s my responsibility.” He did not mention his co-host.

Ms. Curry, a longtime TV reporter before coming to “Today” in 1997, is on solid ground when it comes to journalism. It’s the first thing the show’s executive producer, Jim Bell, brings up when giving her an endorsement: “I don’t think there’s any question what you’re talking about here is one of the great journalists. People nitpick certain details, but she is known and loved by our colleagues and our viewers, she’s been doing this a very long time, she’s had some moments that I don’t think anyone else could have pulled off.”

Which must make it all the more frustrating to be nitpicked on chemistry or perceived warmth, or on how well you handle a cooking segment or celebrity interview. But those are all part of the morning-show game. Jane Pauley, who was co-host of “Today” for 13 years beginning in 1976, said that her success on the show was based on her being “famously normal.”

“NBC shared with me that the attribute most consistently associated with me was authenticity,” Ms. Pauley said. “I don’t think everybody has to score highest in authenticity.”

After watching Ms. Curry closely for a month, I came to think that she and Ms. Pauley had something in common. There is an authenticity to Ms. Curry that sets her apart from Ms. Vieira and especially Ms. Couric, whose genius is for projecting authenticity as part of an artfully constructed, for the most part uncrackable persona.

There are moments in every show when you feel as if you’re registering Ms. Curry’s true feelings, and in the constructed world of the morning show that honesty can work for you or against you. It’s one thing when we know that you’re moved by the story of a sick child. It’s another when we know that you’re bored by and a little contemptuous of a visiting chef.

In the end, it seems to me, none of these issues are things that would make or break a show; I agreed with Andrew Heyward, the former president of CBS News, when he said: “To put everything on the burden of the team overlooks the unbelievable amount of work that goes into making the program. There’s a lot about the art and the craft that’s beyond the personality and chemistry of the hosts.”

But then I’m not a morning-show producer, and I can’t really comprehend the kind of pressure an 852-week winning streak puts on everyone involved. Maybe if I did, I wouldn’t have found the hospital-gown incident endearing. After all, the split second of attention Ms. Curry devoted to Ms. Gifford could have been spent worrying about the show.