Top of the Morning: Inside the Cutthroat World of Morning TV by Brian Stelter

who’d spent decades at NBC. Another colleague, one who viewed Curry with disdain, said “she had a huge sense of entitlement. She thought it was a Supreme Court appointment.” Maybe—but to be fair, Couric and Vieira had held on to the chair as long as they’d wanted.
    For all sorts of reasons, Curry was tough to reverse-seduce. Start with the fact that she had no agent. (After Alfred Geller died, she toyed with signing up with someone new but decided not to; she wanted to keep sending her commissions to his family.) Nor did she have a business manager or lawyer. This put Bell at a disadvantage: he had no one else to go to, no one else to bring into the conversation about her future. Looking back on Operation Bambi, NBC executives would conclude that her lack of representation had been a well-considered choice. Curry would look back and think her lack of representation had been a tactical failure, for it left her without a legal defender until it was too late.
    Bell’s belief that Curry was responsible for the ongoing ratings slippage was bolstered the week of their La Grenouille lunch. The week before, when Guthrie filled in for Curry, Today had had a strong week; when Curry came back from vacation, GMA had a strong week. While the weak numbers were objective fact, Curry would not cop to being their cause. She saw lame content—a daily diet of dubious fashion trends and equally dubious celebrity gossip—as the main explanation for the Today show’s decline. As she told Capus, “Jim Bell has to fix this show.”
    Lauer did not disagree with her on this important point. In March, as he contemplated whether to stay or go, Lauer had confessed to a colleague that he felt the weight of the whole network on his shoulders—that in lieu of new ideas, NBC was relying on his talent and charisma. “There’s more pressure on me now than there ever has been,” he’d said. “They’re relying on Today to prop up the whole network. If we fail…” He’d trailed off, leaving the consequences of failure unspoken. Lauer, like Curry and Capus, felt that the show needed a harder news bent. They both bemoaned their producers’ use of TMZ and the British tabloid the Daily Mail for story ideas. But the stories the producers borrowed/stole about sensational murders and family feuds and shark attacks—one or two degrees shy of “trashy,” the word they tagged GMA with—were the stories that tended to rate highest in the minute-by-minute ratings. They were staples of morning TV. Thus the Today family sometimes had its own feuds when Lauer called in to the office some afternoons and asked the senior producers what was in the next morning’s “rundown,” the second-by-second schedule of what will happen on the show. Lauer dismissed stories he didn’t like (he particularly disliked the shark attack stories, staffers said) as “not relevant” to the audience at home. There are few places in midtown Manhattan more uncomfortable than the receiving end of that phone call.
    Lauer knew that his involvement in story selection rankled some producers. But he wanted to resist pandering to the audience the way he thought GMA too often did. Whenever the ratings “tighten up, there is a little bit of a reaction to the other people—and I don’t like it,” Lauer told me in late April.
    While Bell took issue with Lauer and Curry’s views of how newsy a morning show should be—he was a strong believer in the traditional mix of serious and soft segments that had always been a hallmark of Today —he and his cohosts were united in their disdain for GMA . Bell called it a “freak show.” Like Lauer, he frequently cautioned his staff not to get distracted by the competition, though that was much easier said than not done. He was proud of the quality of Today —the live shots from foreign countries, the better-living segments with financial experts, the kinds of stories he didn’t see on GMA . He encouraged reporters to compare the