When Sylvester L. ”Pat” Weaver created NBC`s ”Today” show 40 years ago, on Jan. 14, 1952, he sent his staff a well-remembered memo.
”Just have fun with the stuff,” Weaver advised, according to former network news president Reuven Frank in his memoir ”Out of Thin Air.”
It was about the only advice Weaver could give, because no one had ever tried what he was about to do on TV. Weaver was out to create a warm, intimate, unstructured show that would illuminate the news and inspire and educate the audience.
It was the sort of TV then known only in Chicago, where Dave Garroway hosted ”Garroway at Large” for WMAQ-Ch. 5; Studs Terkel presided over
”Studs` Place,” first for WMAQ, then at WLS-Ch. 7; and ”Kukla, Fran and Ollie” foreshadowed the Muppets on WMAQ.
Weaver turned to Garroway to host his new national showcase, made possible in 1951 by the establishment of the first coaxial cable between Chicago and New York, because of Garroway`s easy-going style.
Garroway came aboard, Weaver added a chimpanzee named J. Fred Muggs to the cast, and, with everyone having fun, ”Today” became a runaway hit. It was the first time network TV was on the air in the morning.
Somewhere along the way, however, principals on the show forgot what their founder said. And it has come back to haunt them, as one executive noted recently.
”I think, for a while there, we weren`t having too much fun,” says Jeff Zucker, at 26 the youngest executive producer ever to run ”Today.” ”We want to take it back to where it was when it started as a window on the world and do a good program that is both journalistically sound and a lot of fun. We want to be No. 1 again.”
”Today” ceased to be No. 1 in the morning ratings race shortly after a series of highly publicized blunders in 1988. First, a confidential memo, insulting weatherman Willard Scott, was stolen from the personal computer of anchor Bryant Gumbel and leaked to the press, creating the appearance of a family fight.
Shortly thereafter, network executives moved news reader Deborah Norville to parity on the show with veteran co-anchor Jane Pauley-without bothering to notify Pauley. Angered, Pauley quit and took thousands of loyal viewers with her.
Her departure may or may not have caused it (ABC`s ”Good Morning America” had been closing the ratings gap for weeks), but ”Today” tumbled into second place, where it remains today, if only by the thinnest of margins.
Fighting the affiliates
At age 40, ”Today” is ailing, but on the mend, with Katie Couric replacing Norville, who has started a new career in radio, and Zucker in for former executive producer Tom Capra, who has moved to California to produce movies for NBC. Don Browne, vice president of news at NBC, says he expects Zucker to set new parameters for the decade to come.
”The `Today` show is 40 years old because it is constantly evolving and changing,” Browne says. Former executive producer Steve Friedman ”came along with a vision in the 1980s and brought it up to another plateau, and, frankly, we think Jeff Zucker has the same kind of vision and excitement that Steve had. We think he`s going to define morning television in the `90s, so please, stay tuned.”
That people stayed tuned to ”Today” in such numbers, and for so long, surprised almost everyone except Weaver. Now 83 and retired in California, he went up against the most powerful TV critics of his day, and had to fight fellow network executives and affiliates, in getting ”Today” on the air, but he says he always knew it would work.
”The hardest part was getting stations to start in the morning,” notes Weaver in a telephone interview from his California home. ”Most of them didn`t start until noon, so I had to go to the affiliates meeting and really give them hell.”
Despite affiliates` doubts (many, in fact, did not go on the air until 6 p.m. in those early days), Weaver says he carried the day because, as a former advertising executive at Young & Rubicam in the days when ad agencies acquired shows for clients, he had a string of hits to his credit ranging from ”Your Show of Shows” to ”NBC Comedy Hour.”
With ”Today,” Weaver also ushered in the marketing technique that has turned network TV into the multibillion-dollar business it is today. He says
”Today” was the first show to sell commercial spots to various advertisers, rather than sell an entire show to one or two, which then controlled everything from casting to scheduling.
Chicago-style TV
But Weaver says the real secret of ”Today” was his recruiting of ”the guys from Chicago” to run it.
Garroway, now dead, whose WMAQ disc jockey show ”The 11:60 Club” had gained a national audience at the time, was one of the guys. So were author-documentarian Terkel, now 79, and writer-producer Charley Andrews, creator of ”Garroway at Large.”
Hugh Downs, tapped to head up Weaver`s ”Home Show” and subsequently to succeed Garroway on ”Today” before moving to ABC and ”20/20,” also was one of the Chicago gang.
Terkel says Weaver turned to Chicago for his staff because ”Chicago-style TV” existed nowhere else.
”Chicago-style TV was non-formula,” says Terkel. ”It was as fresh as jazz, which also came from Chicago to some extent; it had an air of improvisation to it. But `Garroway at Large` did it. Dave was the first face, the first voice ever heard in American homes in the daytime. It was a revolution.”
Andrews says Weaver`s vision-to bring the audience up to quality programming, rather than bring programming down to the viewer (the latter technique, he adds, eventually ”resulted in `Gilligan`s Island` and `The Beverly Hillbillies` ”)-allowed the Garroway team to experiment with
”Today” because ”nobody knew what they were doing in those days.”
The show initially was broadcast from Rockefeller Center behind a plate-glass window facing the street, allowing pedestrians to kibbitz. It was, says Andrews, now 75 and in ”vigorous pursuit of leisure,” a day-to-day experiment.
”We tried to do pure television as against translating vaudeville to television,” he says. ”Every variety show then was an old-time vaudeville show. Our basic theory was that there was only one person looking at you; if there were two people they were talking to each other, so Garroway approached the camera as if it were a person.
”At that time, nobody else was doing that, and it made a huge difference. We didn`t play to an audience; we played to one person. And we didn`t look for laughter; we looked for chuckles. It was low-key and very intimate. Dave would point to the camera and say, `Come here,` and the camera would move in on him.”
`A frontier moment`
It was fresh, it was new, and it is gone-swamped, according to Terkel, by a tidal wave of commercialism that no longer allows for risk-taking.
”It was a frontier moment, when individuals stood free,” Terkel says.
”Television then didn`t have the tightness of today; it was in the hands of the actual creative people. We always said at the end of my program,
`Dialogue by the cast.` It came from the participants themselves.”
”We lost that,” Terkel adds. ”We lost spontaneity; we lost the astonishment and the excitement of that moment. Something happens to a country by the effect of TV. Soundbite-ism has taken over; now it`s the wisdom of the world in 10 seconds.
”It`s such a huge, overwhelming sales medium. With all the power and money at stake, would they have something wholly spontaneous today? I doubt it.”
Weaver remains proud of the fact that he helped create morning TV, but, like Terkel, he thinks the genre has lost its birthright on all three networks.
”My complaint on all three shows is that they have moved to coping segments, celebrity interviews and piff-paff-nothing stuff, real trash,” he says. ”Against that, with the changes in hardware, they have the ability to go places we always wanted to go (and couldn`t before development of the communications satellite), so in that sense, they`re pretty good, but CNN does a much better job on the international scene.”
Terkel, however, is not campaigning for any return to ”the good old days.”
”It would be very difficult to bring it back,” he says. ”Maybe you can go home again, despite what Thomas Wolfe said, but you`d have to go home a different person, to a home that is not quite the same.”
At 9 p.m. Tuesday, NBC-Ch. 5 will mark the ”Today” show`s anniversary with ”Today at 40,” a retrospective featuring current and former hosts.
