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Text File | 1992-08-28 | 5.4 KB | 116 lines

                                                                                TELEVISION, Page 66

Miles in the Morning


Jeff Zucker, Today's 26-year-old wunderkind producer, turns the
show into -- surprise! -- a happy family

By RICHARD ZOGLIN


    When he became their boss, some wags at the Today show
predictably dubbed him Miles Silverberg. Jeff Zucker, the
26-year-old wunderkind who was named Today's executive producer
last December, just smiles at being compared to the frenetic,
baby-faced producer on Murphy Brown. "I think Miles is more
uptight than I am,'' he says.

    Uptight is hardly a word to apply to Zucker these days.
Try upbeat. After three years of soap-opera travails and
ratings woes, NBC's morning show has almost miraculously righted
itself. Katie Couric, who became co-anchor a year ago, has
managed to make people forget the short, unhappy tenure of
Deborah Norville. Bryant Gumbel, the show's sometimes testy
on-air leader for the past decade, is smiling more. And the
audience is filing back into the auditorium. Though Good Morning
America retains a narrow lead in the ratings, Today scored a
weekly win last month for the first time in more than two years.

    That was quite a feat for TV's newest overachiever, who
rose through the Today-show ranks in a scant three years. "He
is creative, has wonderful news judgment and wants to win,"
says NBC News president Michael Gartner. "And he happens to be
26." Couric also dismisses any notion that Zucker's youth poses
a problem. "He's very intelligent, and he has a real respect
for history -- even if he wasn't around when it was made."

    Zucker -- whose thinning hair and coolly confident manner
make him seem at least, well, 30 -- has put his stamp on the
Today show in ways both predictable and unpredictable. The
sometimes stodgy program (Good Morning America still gets more
of the young female viewers most prized by advertisers) has
started to loosen up, booking hipper musical guests like Color
Me Badd, Marc Cohn and Curtis Stigers. It has also been more
aggressive on breaking news: the morning after Mike Tyson's rape
conviction, for example, Today devoted much of its first
half-hour to the trial, with prosecuting attorney Gregory
Garrison among the guests.

    Yet Zucker, defying the MTV-generation stereotype, has not
turned the show into Short Attention Span Theater. In fact, he
is letting interview segments run longer -- six to seven
minutes, on average, compared with 4 1/2 to five minutes
previously. "I think the audience would like more in-depth
treatment of some issues," he says. "I hate cutting people off."
His approach has had another, not incidental benefit: with
longer segments the show runs one or two fewer pieces each day.
That relieves some of the burden on the trimmed-down staff and
saves money as well. "You have to accept the new realities of
television," says Zucker.

    He learned those realities in an amazingly short time.
After graduating in 1986 from Harvard, where he was editor of
the Crimson, Zucker was contemplating law school when he was
offered a job at NBC doing research for the 1988 Olympics. He
spent the next two years compiling 4,000 pages of background
information for the network's coverage of the Games.

    Once the Olympics were over, Zucker landed a producing job
on Today. His arrival coincided almost precisely with the start
of the morning show's much publicized problems. First was the
infamous Gumbel memo, in which the anchor made disparaging
remarks about some of his colleagues, notably weatherman Willard
Scott. Then came the departure of longtime co-anchor Jane Pauley
and her replacement by Norville, the brittle blond who
alienated both viewers and staff members. Today slipped from No.
1 to second in the ratings; morale sank just as fast. "This
place went through hell," says Zucker. "We can acknowledge it
now because it's over."

    It's over largely because of Couric. Formerly the show's
national correspondent, she filled in as co-anchor when Norville
went on maternity leave in February 1991 and was given the job
permanently a month later. Couric's unaffected, girl-next-door
likability has helped calm down TV's most volatile family
circle. Zucker takes care to parcel out praise evenly, defending
the often abrasive Gumbel. "Bryant is very opinionated," he
says. "That's his greatest strength, and it hurts him too. But
you'd be hard-pressed to find a better interviewer on TV."
Still, he admits, "Katie has reinvigorated the whole show --
including Bryant."

    Not all Zucker's experiments have worked out. In one
recent week the show tried a series of daily call-in segments
on such topics as sex, dieting and jobs; they seemed unfocused
and pointless. But the show's resurgence is causing concern at
Good Morning America, where Joan Lunden and Charles Gibson offer
more stable but increasingly bland competition. (CBS This
Morning remains a not-quite-so-distant third in the ratings.)
Weatherman Spencer Christian recently began joining them on the
anchor couch, perhaps to simulate Today's "family" appeal. And
when NBC ran TV ads several weeks ago touting Today's
first-place finish, Gibson complained in print that the bragging
was in "questionable taste." His comments made Zucker's day. "If
we've got them riled about that," he says, "they're clearly
nervous." All right, Miles, stay calm.