Gold Morning, America

You know how you know you’re getting old?   Shows are having milestone anniversaries–and I remember vividly when and where I was when they started.

Such was the case exactly a half-century ago when I was struggling to wake up to schlep to school, a process that had at that point become particularly mundane.  I was a high school junior, and at my heaviest weight of my childhood.  Every weekday morning I’d groan as the clock radio clicked on at precisely 6:45 am in the living room where I slept on the most uncomfortable convertible bed short of the one Elaine Benes was forced to use in Del Boca Vista.  I’d listen to the quarter-hour sports news recap of the previous night’s scores on 1010 WINS and then trudge to our usually far too cold or hot bathroom and hope against hope the hot water was working.  I’d hurriedly shower quickly enough to be ahead of my dad, who like clockwork would barge in at precisely 7:01 am to “take a leak”, as he delicately put it, and honestly, my day didn’t need any more of a bad start than hearing my teams lost had already gotten it off to.

I’d dress in the living room with THE TODAY SHOW as white noise, as had been the habit in my house for as long as I could remember.  But by November 3,,1975 the show had lost a great deal of its appeal.  My favorite anchors were Hugh Downs and Joe Garagiola, if for no other reason than they also hosted NBC game shows later in the day.  Barbara Walters was fine but hardly a lure, and Jim Hartz, hurriedly hustled in a year earlier to replace the tragically gone-too-soon Frank McGee after he died of a bone cancer he kept from his viewers, was never an allure for me, even going back to his local news days on WNBC-TV.

So I was definintely looking for something different when ABC decided to counterprogram it nationally.  But its initial effort, AM AMERICA, was a pale clone that was also being helmed by a local New York anchor, Bill Beutel, and he seemed both stiff and confused.  I had drifted back to THE TODAY SHOW by default until ABC decided to proactively retrofit the show and retitle it GOOD MORNING, AMERICA.  And initially it wasn’t my cup of tea, either.  I was probably in line with how the NEW YORK TIMES’ influential TV critic John J. O’Connor assessed it, a parable which original staffer (and Facebook buddy) George Merlis drudged up on his feed this past weekend:

Merlis naturally was incensed, but as he confessed the initial casting was curious.  A pair of ex-scripted series stars, David Hartman, who had most recently struck out in a forgettable role as a baseball player turned teacher on the NBC flop LUCAS TANNER and Nancy Dussault, who had been doing occasional celebrity game show stints after her run as the wife and second banana on the second Dick Van Dyke show ended its run, were fronting it.  As Merlis further detailed, they weren’t the only ones:

Interestingly, the show debuted on tape — the production having been done supposedly in real time the day before, on Sunday, November 2 with holes left for the news, weather and Rona Barrett’s Hollywood gossip segments. This was because Fred Silverman, then the president of ABC Entertainment, was uneasy about doing any television live….Mel Ferber, better known as a sitcom TV director, was the executive producer. Bob Shanks, a veteran of “The Merv Griffin Show” and “Omnibus,” was the executive in charge of the show.

But as time went on Hartman settled into the role of journalist extremely well, all the more so when he was joined by yet another New York local anchor, Joan Lunden.  But the perky Lunden complimented Hartman brilliantly.   And she particularly appealed to the audience that saw her as far more representative and identifable than the aloof and airy Walters.  Merlis reminded us of the results that ensued from this strategy:

Later combinations, notably ones that eventually paired newsman Charlie Gibson with Lunden, and later with Diane Sawyer–who just happened to be married to the famed director Mike Nichols- relied on this sort of mix of talent background took the show to still greater heights and right now the battle is as white-hot as ever, as USA TODAY’s Ralphie Aversa noted in the preview he dropped over the weekend:

The co-anchor reveals his most memorable moment on the show came in 2013 when Roberts returned from her bone marrow transplant. “It was just the most joyful moment ever for me on the show because it seemed like a reuniting of our family both inside the studio and in our connection with the audience,” he says. “And when she said, ‘Good morning America’ for the first time, it was explosive.”