On August 21, the Great American Eclipse passed over a wide swath of the United States, crossing 14 states, and all but overwhelming the cable-news and broadcast landscape. The eclipse, after all, was a perfect television story: an uncontroversial natural wonder that could bring huge audiences together. On the set of the Today show at 30 Rockefeller Center, co-hosts Savannah Guthrie and Matt Lauer were ready to capitalize on the cosmic, collective event. They welcomed onto the set NBC weather anchor Dylan Dreyer and their recently hired megastar colleague Megyn Kelly. The mood was festive and light. Guthrie was dressed for the occasion in a sky blue dress adorned with cloud patterns; Dreyer wore a large sun pendant necklace.
The segment began with the sort of warm, family-style banter that has undergirded the show’s epic success: Lauer asked his colleagues whether the eclipse was better to watch in a group or alone; Dreyer and Kelly agreed it was better in the former setting; Guthrie could see the appeal either way, “depending on what you are looking for.” Lauer noted a New York Times story that quoted those who thought it better to watch the eclipse in a crowd, “because we are social creatures” and “we feed off of other people’s energy.”
Lauer then asked the group about other events that were more fully enjoyed in a collective environment. Guthrie offered whale watching; Dreyer suggested a wedding, which set off a flurry of giggles. (“In a group?” Lauer chuckled. “You also need a groom!”) Kelly suggested a rock concert.
Video: Megyn Kelly Asks 12 of Her Toughest Questions
Lauer then pivoted and wondered aloud about events that were best enjoyed alone. He shared that he liked lying down on his back and watching the stars by his lonesome. Kelly jumped in: “And not the eclipse?” But Lauer suggested that the eclipse was different from regular star-gazing because it was a singular moment and he had kids, like they all did, so the eclipse was therefore something to experience with them. Everybody nodded.
But Kelly was about to shake things up. “Is the problem that the eclipse is actually not that exciting and we need to gin it up?” she asked. As she uttered the words, howls of mock protest rose on set. Lauer laughed uncomfortably. “There is an ejector button for that seat,” Guthrie scolded playfully, “We are very big on the eclipse here!” Kelly laughed, but stood her ground. “I mean, I’m gonna watch it, but I’m not feeling what you are feeling.” Guthrie gently reminded Kelly that both she and Dreyer were wearing eclipse-themed clothing. Lauer saved the moment by seamlessly suggesting Kelly should be a football coach and quickly segued to a tape of two college football coaches who were, like Kelly, unimpressed by the cosmic event of the day.
Everybody seemed to be moving on toward a different topic, moments later, until Kelly pressed on. She seemed to suggest that the eclipse might be just as good to view on television. For instance, she offered, the Weather Channel was going to tee it up, as was Today, in case anybody missed it. Watching on television would ensure “you don’t have to waste an hour of your day,” she said. As she spoke, Lauer let out a soft, “who are you?” Dreyer could be heard talking over them both, saying “you are breaking my heart.” By then, Lauer seemed to have given up. He said to Dreyer, across the table, “go ahead, save us.” Guthrie offered one final rebuke: “Megyn’s like, ‘Hey universe, do better!’” The segment ended awkwardly.
In a week, Megyn Kelly will complete her transition from right-wing cable-news provocateur to morning-show personality as the host of Megyn Kelly Today, which will debut on September 25 and take over the third hour of the Today show, at 9 A.M. Kelly has promised that the show, which will air before a live audience, will highlight “content that is focused on inspiring and empowering people.” She has said it would conjure “human connection” in a disconnected world and be “energetic.”
Others, however, are skeptical. When Kelly left Fox News for NBC, one industry insider warned me that I would never be writing about her again—the implication being that morning television had become a milquetoast and apolitical landscape. And yet Kelly has managed to remain in the headlines, but not always for the reasons she had hoped. She has endured scrutiny for the middling ratings of her newsmagazine show, Sunday Night, which featured controversial interviews with Vladimir Putin and Alex Jones, the latter of which created a weeklong media spectacle. (By putting her across from Jones, “now you’ve given them a reason to not like her,” one TV executive recently relayed to me. An NBC insider countered that Kelly had done a fair share of uncontroversial interviews with personalities such as author J.D. Vance, comedian Ricky Gervais, and radio and TV host Maria Menounos.) Kelly’s Sunday night program, which was to run for “around 10 episodes” ended up finishing after eight episodes over nine weeks. The ratings hovered around 3.5 million viewers and regularly lost out to reruns of CBS’s 60 Minutes.
The media obsession with Kelly’s debut may be best explained by National Enquirer owner David Pecker, who recently noted in The New Yorker that Kelly sells more copies of his supermarket tabloid than J. Lo. But her overlords at NBC are hoping that she can translate that frequently negative attention into positive ratings in the highest-profile and most-profitable news franchise on air. Given Kelly’s reported $17 million-plus salary, and the marketing blitz surrounding her arrival—and the fact she now joins perhaps the greatest cash cow in TV history—the stakes are high. “If she doesn’t [succeed], it’ll be a disaster for NBC,” said one news-industry veteran.
Lauer’s question to Kelly on the set of Today—“Who are you?”—was apparently made in jest, yet its answer may be a harbinger of Kelly’s forthcoming success. Legendary NBC News chairman Andy Lack has said he was not drawn to Kelly for her appeal to conservative audiences, but most news outlets scrambled to adapt to a new reality after Donald Trump’s surprise electoral college victory in November. NBC amplified the presence of conservatives on its news programs, including Charlie Sykes, Hugh Hewitt, Bret Stephens, Nicole Wallace, and Steve Schmidt. It also gave an hour-long slot to former Fox News stalwart Greta Van Susteren.
But the anticipated cultural shift went in the opposite direction. Rather than reward conservative personalities who could translate Trump’s appeal to the mainstream, NBC and MSNBC have enjoyed the success of anchors, such as Rachel Maddow and Lawrence O’Donnell, who have cogently espoused a progressive political bent. Van Susteren is no longer on the air.
Kelly, for her part, appears to be finding her voice within this continuum. Rather than tack left or right politically, she has been on a full-throttle mission to revamp her image into someone with greater dimension than what she was able to showcase during Fox News’s prime-time lineup, where her staccato-like questions and litigious cross-examinations created viral moments. She spent the summer preparing for her main job on Today by, among other things, taking a five-day trip to meet 19 affiliate stations in six cities in August, and throwing out the first pitch at a minor league baseball game in Raleigh, North Carolina. And on one such stop to an affiliate in Chicago, she noted that she has enjoyed the transition to network news from cable because of her colleagues and because of “resources, resources, resources,” Kelly told The Chicago Tribune. “NBC, they expect excellence, and they are willing to devote the resources needed to achieve excellence, and nothing less than excellence will do.”
The amount of resources at Kelly’s disposal has irked some NBC colleagues, who feel she is sucking up too many of them at a time when a nonstop news cycle has exhausted her fellow NBC anchors and producers. Moreover, there is a lingering question of whether the resources will provide an adequate return on investment. In this regard, Kelly certainly has her supporters. Lack reportedly told affiliates before Kelly’s Sunday show launched that its success would not be measured in ratings. “It’s not going to be perfect on Day One, and we’re not going to be in first place on Day Two—but I’d rather be holding our cards than anyone else’s.” Indeed, the show was not in first place at all and was not infrequently in third place. “The measure of that show’s success is the journalism it produces and not ratings,” an NBC insider told me. “A Sunday night public-affairs show is not a ratings play for a network; it’s an influence play,” this person said.
Maybe so, but another executive with close ties to the industry took particular issue with the way NBC has managed Kelly since her arrival at the network, specifically citing the decision for her to interview Jones, who long asserted that Sandy Hook’s mass shooting was a hoax on his Infowars platform. “Journalistically, to interview him is defensible,” the executive with close ties to the industry said. “But she was going to need that exact demo—moms and minority women—who were the most obviously alienated demographics by her interview of him.” (The NBC insider countered that if the broader population had a general impression of Kelly, it would have come from her public battle with then-candidate Trump, not from the Jones interview.)
Kelly’s credibility with this audience is more important than ever. She will occupy a full hour of the lucrative Today franchise, which has only recently regained sustained top billing over Good Morning America in the most coveted demographic of the vicious morning-show wars. Several NBC insiders I spoke to professed excitement about the show; Kelly has described herself as a racehorse eager to get out of the gates. Still, there is lingering concern over whether Kelly, who can’t bother to feign interest in a once-in-a-generation eclipse, is made for the mornings. The atmosphere among some of the rank and file at NBC was summed up by one staffer who told me: “We are just bracing ourselves and hoping it is less bad than the reception of the Sunday show.”
Correspondents Harry Reasoner, Ed Bradley, Morley Safer, Diane Sawyer, and Mike Wallace with 60 Minutes creator Don Hewitt in Hewitt’s CBS office, New York City, 1986.
Photograph by Brownie Harris.
Wallace, photographed for V.F. by Harry Benson, 1991.
Photograph by Harry Benson.
Reasoner and Wallace co-host the first broadcast, 1968.
From the CBS Photo Archive.
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Bradley and Hewitt edit copy, 1985.
From the CBS Photo Archive.
Steve Kroft grills the Clintons about their marriage, Boston, 1992.
From the CBS Photo Archive.
Safer with an upstart producer, Jeff Fager, circa 1990.
Photograph from 60 Minutes.
Safer reporting the war in South Vietnam, 1965.
By Alex Brauer/CBS News.
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The 60 Minutes team, in 1975.
From The CBS Archive.
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