Miles in The Morning

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.