‘TODAY’ BRIGHTENS MORNINGS FOR NBC

NBC’s “Today” has edged out ABC’s once-dominant “Good Morning America” in ratings for the last three weeks. “Today” no longer has a program consultant named Frank Magid. The “CBS Morning News” may still be in trouble but shouldn’t be written off as hopeless.

Oh, yes, Jane Pauley, the “Today” co-anchor who gave birth to twins in 1983, is pregnant again. Pauley, married to “Doonesbury” cartoonist Garry Trudeau, is expecting her baby in August.

All this was noted Saturday by “Today” executive producer Steve Friedman, the lead-off speaker at NBC’s biannual meet-the-press sessions with out-of-town TV critics and writers, followed on Sunday by NBC News President Lawrence E. Grossman.

Grossman said that NBC’s “Almanac” news-magazine series, aired on a monthly basis since its September debut, will join the network’s weekly prime-time schedule in March on Tuesday nights at 10 p.m., starting March 4. That time slot currently is occupied by “Remington Steele,” whose fate has not been announced.

“Almanac,” anchored by Roger Mudd, also will air single-subject documentaries on a once-a-month basis when the program seems sufficiently established as a weekly offering, Grossman said. He anticipated that six to eight such documentaries will have aired in the “Almanac” time period by the end of the year.

Support for “Almanac” repeatedly has been voiced by NBC Board Chairman Grant Tinker. It is the latest prime-time news venture attempted by the network, which has seen at least four other such series end in failure in recent years, among them “First Tuesday,” “Weekend” and “First Camera.”

Friedman, whose resurgent “Today” began making its comeback in the morning-show ratings in early 1985, declared that year as the year “we caught ‘Good Morning America.’ ” But he sounded a predictable note of caution that the race is far from over.

Although Friedman needled ABC’s morning competition as now being somewhat stodgy, he told the visiting press Saturday at the Century Plaza Hotel: “We do not take for granted that we are going to win in 1986, because if you take things for granted you get taken.”

Ergo, he said, big plans are afoot for “Today” this year, including voyages outside New York that are akin to the 1985 trips to Rome and five U.S. cities in five days that got the program a lot of publicity and helped its rise in the ratings.

The 1986 trips will start with one to New Orleans for the Jan. 26 Super Bowl that NBC is televising. After that, the schedule calls for a February week in Rio de Janeiro (for the carnival) and Buenos Aires, then a five-port Wilmington, N.C.-to-Miami cruise aboard the cruise ship Norway in May.

During his Saturday night chat, Friedman disclosed that program consultant Frank Magid--sometimes sardonically called a TV “news doctor”--no longer is advising NBC on how to boost its “Today” audience. Magid’s contract expired last month and “he chose to go somewhere else,” Friedman said. He did not elaborate.

Magid’s employment wasn’t “a waste of time or money,” Friedman said, but “the people who fixed the show, quite frankly, are (co-anchor) Bryant Gumbel, Jane Pauley,” and John Palmer and Willard Scott, the show’s newscaster and joke-cracking weatherman, respectively.

Friedman chided CBS News for its varied efforts to pull the “CBS Morning News” out of the third-place spot in which that program has been mired for years.

“If you wanted to, you could write a book on how to destroy a program with what they’ve done in the last three years,” he said. He singled out the five changes in anchor teams that the program has had since 1983, including last year’s much-publicized entrance and exit of Phyllis George.

The “Morning News” now is co-anchored by Forrest Sawyer and Maria Shriver.

Friedman, asserting that George “didn’t fail the ‘Morning News,’ the ‘Morning News’ failed Phyllis George,” said he believes that viewers want familiar faces every morning and that all the program’s anchor changes have contributed heavily to its problems.

However, CBS “is a tough outfit,” and while he wouldn’t expect the program to be a serious competitor for the next six months, “I think CBS is doing the right thing now,” he said.

“And I would say that if they stick with it and keep working, that maybe sometime later this year they’d be worth another look. I wouldn’t write them off.”