Life Changes Enable Zucker to Enjoy ‘Today’

Over at the “Today” show--where Jeff Zucker has been top dog for most of the past decade, goading the venerable NBC franchise from also-ran status to its present perch as the most dominant program in the history of morning television--Zucker’s friends claim he’s mellowed.

“In the past,” says the show’s anchor Katie Couric, “I think he could have been a little bit of a hothead--sort of flying off the handle, a screamer. But now I think he’s much more sanguine. He doesn’t sweat the small stuff as much.”

“Does he take a little more time for his family? Probably,” says co-host Matt Lauer. “Does he take a few more vacations? Yes. Does he maybe go out and enjoy himself a little more at night without constantly fretting about the show? Probably. But I think that comes with age.”

Zucker is all of 33. When he was named executive producer at age 26 and a few years out of Harvard, he was a whiz kid notorious for his world-class cockiness. But now, in the attention-deficit-disordered world of network television, he’s a grand old man--a relatively serene one, at that.

As weatherman Al Roker puts it: “If you get married, survive colon cancer, have a baby and that doesn’t change you, then there’s something fundamentally wrong with you. There’s nothing wrong with Jeff.”

Zucker, too, seems to subscribe to the maturation theory. “I don’t think people would describe me as laid-back, OK?” he says over a lunch of Cobb salad--healthier by far than his previous, whiz-kid diet of Pop-Tarts and pizza. “I still want to win, but I don’t want to kill somebody or kill myself getting there.”

Part of it may simply be his warm embrace of adulthood. In June 1996, Zucker married Caryn Nathanson, a producer on “Saturday Night Live,” an event that friends say made him conspicuously happy. Earlier this year, their first child, Andrew, was born.

But part of it must surely be his run-in with mortality. Four months into his marriage, Zucker’s doctors told him that a weird tingling in his abdomen was due to a walnut-size malignant tumor nestling in his colon--extremely rare in men as young as Zucker. He took a 2 1/2-month leave from “Today” to undergo a grueling ordeal of surgery and chemotherapy--and more chemo after the discovery of additional cancer in his lymphatic system. Then came a regimen of alternating colonoscopies and CAT scans, which continues to this day. Two years after the diagnosis, Zucker says he’s cancer-free.

“Because of what happened, I’m much more willing to let things slide,” Zucker says. “I just think it’s the perspective of knowing that life is short.”

In his perpetual rush, Zucker starts assembling each broadcast around 10:30 a.m. the day before. After the usual furor of the control room, his thoughts are still bouncing around behind his eyes. So he spends a little time trying to gather them in.

“From 9 to 10:30, I just relax,” Zucker says in his beigely functional office, just big enough for a production meeting. “Or I stew over something that went wrong.”

The 10:30 conference call among the far-flung bureaus of NBC News starts on schedule. Zucker sits at his pristine desk, leaning commandingly into the speaker phone, his various lieutenants arrayed around him, ready to listen to stories.

“Good morning, everybody,” Zucker begins briskly. “Sigi?”

Producer Sigi Devos in London touts a student protest in Paris, the arrest of former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet in London, the filming of the latest James Bond film and Linda McCartney’s posthumous CD.

“Do you care about that?” Devos asks.

“No!” Zucker answers--with such savage dismissiveness that the producers in New York begin to laugh. His boredom threshold is notoriously low, his attention span brutally brief.

The Absolute Ruler of His Staff

From Chicago, field producer Amy Wasserstrom pitches a story about a Boy Scout troop and an 11-year-old member with Tourette’s syndrome. It seems the parents of the other Scouts have withdrawn their children from the troop so they won’t be subjected to the boy’s idiosyncrasies.

Zucker’s face lights up. “All right. Call him, see if we can bring him to New York.”

So it goes, on to Los Angeles and Washington, as bookings for the next few days start to come together. Zucker indulges his berserk addiction to nicknames--”Scary Alice” for special events producer Mary Alice O’Rourke, “Pronto” for publicist Erica Proto. The executive producer answers to “Zuck.”

While he’ll listen to the opinions of others (provided they can be expressed in 10 seconds or less), Zucker will never be mistaken for a democrat. He’s the absolute ruler of his staff of 75 and makes all final decisions unilaterally.

The show is essentially four half-hour programs--22 minutes plus commercials and local news cut-ins--with their own distinct audiences. The executive producer is intent on filling each segment with the right combination of guests and spots. It’s heavy on hard news and politics for the 7 o’clock opening segment that reaches a markedly male and professional viewership, and stresses entertainment, exercise and cooking features for the 8:30 final segment that skews female and over-50.

“Really we are programming to our flock,” Zucker explains. “And the way we have to think about it is: Who is watching when? It’s news, sports, entertainment, politics, popular culture, lifestyle, all in one two-hour block. The beauty of the ‘Today’ show is that it’s a microcosm of television and life.”

And it bears Zucker’s singular imprint. Among other innovations, he has molded the 7 a.m. segment into 22 minutes of news and analysis unbroken by commercials; he airs magazine-length political profiles, such as a 17-minute report on Vice President Al Gore; and he launched the popular Friday summer concert series in the 8:30 segment. After Bryant Gumbel left for CBS early last year, Zucker also negotiated the perilous leap to Lauer in the co-anchor chair, from Willard Scott to Roker in the weather-comedian job, and from Lauer to Ann Curry in the news reader’s seat. All these transitions were seamless.

“Today” has been a staple of NBC’s lineup since 1952, when it was invented by programming genius Sylvester “Pat” Weaver Jr. It has proved to be a miraculously vital creation and a reliable profit center for the network, churning out around $234 million in revenue this year alone.

With NBC’s prime-time ratings threatening to sink like quicksand, “Today” is Old Faithful. In its 46 years, it has changed remarkably little in its aspiration to reflect--and occasionally improve--the national frame of mind.

The program has spawned innumerable imitators. One of them, “Good Morning America,” managed in the ‘80s and early ‘90s to beat “Today” at its own game, while misguided NBC executives damaged the franchise with such “fixes” as replacing wholesome co-host Jane Pauley with sexier Deborah Norville.

“The lesson is: Be careful,” says Zucker, who was a writer-producer on the broadcast during the Norville fiasco. “It’s: Be conscious. Be sure of every step you’re taking, especially on a program like this, where the audience is very attached to those people. And understand what you’re doing, the ramifications. It’s a lesson we all learned.”

Three years ago, “Today” overtook “Good Morning America” in the Nielsen ratings and has never looked back.

“I’m very happy and content right now,” Zucker says. “We’re enjoying the greatest run of any television program on, and I want to enjoy that. And certainly at some point I’d like to do something else. I’m sure that the right opportunity will present itself.”