CBS turns to quartet in a.m.

NEW YORK -- CBS News will attempt its newest incarnation of a morning show beginning Oct. 28, and to those who would ask why the perennial third-place program bothers, there is a simple answer: money.

With morning television stakes high, CBS can’t afford to give up, so the network will try again with an ensemble group on “The Early Show,” made up of “Biography” host and former “CBS This Morning” co-anchor Harry Smith, NBC sports anchor Hannah Storm, current news anchor Julie Chen and a newcomer to network television, Dallas TV anchor Rene Syler.

Traditional anchor roles and national weather will be missing. Each member of the ensemble will do interviews and introduce reports from CBS correspondents; weather forecasts will be ceded to local stations. The foursome will frequently comment, in a group discussion, on the news and stories of the day.

“We’re going to try to bring more energy to the show and more spontaneity to the morning,” said Michael Bass, the show’s senior executive producer, calling the show an alternative to the “clones” that the current ABC, NBC and CBS shows have been. “These people all have a lot to say and it’s important to let them say it.”

But with morning audiences resistant to change, CBS executives have to walk a fine line of trying to distinguish the show from rivals without jarring the small audience that currently tunes in.

Both Bass and CBS News President Andrew Heyward insisted the show will still look and feel like morning television, with the same mix of news, information and entertainment that viewers expect. “We’re not reinventing the wheel here,” Heyward said.

CBS has had little success in the last three decades finding a morning format that could challenge NBC’s “Today” show and ABC’s “Good Morning America,” yet the network has no choice but to keep trying, Heyward said.

There is enormous potential revenue, the program helps CBS spread news gathering costs across many time periods and the audience is growing, he said, making the morning, “in terms of the continuing prosperity of the news division, critically important.”

“We’ve made progress even while being a distant third,” Heyward said of the most recent version of the show, anchored by Bryant Gumbel and Jane Clayson. Heyward declined to discuss profit numbers, but they are said to be in the tens of millions of dollars. He said a morning program also “sets the tone for the day” for both viewers and the news division itself. “This is arguably the most important day part in television news right now,” he said.

CBS will have newly energized competition. “Good Morning America” is riding high on gains made in the past year, while “Today,” still a very comfortable leader in the morning, is getting a new executive producer.

For Smith, who co-anchored “CBS This Morning” from 1987 to 1996, the return to mornings is somewhat of a vindication, after being pushed out the last time around. He says that word “hasn’t been part of the vocabulary.” He’ll continue to anchor “Biography” on A&E.;

Storm, 40, has been an anchor and reporter with NBC Sports for 10 years, hosting Olympics and NBA coverage, among other events. Chen, 32, has been the news anchor of “The Early Show” since it debuted in 1999 and also hosted the summer reality series “Big Brother.”

Syler, who is 39 and grew up in Sacramento, has anchored newscasts at CBS-owned KTVT in Dallas since 1997 and anchored at Dallas’ WFAA from 1992 to 1997; before that, she worked at a number of local stations around the country.

Separately, KCBS said it too has a new morning anchor, Suzanne Rico, who will join Kent Shocknek on the 5 to 7 a.m. “CBS 2 News This Morning,” beginning Oct. 23. Rico, who replaces Catherine Anaya, was previously an anchor and reporter for San Diego’s KNSD.