Flashback is a feature series that revisits key moments from TV news history with the Newsers that were part of them.
Long before the fictional machinations of the Roy family, Americans were hooked on a real-life succession drama playing out on their television screens… or one they believed to be real anyway. 35 years ago, the country’s media consumers and media class tuned into NBC News’ Today convinced that the network’s flagship morning show had morphed into a remake of the classic 1950 satire All About Eve.
And in the updated version—which ran from September through December of 1989—longtime co-anchor Jane Pauley was cast as Bette Davis’s esteemed Margo Channing, while newcomer Deborah Norville inherited the part of Anne Baxter’s upstart Eve Harrington.
Never mind that neither journalist wanted those roles. Once the narrative took hold, their lives became fodder for wink-wink headlines, anonymous source-led speculation, and a Saturday Night Live parody. (In fact, that SNL sketch was even called All About Deborah Norville, and featured Kathleen Turner as Norville and Jan Hooks as Pauley.)
“Almost every day there was something about the transition,” Pauley, 74, tells TVNewser while reflecting on that fraught time. “It was mischaracterized, because what was going on at the network was [happening] behind closed doors. And there were a thousand ears at the door filling in the blanks.”
In a separate interview, Norville, 66, compares the experience to being “stuck on a merry-go-round” with no exit route. “There was no way I could put my hand out and stop it,” she notes of living through a maelstrom that nearly wrecked her still-young journalism career. “It was controlled by people higher up the food chain in television than me.”
In an example of how history can rhyme, Today is on the cusp of another transition 35 years after the botched hand-off from Pauley to Norville. In January, Hoda Kotb will depart the couch and Craig Melvin is set to inherit her perch. While there has been plenty of speculation about the reasons for that change-over, Kotb and Melvin notably haven’t been given Channing/Harrington treatment.
