Flashback: Jane Pauley and Deborah Norville Revisit Today’s 1989 Succession Drama

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.

Norville and Pauley spoke with us prior to Melvin being announced as Kotb’s replacement, but they likely wouldn’t be surprised that 1989’s succession drama didn’t repeat itself in 2024.

“I don’t think something like that would happen now for a variety of reasons,” Norville says. “But honestly, I wouldn’t change a thing. The struggles are what make you strong, and I truly do live each day in gratitude—even that very difficult chapter in my life.”

Good times  

Before the difficult times set in, both journalists recall their shared chapter at Today getting off to a smooth start. Pauley had been part of the morning show since 1976, steadily growing into a role that she admitted to feeling too young for at first.

“When I started on Today, I was so utterly self-conscious about my age that I led with it,” she confesses. “I said, ‘I’m kind of ridiculously youthful and I don’t know how I got here—maybe you’re wondering that, too.’”

Norville says that she followed in Pauley’s footsteps… literally. After getting her start at a CBS affiliate in Georgia, she landed a reporting gig at Chicago’s NBC-owned station—the same place that launched Pauley on her Today trajectory.

“I remember signing my contract, and the news director asked, ‘How old are you anyway?’ she recalls with a laugh. “I said, ‘I’m 23, but I’ve been working in television since I was 18.’ He shook his head, picked up his pen and said, ‘I think that’s how old Jane was when she started here.’”

Four years later Norville found herself at NBC News anchoring the early morning show NBC News at Sunrise and occasionally filling in on Today when Pauley would shoot her a message on their interoffice computer system.

“I’d be writing copy for Sunrise, and if Jane’s alarm went off and she felt like garbage, she’d [message] me saying: ‘Aside from the headache and throwing up part, could you be me today?’” Norville says now. “We had a really nice working relationship and a professional friendship.”

Pauley expresses similar sentiments about Norville from their time together. “Deborah’s very, very talented,” she remarks. “And she was noticed because she was capable and ambitious. She had every reason to think that she had a bright future ahead of her—as I regarded her as having myself.”   

When September ends

In September 1989, Norville graduated from substitute to full time when the Today producing team—led at the time by Dick Ebersol—promoted her to news anchor. But her arrival coincided with Pauley’s separate realization that she was ready to exit the morning show game and NBC altogether… and that’s where the trouble started.

In her 2004 memoir Skywriting: A Life Out of the Blue, Pauley recalled informing Ebersol of her decision on Sept. 7, two days after Norville joined her and Bryant Gumble on the Today show couch for the first time since her promotion. To this day, she’s adamant that the two events weren’t connected.

“My exits have always been fairly momentous,” Pauley says. “The fact of it was that after 13 years, a network is entitled to make changes. And I said, ‘Let me help you welcome my successor.’”

But producers declined that offer and media watchers—including then-Washington Post TV critic Tom Shales—rushed in to fill the information void. “[Shales] saw three people on the sofa saying, ‘Good morning,’ and immediately sees All About Eve,” Pauley explains. “After that, we were off and running.” (Shales died this past January.)

As Today’s succession narrative took shape in the press, Pauley—to use reality TV parlance—received the hero edit while Norville got the villain edit. And the network explicitly forbade either of them from trying to correct those mistaken impressions.

“NBC told me, ‘Do not speak to the press,’” Norville recalls, adding that her agent told her she could be fired for violating that network directive. “I was between a rock and a hard place with no choice. I had to be quiet.”

For her part, Pauley says that NBC’s insistence on silence was “unfair” to Norville. “It inevitably cast her in an unfortunate light, which is why I was saying, ‘Let me help you.’” Complicating matters further was the fact that Pauley was trying to to exit her NBC contract, and the network was reluctant to let their star anchor head out the door.

As September gave way to October, Pauley abandoned the idea of a hard break with her employer, instead deciding to look for a post-Today role within NBC. She made her final morning show appearance on Dec. 29, 1989, and went on to launch the short-lived Real Life with Jane Pauley series before settling into a decade-long stint co-anchoring Dateline. Pauley eventually left NBC in 2003 and currently hosts CBS News Sunday Morning.

Norville, meanwhile, took over as Today co-anchor in January 1990, and spent the next year covering major news stories and interviewing subjects ranging from Margaret Thatcher to Paula Abdul. But the damage had already been done. Pauley’s successor continued to receive chilly treatment in the press and viewers steadily tuned out of Today in favor of Good Morning America.

In early 1991, Norville went on maternity leave after giving birth to her first child and Katie Couric—then the morning show’s national political correspondent—was picked as substitute co-anchor. Norville never sat on the Today couch again.

Lessons learned

Reflecting on the bungled Today succession 35 years later, Norville says that the only thing she’d do differently is not remain silent—even if it meant being fired.

“At the end of the day, I left NBC anyway,” she says, referring to how the network ultimately pushed aside in favor of Couric. “The net result would have ended up being the same, except I did get a payout. I was able to be whole financially, even though I was kind of a mess psychologically.”

Norville candidly described her post-Today battles with depression in her 1997 book Back on Track, which also revealed how she ultimately pulled her life and career together with a stint at CBS News followed by her nearly 30-year tenure at Inside Edition. “35 years sounds so remote, it almost doesn’t compute,” she says. “It’s literally an entire lifetime.”

Pauley agrees that the media frenzy that once enveloped her life seems like ancient history now. “I look back on it with astonishment,” she says, adding that it also felt like a necessary turning point. “I had really grown up by that point and was ready to proceed to whatever would come next with no guarantees.”

Both journalists say that they’ve occasionally spoken with each other in the ensuing decades and they each were present for Today’s landmark 60th anniversary episode in 2012. They’ve also happily watched as the industry has evolved, with more women stepping into and out of anchoring jobs without generating a ruckus among media watchers.

At the same time, Norville still sees those sharks circling when a high-profile female journalist is visibly struggling. In 2012, Ann Curry tearfully exited as Today co-host amid declining ratings and criticism of her chemistry with Matt Lauer. (Curry later revealed that she’d reported Lauer for sexual harassment five months before her departure; Lauer was fired in 2017.)

Ahead of Curry’s last show, Norville penned a Hollywood Reporter column that drew a direct line from 1989 to 2012 and asked one particularly potent question: “Why is the press so quick to blame the chick?”

Part of the answer, or course, lies with which members of the press are doing the reporting. Norville correctly notes that at the time and still today, many of the reporters on the media beat—including the current TVNewser team—are men. And she indicates she felt that particular perspective acutely in the way her story was covered 35 years ago.

“This wasn’t that long after that famous scene in Dynasty when two characters ended up in a catfight and fell into a fountain,” she says. “I think a lot of people who wore the hat that you’re currently wearing wanted to see a real-life reenactment of that moment.”

In fact, as Norville correctly suggests, the prospect of yet another male writer revisiting the story 35 years later risks being more the same. There’s certainly a version of this article that could lean into the catfight coverage and dredge up unflattering gossip.

Instead of perpetuating that cycle, let’s break it by reinforcing that while neither Pauley nor Norville had the succession they wanted in 1989, they’ve both achieved personal and professional success since.

“It’s an interesting bond to have with another person for sure,” Pauley muses. “But a lot of time has passed.”