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Longest Winning Streak in TV History May Be About to End

Mar 30, 2012  •  Post A Comment

The longest winning streak in TV history could come to an end next week, reports Bill Carter in The New York Times’ Media Decoder.

With former "Today" co-host Katie Couric slated to co-host "Good Morning America" next week, there’s a chance that NBC’s "Today" could actually lose its No. 1 spot for a week, Carter writes.

"Good Morning America" ended last week trailing "Today" by only 137,000 viewers, the piece points out. That’s the closest margin in almost five years, and the ABC morning show won two of the five mornings during the same week, the story notes.

"ABC executives have been nearly obsessed with breaking the longest winning streak in television history, the 16-year-plus run that ‘Today’ has enjoyed. ‘Good Morning America’ has not beaten the NBC morning show since the first Clinton administration — December 1995," Carter writes.

"With one of the most popular ‘Today’ hosts of all time, Katie Couric, now scheduled to sit in for a week as guest host on ‘G.M.A.’ next week, the morning ratings will probably be as intensely scrutinized inside those two networks as those hanging chads were in Florida in 2000," the story says.

2 Comments

  1. Remember when Bryant Gumbel moved to CBS? Ah ya, it was a non-issue. Katie is a “has been” in the morning and I will not be watching.

  2. I doubt that Katie Couric is that big a draw. After all, she didn’t exactly light it up on the CBS Evening News.

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