September 29, 1948
Bryant Charles Gumbel is born.
The television journalist, sportscaster, newscaster, television personality and sports anchor is best known for his 15 years as co-host of NBC's The Today Show. He is the younger brother of sportscaster Greg Gumbel. He began his television career in October 1972, when he was made a sportscaster for KNBC-TV Los Angeles.
NBC Sports
Gumbel was hired by NBC Sports in the fall of 1975 as co-host of its National
Football League pre-game show GrandStand with Jack Buck. From 1975 until January 1982 (when he left to do The Today Show)
Gumbel hosted numerous sporting events for NBC including Major
League Baseball, college
basketball and the National Football League. Gumbel returned to sportscasting for NBC when he
hosted the prime time coverage of the 1988
Summer Olympics from Seoul and the PGA Tour in 1990.
One of Gumbel's more memorable moments during his time
at NBC Sports occurred in 1982, when he was on-site for the "Epic in Miami" NFL playoff game between the San Diego Chargers and Miami
Dolphins. At the end of the game,
Gumbel told the viewing audience "If you didn't like this football game
then you don't like football!"
Today
Gumbel began his affiliation with Today as the
program's chief sports reporter contributing twice-weekly features to the
program, including a regular series entitled "Sportsman of the Week,"
featuring up-and-coming athletes. In June 1981, NBC announced that Tom Brokaw would depart Today to anchor the NBC
Nightly News with Roger Mudd beginning in the spring of 1982. The search for
Brokaw's replacement was on, and the initial candidates were all NBC News
correspondents, including John
Palmer, Chris
Wallace, Bob Kur, Bob Jamieson, and Jessica Savitch. The candidates auditioned for Brokaw's job
throughout the summer of 1981 when Brokaw was on vacation. Gumbel became a
candidate for the job just by chance when he served as a last-minute substitute
for Today co-anchor Jane Pauley in August 1981. Gumbel so impressed executive
producer Steve Friedman and other NBC executives that he quickly became a top
contender for the Today anchor position.
While Friedman and other NBC executives favored Gumbel
as Brokaw's replacement, another contingent within the NBC News division felt
strongly that Brokaw should be replaced by a fellow news correspondent, not a
sports reporter. Chris Wallace was the favored candidate of then-NBC News
president Bill Small. NBC News decided to split the difference, selecting
Gumbel as the program's anchor and Wallace as the Washington-based anchor. Jane
Pauley would remain co-anchor in New York. Brokaw signed off of Today on
December 18, 1981, and Gumbel replaced Brokaw on January 4, 1982.
The Gumbel-Pauley-Wallace arrangement, known
internally as the "Mod Squad," lasted only nine months. It was an
arrangement that proved intriguing on paper but unwieldy on television. Gumbel
served as the show's traffic cop, opening and closing the program and
conducting New York-based interviews, but Pauley and Wallace handled
newsreading duties, and Wallace conducted all Washington-based hard news
interviews. With ABC's Good
Morning America in first place
and expanding its lead, NBC News made Gumbel the principal anchor of Today
beginning September 27, 1982, with Jane Pauley as his co-anchor. Wallace became
chief White House correspondent covering President Reagan, and John Palmer,
previously a White House correspondent, became Today's New York-based
news anchor.
Gumbel and Pauley had a challenging first two years
together as Today anchors as they sought to find a rhythm as a team. Good
Morning America solidified its lead over Today in the ratings during
the summer of 1983, and Pauley's departure for maternity leave sent Today
into a ratings tailspin. But when Pauley returned in February 1984, she and
Gumbel began to work well together as a team. NBC took Today on the road
in the fall of '84, sending Gumbel to the Soviet Union for an unprecedented
series of live broadcasts from Moscow. Gumbel won plaudits for his performance
in Moscow, erasing any doubts about his hard-news capabilities. That Moscow
trip began a whirlwind period of travel for Today. Remote broadcasts
from Vietnam, Vatican City, Europe, South America, and much of the United
States followed between 1984 and 1989. Today began to regain its old
ratings dominance against Good
Morning America throughout 1985,
and by early 1986, the NBC program was once again atop the ratings.
In 1989, Gumbel, who was already known for his strong
management style as Today anchor, wrote a memo to Today executive
producer Marty Ryan, on Ryan's request, critiquing the program and identifying
its shortcomings. Many of Gumbel's criticisms were directed at fellow Today
staffers. This memo was leaked to the press. In the memo, Gumbel commented that
Willard Scott, "holds the show hostage to his assortment of
whims, wishes, birthdays and bad taste...This guy is killing us and no one's
even trying to rein him in". He commented that Gene Shalit's movie reviews "are often late and his
interviews aren't very good."
There was enough negative backlash in regard to
Gumbel's comments toward Scott, that Gumbel was shown making up with Scott on Today.
Following Jane Pauley's departure from Today in
December 1989, Gumbel was joined by Deborah Norville in a short-lived partnership that lasted just over a
year. Today dropped to second place in the ratings during this period as
a result of intensely negative publicity surrounding Norville's replacement of
Pauley, and Gumbel's feud with Scott. Norville was replaced by Katie Couric in April 1991, and the Gumbel-Couric team helped
refocus Today as the morning news program on public affairs during the
1992 presidential campaign. The program returned to first place in the ratings
in December 1995.
Gumbel's work on Today earned him several Emmys and a large
group of fans. He is the second longest serving co-host of Today,
serving two months less than Couric. Gumbel stepped down from the show on
January 3, 1997 after 15 years.
Public Eye with
Bryant Gumbel
After 15 years on the Today show, Bryant Gumbel moved
to CBS to host a new prime time news-magazine called "Public Eye with
Bryant Gumbel" during the 1997–1998 television season. The show lasted
just one season before being cancelled. The show aired on Wednesday nights
between 9 and 10 pm.
The Early Show
After leaving the Today Show and Dateline
NBC in 1997, Gumbel moved to CBS, where he hosted
various shows before becoming co-host of the network's morning show The Early Show on November 1, 1999. Gumbel left The Early Show
(and CBS that same year) in May 2002. He returned to his morning television
roots when, in the spring and summer of 2010, he served as special guest
moderator of ABC's "The View" for multiple days.
Real Sports with
Bryant Gumbel
Gumbel has concentrated most of his energy recently on
his duties as host of HBO's acclaimed investigative series Real Sports with Bryant Gumbel (a show that he has hosted since 1995). HBO's web
page claims that Real Sports has been described as "flat out TV's
best sports program" by the Los Angeles Times. Also according to HBO, Real Sports
has earned 15 sports Emmys, and a 2006 Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University Award for broadcast journalism, the first time in the
award's history that it was given to a sports program. The award was for a
story called "The Sport of Sheikhs", an investigation into the
exploitation of children as camel jockeys in the United
Arab Emirates.
September 29, 1953
Make Room for Daddy premiered on ABC-TV.
September 29, 1963
The Judy Garland Show premiered on CBS-TV.
September 29, 1963
My Favorite Martian first aired.
The show starred Ray Walston as Uncle Martin (the Martian) and Bill Bixby as Tim O’Hara. A human-looking extraterrestrial in a one-man spaceship crash-lands near Los Angeles. The ship’s pilot is, in fact, an anthropologist from Mars and is now stranded on Earth. Tim O’Hara, a young newspaper reporter for The Los Angeles Sun, is on his way home from Edwards Air Force Base (where he had gone to report on the flight of the X-15) back to Los Angeles when he spots the spaceship coming down. The X-15 nearly hit the martian’s spaceship and caused it to crash.
September 30, 1958
Naked City first aired
September 30,
1958
The first episode
of The Rifleman aired on
ABC-TV.
October 1, 1958
Kraft Television Theater broadcasts its last episode.
The influential show had first appeared in 1947. Kraft had discovered the value of entertainment sponsorship back in 1933, when it launched the radio program Kraft Music Hall specifically to introduce Miracle Whip. The product took off and so did Kraft's media ventures. Kraft Television Theater featured televised comedies and dramas starring a different cast every week. The series' first production cost only $3,000, but by 1958 the network paid at least $100,000 per production. Jack Lemmon, James Dean, Grace Kelly, Anthony Perkins, and Paul Newman were among the stars that appeared on the program.
