Word: ebersol
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Rarely has a show fallen so far so fast, and last week the network scrambled to repair it. Out went Dick Ebersol, senior executive in charge of the show, who had picked Norville and who graciously, if inescapably, took the blame for the decline that followed. (Ebersol remains head of NBC Sports.) On June 4, in will come a third host, the amiable Joe Garagiola, a onetime catcher for the St. Louis Cardinals who was one of the show's stalwarts from 1969 to 1973. "It's incredible that I could come back," says Garagiola, 64, who was dropped...
...morning family. The turmoil began early this year with the leaking of an internal memo in which Gumbel bluntly criticized several of his Today colleagues, notably weatherman Willard Scott. Egos were still being massaged when the show went through a behind-the-scenes shake-up: NBC Sports president Dick Ebersol was given new responsibilities as the executive in charge of Today, an unusual and controversial appointment for someone outside the News division. Then came Norville's unseating of veteran John Palmer as anchor of the Today newscasts. Norville's sudden prominence (unlike Palmer, she occasionally gets to join Gumbel...
...staff, the show lost not only its keenness but its momentum. An interregnum presided over by a talent coordinator who was referred to as the "Ayatullah Doumanian" may have been television's most public and widely publicized embarrassment since My Mother the Car. From 1981 to 1985, Producer Dick Ebersol got the show back on a firmer, though slicker, course from which Eddie Murphy busted loose, as did his pal Joe Piscopo. Then Ebersol left, and Michaels, with a new cast and a lot of the old staff, took over again, but without the original brew of fervor and innocence...
...change of face, but Eddie Murphy, 23, is one of the few to try a change of race. Appearing as host on his old show, Saturday Night Live, last week, the chameleonic comedian went Caucasian in a four-minute film. For viewers who missed it, SNL Executive Producer Dick Ebersol explains, "He gets on a city bus, and there's one black man on it. The instant the black man gets off and it's just white people, they pull out music and cards and have parties." Murphy also performed in a sketch called "Milestones," depicting South African...
...closest thing to Dan Aykroyd on the new SNL; next month Eddie will move into a new house a mile away from Piscopo in Alpine, NJ. Otherwise, his best friends are his oldest friends. One of them, Clinton Smith, is an assistant to Saturday Night Live Executive Producer Dick Ebersol Another, Derrick Lawrence, 28, has signed on with Eddie Murphy Productions as an all-purpose aide-de-camp. "I'd been laid off from my job," Lawrence recalls, "and Eddie asked me if I wanted to work for him. I love Eddie for it and I always will...