Word: gumbel
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Gumbel seems like a fun boss (Hey, there's a plastic humanoid M&M behind his desk). He tosses a paper ball in the air as his producers pitch story suggestions, and even digresses from the matters at hand to suggest a movie rental (the Belgian crime drama Man Bites Dog). But he displays no loosey-gooseyness about what he wants. He quickly rejects stories that sound even remotely as if they could spring from the mouth of Steve Dunleavy. During the past months, he has told the world in almost mantra-like fashion that he doesn't want...
...crowded arena, indeed. Public Eye, which makes its debut this week, will battle it out for viewers and good stories with no fewer than five other TV newsmagazines that are already cramping network television's prime-time schedule. If, during his 15-year tenure on the Today show, Gumbel did not always display the intellectual heft or consistent coolheadedness of such newsmen as Tim Russert or Ted Koppel (the interviewer with whom he is too often favorably compared), he did manage to brand himself as television's most engagingly willful journalist. And beyond offering the intense presence of Gumbel, Public...
...plans for Public Eye may seem formulaic, but just how stressful launching such a venture can be was obvious two days after Gumbel played host to the Emmys in Los Angeles and was back on the East Coast in a CBS wardrobe room getting prepped for a photo shoot. As network staff members dropped by to compliment him on his performance, he was yukking it up with the hair and makeup women, telling them how he had thought about helping Gillian Anderson on stage because she looked so immobile in her tight dress. But his spirits quickly shifted, when...
...days later, in a calmer state, Gumbel explained that he felt the move by his superiors was simply "bad strategy." He added, "Someone could contend that the story was news and you shouldn't hold news. I don't feel compelled by that argument...
...unlikely he ever pretended to his bosses that he could be. If there is anything that Bryant Gumbel seems innately incapable of, it is faking sentiment. (No one has forgotten his infamous 1988 memo rightly excoriating Willard Scott's Today show antics.) That could make it especially hard for Gumbel to compete in a newsmagazine world full of melodramatic affect and a sense of false earnestness...