NBC executives are worried about the network news division's plan to scrap and replace "Today's Take" with Megyn Kelly's new morning show next month, according to an NBC insider.
On the record, NBC is "upbeat" and "excited" about Kelly's new 9 A.M. ET show, Megyn Kelly Today, which is scheduled to debut Sept. 25 before a live audience in a specially built studio at 30 Rockefeller Plaza, The Daily Beast reported.
Before leaving to join NBC, Kelly had a successful career at Fox News as a primetime anchor, which tends to have a male-skewing audience, but people are concerned about whether she can connect to the daytime demographics that watch the network.
"A lot of people were watching the magazine show to try to get a sense of her appeal to the daytime demographic and a sense of how she would be outside of the Fox environment," a veteran daytime television impresario said, noting that the nationwide audience in that time period is heavily female and 25 to 30 percent African American and Latino. "Fox News skews very male … I always tend to think of her as more of a guy’s girl than a girl’s girl … It’s extremely challenging, and I’m not sure Megyn’s personality really connects with women."
While Kelly has been a regular contributor on the popular 7-to-9 A.M. Today show and has been building relationships with various coworkers at 30 Rock, network insiders are internally questioning who her audience is.
One said that there is a sense of "total panic" concerning media scrutiny of the show and whether NBC News Chairman Andy Lack’s $17 million gamble on her will pay off with high ratings, according to the Beast:
It was not a good omen for Kelly’s daytime prospects when Sunday Night with Megyn Kelly posted disappointing numbers, was reportedly pulled from its limited summer run July 30 two episodes short of the expected 10, and attracted unwelcome controversy with the Alex Jones segment, notably protests from the relatives of the Sandy Hook Elementary School victims (including 20 young children killed in a mass shooting that Jones had called a hoax).
"The Sunday show laid such an egg that any claims that she had automatic star power, to get people in the door to see what she was doing, have been disavowed," television news analyst Andrew Tyndall told The Daily Beast. "The stardom of the celebrity anchor was a phenomenon of the 1980s back when [flamboyant ABC News president] Roone Arledge was around. In this day and age, the shows make the anchors, not the other way around."
Kelly's Sunday show may have struggled over the summer, but another NBC insider is optimistic about the launch of Kelly's new show and her future at the network.
"The Sunday show struggled and tried to be very splashy and even controversial, but the Today show is a different format with a very strong underlying brand," an NBC insider said, claiming to be rooting for her success. "She should be able to excel there even if the Sunday show was perceived as compromised. They’re totally different animals."