Katie Couric will spend a week co-hosting the Today Show in early January. The splashy move will return Couric to the high-profile morning perch where she first found fame and reunite her with her longtime on- and off-air buddy, Matt Lauer.
Couric will spend the week of Jan. 2 filling in for current “Today” co-host Savannah Guthrie, who is on maternity leave — further igniting the morning show ratings wars. Starting in 1995, “Today”was No. 1 for an unparallelled 852 consecutive weeks before finally being deposed by “Good Morning America” in 2012. Couric was co-host for much of that time, leaving in 2006 to serve as anchor of the CBS Evening News. The lead has been going back and forth of late, with “Today” drawing more total viewers the week of Dec. 12, its third victory over “GMA” in the past six weeks.
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Couric's fill-in role inevitably also will get some tongues wagging about whether she's angling for a more permanent "Today" perch. It seems highly unlikely she'd depose the well-liked Guthrie, who extended her contract with NBC earlier this month. But stranger things have happened in the world of morning TV, where Couric's 2006 departure from "Today" set off a chain of events that eventually led to Ann Curry getting the co-host gig in 2011 — then losing it a year later in an excruciatingly tearful way that was televised live.
"Good Morning America," meanwhile, has had its own high-profile drama as a result of its recent attempts to remain No. 1 in the ratings. Last May, when it was suddenly announced that "Live with Kelly and Michael" co-host Michael Strahan was leaving that popular syndicated program for a fulltime gig on "GMA," many people — including a blindsided Ripa — cried foul. Strahan left "Live" much sooner than planned and Ripa has since conducted an extended and seemingly quite enjoyable series of "auditions" of potential co-hosts.
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