It is Gumbel's show, and almost everyone pins its seeming failure on him, or at least on people's perceptions of him. Clayson, a former L.A. correspondent for ABC, may have seemed out of her depth at first but now holds her own in interviews and hands-on features. Indeed, it's a formula the two men helped perfect. In the interest of establishing what most of us intuited, Brill's Content hired a research and consulting firm to conduct several focus groups testing viewers' responses to Gumbel. They find him arrogant, condescending, uncaring.
Conditional love is tough to sell before coffee.
Oddly enough, CBS knew this going in. But such powers of persuasion won't amount to a hill of coffee beans in the anemic, decaffeinated world of morning television if Gumbel doesn't turn this boat around soon. But even the most dynamic of duos break up and try to move on. Witness Kathie Lee. Or, for that matter, Gumbel.