If Lauer is guilty in the hosticide of Ann Curry (he’s certainly not innocent), he’s far from the only guilty party. Matt Lauer smiles for a living, but offstage he has been obsessed with the situation, brooding about his ratings and his enemies while trying to put forward his own version of events. But the show is still haunted by what happened, and is still happening, offscreen, the internal struggles and animosities casting strange shadows. The producers of Today are employing every trick they know to rebuild the family’s chemistry, retooling the set, fiddling with the mix of stories, going for more uplift and smiles. When Chelsea Handler joked to him on Today earlier this month, “You have a worse reputation than I do,” Lauer’s smile sharpened into something that wouldn’t make it past airport security. In the aftermath of the Curry debacle, the show lost half a million viewers and ceded first place in the ratings war to ABC’s Good Morning America, losing millions of dollars overnight.īlamed in the press for his co-host’s offing, Lauer has watched helplessly as his reputation gets battered week after week. 1 morning show in America, Today was worth nearly half a billion dollars a year in advertising revenue to NBC, the bedrock of its business. What followed was the implosion of the most profitable franchise in network television. “And it just seemed like something-there was nothing we could do as it was happening, and we all felt bad about it.” “I think we all knew it at that moment,” says Lauer during an interview with his current co-hosts, Al Roker, Natalie Morales, and Guthrie. On Curry’s final day, Lauer realized the scene was catastrophic even as cameras rolled. But reality can’t always be kept out of the picture. The truest truism of morning-TV shows is that they are like families, or aspire to be-it’s a matter of practiced artifice, faked from the first minute to the last. The image of Matt Lauer trying to comfort her-and of Curry turning away from his attempted kiss-has become a kind of monument to the real Matt Lauer, forensic evidence of his guilt. Five million viewers, the majority of them women, would not soon forget how Curry, the intrepid female correspondent and emotionally vivid anchor, spent her last appearance on the Today show couch openly weeping, devastated at having to leave after only a year. Ever since, Lauer has been the prime suspect in Curry’s virtual demise. She was swiftly replaced by a younger, more genial woman, Savannah Guthrie. If Matt Lauer doesn’t want to be seen with sharp knives, it’s because last summer his co-host Ann Curry was discovered with one in her back. “Here’s Matt with a switchblade,” says Lauer, imagining the caption. “Whoa!” Lauer yells, suddenly serious, pulling back the knife with the reflexes of a practiced fighter. I casually try snapping a picture with my phone.

“It’s long enough to get right to your heart, is what it is,” says Lauer. “You know how long it is?” inquires a producer who sits alongside Lauer with a sheaf of notes. A crewman offered up this specimen from his belt holster.

Sitting at his glass-topped desk on the morning-show set, Lauer, meticulously outfitted in a green-gray plaid suit and a burnt-orange tie, has asked the crew for props for a segment on new TSA rules allowing small knives on commercial airliners. Matt Lauer, the co-host of the Today show, turns it over in his hand, marveling at the blade. The knife springs open with a satisfying snap.

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