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Amy Robach, TJ Holmes and the high-flying act of co-anchor chemistry

December 7, 2022

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Amy Robach and TJ Holmes appeared to be in high spirits as they welcomed viewers to ABC’s “GMA3” on the Monday after Thanksgiving.

“TJ is multitasking today,” Robach explained, as she sat between a laptop-wielding Holmes and their co-host, Jennifer Ashton. As Holmes insisted he was simply consulting the show’s agenda, Robach smiled. “Or maybe any World Cup game right now?” she teased.

Ashton tried to join in on the jokes, but Robach and Holmes were running, and the camera quickly settled on the two of them.

“Why am I entrusting you with anything if you’re going to tell me?” huffed Holmes, 45.

“Entrust?!?” exclaimed Robach, 49, gesturing to his laptop. “Everyone can see!”

“Well, they don’t know what’s going on. Let’s not do this in front of people,” Holmes said with a laugh, gently taking his anchor banter in a transition about how viewers might too be multitasking, shop around for these Cyber Monday deals.

TV news executives spend countless hours and millions of dollars trying to conjure up this kind of on-air electricity – the witty banter and easy comfort between co-anchors that will persuade viewers to incorporate a program into their daily routine. But moments like these — and there have been many since Robach and Holmes began hosting the 2020 “Good Morning America” afternoon spinoff together — were cast in a new light on Wednesday. after the Daily Mail published an in-depth investigation revealing that the relationship between the anchors, who were both married to other people, had turned romantic.

After a tough few days, ABC News executives pulled the two off the air at least temporarily on Monday, with their future unclear. It was both an ironic and inevitable decision: It never hurts a show to have co-hosts who clearly adore each other, and falling in love at work isn’t unprecedented. Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski tied the knot in 2018 after feuding for more than a decade on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe.”

But a new romance can also inject volatility into the live TV act and family dynamics we expect from the people delivering the news to us — especially in the morning and afternoon programs that “follow the safety,” said Evan Nierman, chief executive of global crisis public relations firm Red Banyan.

Suddenly, Robach and Holmes are “in conversation” in a way they never were before, Nierman noted. “But it’s a pretty common rule in journalism that you don’t want to become the story.”

When the Daily Mail approached ABC on Wednesday, Holmes initially denied to his bosses that he and Robach were involved, according to a person familiar with the matter who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss an internal matter. That same morning, the tabloid published not just an account of the affair, but 60 photos of the two looking cozy. Footage captured the two packing their car after a trip to a remote cabin in upstate New York, his hand affectionately brushing it behind. The network has been on its back foot ever since.

The story set off an internet storm. Holmes appeared on the show without Robach that day, and both deleted their Instagram accounts. Anonymous sources were quickly sent to the tabloids; some reported that the two separated from their spouses over the summer.

The two anchors came to report on shoe leather in local TV markets – Holmes in his native Arkansas, Robach in Charleston, SC, before moving to Washington’s WTTG (Ch. 5) – before moving on to the field more sweet and focused on the morning TV personality. . Robach joined ABC in 2012, Holmes in 2014. Both are in their second marriages, with spouses they wed in 2010: Robach with former “Melrose Place” actor Andrew Shue, and Holmes with the lawyer Marilee Fiebig. Neither Holmes nor Robach returned calls seeking comment.

Initially, ABC executives determined the case was a personal matter between consenting adults, according to an executive who spoke on condition of anonymity to speak freely. And on Thursday, Robach and Holmes were on camera together again, joking about looking forward to the weekend, a vibe that turned positively giddy the next day.

“You know, it’s too bad it’s Friday,” Holmes told Robach with gleeful irony, noting the “great week” he’d been enjoying. “I just want this one to go on and on and on, just enjoying it.”

“Speak for yourself,” Robach replied with a laugh. The two then burst out laughing during a wellness segment about how poppy seed bagels can trigger a positive drug test result.

Network executives, however, decided on Saturday that a pause was needed as they planned their next steps. A flurry of reports began to emerge in the New York Post alleging that Holmes had had other romances at work and that co-workers had long been suspicious of her closeness to Robach. On Monday, ABC News President Kimberly Godwin told staff that while the relationship was not a violation of company policy, the pair “became an internal and external distraction.”

Even though the controversy involved a less publicized spinoff of the more popular “Good Morning America,” the network’s response spoke to the deep investment audiences place in the lives of the presenters they see every day.

As the news brought far more attention to ‘GMA3’ than it has ever received before – ratings jumped 12% from their average the day after the Daily Mail story , according to Nielsen – that’s not the kind of attention broadcast executives appreciate.

If the pair is important to the network, “they will find a way to roll with it. [the relationship]said Jonathan Klein, the former president of CNN, where he employed Holmes as an anchor from 2006 to 2011. ‘them. .”

In an otherwise splintered media landscape, the dynamic of TV news co-anchors remains a touchstone and a constant, especially as morning shows have claimed some of the latest claims to mass appeal. Without their morning shows, CBS News and ABC News would be losing money. (NBC News would still be profitable, aided mightily by its cable arm, MSNBC.)

Finding the elusive balance of cheerfulness, gravity and chemistry between the hosts is difficult, and it can play out publicly and messy — from NBC’s disastrous process of dropping Ann Curry from “Today” to replace her. by Savannah Guthrie in 2012, to Kelly Ripa telling viewers how blindsided she was to learn at the last minute that co-host Michael Strahan would be leaving “Live!” going to “Good Morning America” in 2016.

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In the beginning, television news was usually broadcast by a single person sitting behind a desk, said Mendes J. Napoli, chief executive of Napoli Management Group, a division of Paradigm Media Entertainment. But executives ultimately felt it would be wise to split authority between two reporters – if viewers didn’t warm to one, they might connect with the other.

Typically, both of these reporters were male, even in the freeform realm of morning television, where early co-hosts included a chimpanzee – J. Fred Muggs, who helped Dave Garroway make “ Today” a hit for NBC – and comedian Ernie Kovacs, who pitched it as a lisp “poet laureate” on Philadelphia’s WPTZ in 1950.

But after Barbara Walters joined “Today” in the 1960s, eventually becoming a co-host, executives realized that “morning shows tend to have a large female audience, and they want to bring in a woman who they can identify themselves” at home, Mitchell said. Stephens, who taught journalism at New York University and has written several books on the history of the news industry.

“Viewers were drawn in by the chemistry between the two anchors,” said Napoli, who represents hundreds of TV broadcasters. “I hate to use the word ‘family’, but people really thought of them as family.”

When British director Simon Godwin was looking for a new way to stage a new production of Shakespeare’s ‘Much Ado About Nothing’, he realized he needed a plausible setting to make sense of the banter between Benedick and Beatrice – two romantic protagonists who spend the most of the play verbally arguing while denying their obvious feelings for each other.

Where else can you find that kind of chemistry, laden with public-private tensions, on display? For his production, which runs until Sunday at the Shakespeare Theater Company in Washington, Godwin cast Benedick and Beatrice as co-television news anchors.

“The adrenaline of presenting the news together is, I would say, a bonding experience. And you’re out there and presenting as a couple,” Godwin said. “For a lot of people, media is part of their family. – and the stakes are very high.”