Usually you tune into the morning news shows if you want to get a quick glimpse at the weather before you walk out the door, or if you've got a real weakness for high camp you tune in to Kathie Lee and Hoda in the 18th hour of the Today Show. But CBS, stuck with the low-rated Early Show, is trying something a little different. The New York Times reports that early next year, Charlie Rose and Gayle King will take over on the two-hour news show, with plans to emphasize hard news.
Rose currently hosts his own interview series on PBS, and King was primarily known as Oprah's best friend before taking over her own show, appropriately called The Gayle King Show, on Oprah's new network OWN. They'll be joining the current co-hosts Erica Hill and Jeff Glor, who started only a year ago ,so recently that I at least had no idea who they were. It's unclear how Rose's hard news approach and King's chatty, Oprah-inspired style will fit in with what the two original hosts were doing, but at CBS they're apparently planning a total revamp, inspired by increased ratings for their harder news shows like CBS Evening News and Face the Nation. Basically, whereas The Early Show always felt kind of like a Today show knockoff, you now won't be able to mistake it for anything else when you come across it on the dial.
But with Brian Williams's hard-newsy Rock Center flailing in primetime on NBC, I do wonder if people are as into hard news as they think. Then again, if you're in last place, you really have nothing to do by shaking things up-- and names like Charlie Rose and Gayle King do mean something, even at 7 a.m. I may not tune in, but I'll count on the early risers out there to fill me in on how it works out.
