Alessandra Stanley is talking Today in today’s New York Times, calling it the “modern equivalent of the old Barbizon Hotel for Women”.
The “fourth hour of ‘Today’ has tipped the balance of the program,” she writes, since the “first hour seems increasingly at odds with the long, tranquilizing estrogen stretch that follows.”
‘Tranquilizing’ seems to be Stanley’s overarching sentiment, as she goes on to say that “the morning on-air chemistry has gotten less tense with the arrival of new faces, but also less interesting.” New face Meredith Vieira “is pleasant but bland…”
The ‘tense-vs.-interesting’ reference comes a little more than two and half years after Stanley wrote her now-infamous critique of Katie Couric, in which Stanley partly blamed a drop in Today‘s ratings to “strained chemistry between Ms. Couric and her colleagues.”