Ann Curry doesn’t watch a lot of TV news these days, which is striking considering the former Today show co-host has been in the business for more than 35 years.
Curry, off the air for the last several years since her departure from NBC’s morning show in 2012, is returning with a new PBS show called We’ll Meet Again. The six-part series tells the stories of people whose lives have intersected at pivotal moments only to be separated by time and circumstance.
Curry talked about the new show at the Television Critics Association’s summer press tour in Los Angeles today. Adweek’s Jason Lynch got Curry’s take on the current state of TV news:
“I rarely watch television broadcasts, unless there’s something that’s really breaking, and I tend to scan all of them,” Curry said, adding that she gets most her news in print or online. “There has been some stunningly exemplary cases of journalism across the board, and there’s also been the opposite,” she said, calling the Trump era “a transformative time” for journalism.
“It’s easy to talk about what you think about something, but that’s actually not what your job is. Your job is to not tell people what to think, your job is to tell people what they need to know so they can make their own decisions,” she said, seeming to take a swipe at cable news, which has seen massive ratings growth since the president’s inauguration.
“I wasn’t looking for a comeback series,” she said of her new show. “If anything, I was looking for a wonderful way to do meaningful journalism, and that’s what this is.”
“It’s been fun to be independent,” Curry said of her post-NBC years. She’d been with the network since 1990, joining as a Chicago correspondent, working her way up to anchor NBC News at Sunrise, then to Today show news anchor, and for 15 months as co-anchor of the Today show. She remained with NBC until early 2015, but her reporting didn’t get much airtime.
“For years I have done stories about war and humanitarian disasters, and that’s what this is. It actually felt like getting back on a bike. It felt very comfortable,” she said.
We’ll Meet Again is scheduled to debut early next year on PBS stations nationwide.