Last night, TVNewser headed out Greenwich Village for the release party for Al Roker’s new mystery novel, “Morning Show Murders.” Matt, Meredith and Ann were there, as were Steve Capus, Jeff Zucker, Hoda Kotb, Natalie Morales, and Willie Geist. Also on hand the show’s EP Jim Bell. In “Morning Show Murders,” it’s the EP who gets the axe — or rather, the poison — and a TV host who is the prime suspect.
TVNewser caught up with Matt Lauer and Meredith Vieira who were all for the murder of their EP.
“We were fully supportive,” said Lauer. Vieira agreed. “Absolutely, it was one of those, ‘What took so long?’ He’s been dead to us for years anyway.”
Lauer joked, “To be honest, we thought it was ridiculous and we were wondering why he didn’t kill Ann.”
Roker tells TVNewser he’s been an avid fan of the genre since he was a kid reading Hardy Boys novels. “I always thought, someday I’m going to write a mystery. I never actually thought I’d do it, but I kept thinking, someday I’m going to do this.”
During a toast, Ann Curry warmly pointed out, “I think about how Isabel, you’re mother, read to you all of those years…and here you are, writing a novel. Al Roker is a novelist.”
“Al gets up earlier than we do,” Lauer told the crowd. “He does Wake Up with Al — three of you may have seen it — then he does the ‘Today’ show, then he does one of the thousand other projects he does. And still he finds time to have three children. And to also write a book.”
“I thought a lot about this,” Viera said. “I looked at your schedule, and know how much you work during the course of the day, the number of jobs you have, the time of day you get up, what it would take to write that book. And I realized — you didn’t write one damn word of it.”
As for one of his other TV jobs, WUWA (“Wake Up with Al” on the Weather Channel), Roker says things are going well. “I think it’s made me better on the ‘Today’ show, because before I was starting from zero at 7 o’clock,” he told us. “Now at 7 o’clock, I’ve been on for an hour talking about everything I’m going to talk about from 7 to 10.”
Roker hopes “Murders” is the first in a series. And TVNewser wanted to know who Roker was planning to enjoy “killing off” next. “I’ll just say that it’s a broadcaster in another daypart,” he said.
We asked if he had any plans to kill the editor of, say, some kind of TV news industry Web site.
“No,” he said. “I want people to buy the book.”
(Photo Credits: Martyna Borkowski)