'Morning Joe' duo aim for discerning viewers

Mika and Joe want to make you late for work.

They want their smart repartee and influential guests to so engross you, the intelligent viewer, that you'll forget what time it is.

Mika is Mika Brzezinski, whose new book is titled All Things at Once, a memoir of her bumpy TV career. She's been doing a sort-of book tour with her TV partner, Joe Scarborough as a way to bring the Mika-and-Joe brand to the people.

They cohost Morning Joe, MSNBC's breakfast-time news show, which runs from 6 to 9. Morning Joe amounts to a cable-TV bet: that a smart show can find and keep an audience that, if relatively modest, is steady and competitive.

Thus their road trip for Brzezinski's All Things at Once. Make that road trip, Part 2: Brzezinski accompanied Scarborough last year when he published The Last Best Hope.

When DJ Don Imus went down in flames in April 2007, MSNBC searched for a workable morning show. Morning Joe emerged from the wreck, and after some tweaks, the show has found an audience, thanks largely to the unlikely chemistry between the cohosts.

Brzezinski, 42, and Scarborough, 46, present an image of political diversity not often seen on TV. Scarborough is a conservative, a former (1995-2001) U.S. House representative for the First District of Florida. Brzezinski, a daughter of former U.S. National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski, is a self-described progressive whose family has long been active in Democratic causes. (Scarborough jokes that "it's something you almost never see: a sensible conservative and a rational progressive.")

Awkward at first, it has grown into something unexpected: a model of how people who disagree (flinty but lovable male neocon and empathetic but tough female liberal) can still get along.

Onstage as on camera, when she says something he dislikes, he rolls his eyes. When he says something she can't stand, she does not hide her distress. Yet this is no Firing Line, no "Point/Counterpoint," no toxic misrepresentation of tit-for-tat gotcha advocacy as political discourse. More like a family that enjoys a good political row over toast and coffee, and looks forward to next breakfast.

There's some evidence the Morning Joe wager may just work. At a recent, and packed, Free Library appearance, a fan rose to say: "I want to congratulate you for making me late to work every morning."

Many in the audience (frequently late for work, evidently) cheered. Scarborough laughed and said: "We're thinking of having a Late for Work Club. That's the kind of audience we have: loyal."

"We're betting, and we've found in audiences like the one here," Brzezinski said afterward, "that there's a small but vibrant and very brilliant audience for a show like this. I'm just tired of all these so-called women's morning shows, all the discussions of lingerie and how to make the perfect salmon."

Morning Joe prides itself on attracting newsmakers and giving them time. "We don't bring somebody on for a 30-second sound bite," a yawning Brzezinski said during an hour-long book signing after the Q&A. "That's not what we are. But neither are we 'He says this, and she says that.' "

"We don't do tabloid, we don't dumb down," Scarborough said, adding that "in the Beltway, there's a reason we're the show they watch."

It's morning zoo for political junkies.

It's tough now for anything cable. Revenues have fallen for almost everyone not named Fox. Times are really tough for anything NBC, as the ailing Peacock arranges its feathers for Comcast.

No cable show yet rivals the titans of morning broadcast TV (Fox strains to reach two million, while NBC's Today cruises at five), and Fox News' Fox & Friends is well in front among cable morning shows. So the battle rages for second place. Morning Joe thus vies with American Morning on CNN and Headline News' Morning Express With Robin Meade. (And there's Imus, now at Fox Business.)

The quest is on for a distinctive edge that can attract a loyal audience - even if that audience may number only around 350,000.

Like most cable morning newsies, Morning Joe enjoyed its biggest audiences during the 2008 elections. And also like them, it has not returned anywhere near those numbers. It's a dogfight. In the last four months' Nielsen ratings, Morning Joe sometimes comes in second, sometimes fourth. As of Jan. 12, it was in second place. Then, as of Jan. 21 - thanks, perhaps, to the Haitian earthquake and Massachusetts elections - CNN's American Morning nearly doubled its average viewership (from 339,000 to 617,000) and shot into second place.

Mika and Joe seemed a little astonished by the crowd at the Free Library, by the long autograph line, and by the affection for Scarborough among a largely (judging from a show of hands) liberal audience.

During the book signing, he and she smiled for photos and banter with fans. One woman pulled on Scarborough's perfect hair and cried, "Oh my God! It's real!"

As the title attests, Brzezinski's book is a memoir about her struggle to maintain family, marriage, career, and self-respect while negotiating the stormy straits of the TV world. Her message: It's rough out there.

"If you're a woman in this business, you're a piece of meat, and someone is always sizing you up," she says. She should know: The nadir of her career came when CBS fired her on her 39th birthday. She spent a year looking for work.

"If you've been fired in TV, everybody thinks there's something wrong with you," she says. She got back in the game by phoning MSNBC and taking "whatever they had," which, in this case, was a part-time overnight newsreader position. It was as a news lady she first poured a cup with Morning Joe.

"TV is a terribly misogynist business," she says flatly. Her advice to career-minded young women runs against the grain: "Don't forget to marry and have children, if that's what you want. My career wouldn't mean a thing to me if I didn't have my children to share it with."

Brzezinski's book begins and ends with the moment that turned the corner for both her and the show.

On the morning of June 26, 2007, at the bleakest point of the Iraq war, producers pushed Brzezinski to lead the news report with Paris Hilton getting out of jail. Brzezinski refused - she tried to set fire to the script, and later put it through a shredder on-camera. It has become part of cable lore, and the YouTube vid of it (http://go.philly.com/mikaparis) has attracted almost 3.8 million hits.

"That really sort of set the tone," said Scarborough.

Her popularity soared, and soon she was cohost. She and Scarborough also do a daily radio show. In fact, once their TV show is done, they step across the hall to a radio studio and get started.

Although Morning Joe usually does not have a live audience, Scarborough says he's thinking about it: "Tonight's thing [at the Free Library] went so well we might give it some serious thought."

It could work. The audience laughs as Scarborough invites emcee Gov. Rendell up onstage "to finally, once and for all, solve health care." (And they do.) They also laugh at Brzezinski's stories of her family - "Polish hillbillies come to Washington" - including tales of mother Emilie Benes Brzezinski, who once served roadkill venison to U.S. Ambassador to France Pamela Harriman.

In the fragmented, fractionated world of cable TV, small but loyal can make for success. So why not go for smart people who don't mind being late for work if the conversation is worthwhile?

"That's what we're trying to do," says Joe Scarborough. "Have conversations that last more than three minutes."