Al Roker returned Monday morning to the third hour of the Today show, for which he'd been a cohost for five years—under the title "Today's Take"—until he was rudely interrupted last year by an interloper from Fox News.
Far from his frequent role as Today's class clown, he wore a grim expression and a somber three-piece suit—appropriate to a moment when Americans are coping with the worst anti-Semitic attack in U.S. history, a maniac's slaughter of 11 congregants at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh.
On this third hour—which was otherwise untitled but, until last Friday, was known as Megyn Kelly Today—Roker and his cohosts, Craig Melvin and Jenna Bush Hager, sat together on a sofa for two tearful segments featuring a father and his daughter who performed CPR to save his life from a cardiac arrest, along with the emergency dispatcher who talked her through it over the phone, and the deputy sheriff who rushed to help.
"It literally is a perfect story for a day like today," Al Roker told the guests at the end of the segment. "Thank you for helping us see the good out there."
It was six days after the career-ending controversy over a blurted defense of Halloween blackface—actually the last straw of a series of unfortunate events involving Kelly's show—and Roker didn't utter the words "Megyn" or "Kelly"; neither did his co-hosts.
Kelly is now a non-person at NBC News: she whose name, like Voldemort's, shall not be spoken.
As her Hollywood attorney was beginning Day 4 of trying to hammer out a severance package with NBC's lawyers on the 1 ½ years that remain of a reported three-year $69 million contract, it was supposedly old-home week at the venerable NBC franchise.
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