The unexpected death last Friday of Meet the Press host Tim Russert has left NBC facing questions about the future of its political coverage, and the format of one of its most popular shows, smack in the middle of a key election season.
 
NBC executives were attending memorial events Tuesday in Washington, and were not available for comment. "Our focus right now is on the next few days," said a spokesperson, declining to comment on the search for a successor.
 
But competing networks weren't so reticent. "Tim was the format" of the most popular of the Sunday morning political gabfests, said a news executive from a competing network who did not want to be identified. "By definition [the show] will change to suit whoever they put in there.”
 
Maybe so. But during the changing of the guard at Meet the Press, the longest-running program in the history of broadcast television, NBC network executives would be wise to pay attention to recent efforts to revive the nightly news, which has fallen the farthest, in term of ratings and prestige, of anything on broadcast television in recent years.
 
CBS, NBC, and ABC have pulled a series of increasingly desperate stunts to try to retain their aging or fleeing viewers—and by extension, advertisers. Bells and whistles have included online interactive quizzes tied to news broadcasts, webcasts of the nightly news, and most notoriously, hiring Katie Couric, whose charm and smarts were supposed to revitalize CBS's nightly offering.
 
These grabs for younger viewers, while necessary in a shifting media landscape, have been almost universally unsuccessful. The lesson for the producers of Meet the Press? If it ain't broke, don't fix it.
 
Andrew Heyward, former president of CBS News, was involved with initial talks to bring Katie Couric to the network. "A lesson to me there is that for the evening news—and the Sunday morning shows are kind of like this—the people who watch it like it the way it is," says Heyward, who left the network in 2005 and is currently working for Marketspace, a consultancy affiliate of Monitor Group.
 
Of course, Meet the Press is now broken. It has lost its charismatic host, and the temptation to shake things up might sway the producers. But there are several reasons it shouldn't.
 
For one thing, Meet the Press isn't in nearly as much trouble as the nightly news. The show's audience isn't going anywhere. Average viewership for Meet the Press and its competition in the Sunday morning political talk fest, Face The Nation on CBS and This Week with George Stephanopoulos on ABC, has held fairly steady in the past 10 years, though Meet the Press has consistently led the pack, with an average of just under 4 million viewers per show in the current broadcast season.
 
That loyal audience includes the kinds of tastemakers and civic leaders that every network—and advertiser—wants to reach, while being relatively cheap to produce and thus reliably profitable.
 
Finally, the shows are "often news-making opportunities," says Jeffrey Schneider, senior vice president at ABC News. "Every Sunday there are a whole array of news-makers who are having tough questions put to them, and those answers often command the front page of the newspaper the next morning." The shows' hosts each play leading roles in the political coverage at their respective networks, and the relationships they form on the show allows them to break news for the networks year-round.
 
Still, as good as the formula is, change has obviously come to Meet the Press. As the names of possible successors—Tom Brokaw for the immediate time being, David Gregory or Andrea Mitchell from within NBC News, or even a cable cousin like Chris Matthews or Keith Olbermann—are tossed around, questions about format changes are inevitable.
 
No matter who takes over, the show "will not be reinvented," predicts Andrew Tyndall, the blogger who authors the site TyndallReport.com, a website tracking network news coverage. "It will evolve, if the new host is up to the task."
 
That's a big if, of course. But no doubt exactly what NBC is hoping for.