The test versions were prepared for ABC and Disney executives, who will consider whether to further develop an expanded version of the show. Nightline has done hour-long episodes in the past, as when its founding host, Ted Koppel, conducted celebrated news-breaking panels in Israel and South Africa, but the show has never owned an entire hour of regular late-night real estate.

In its current incarnation, the show has three hosts: Cynthia McFadden, Martin Bashir and Terry Moran. One of the pilots featured Ms. McFadden as the solo anchor of the broadcast. In the other, Mr. Bashir joined her behind the anchor desk.

Mr. Moran’s absence from the project may be explained by the fact that he lives in Washington, D.C.

Disney executives in Burbank, Calif., gave permission for the pilots in January. Nightline executive producer James Goldston relayed the news in a Jan. 18 conference call with his staff.

Were ABC to pick up the longer version, the extra time would fill the slot currently held by Jimmy Kimmel Live, the network’s underperforming answer to David Letterman and Jay Leno’s talk shows on CBS and NBC. According to Nielsen, Mr. Leno averages about 6.1 million viewers a night, Mr. Letterman 3.9 million, and Mr. Kimmel—confined to a later, less-attractive half-hour—1.8 million.

Nightline averages some 3.5 million viewers and actually beat Mr. Letterman’s Late Show on a handful of momentous nights this past summer and fall. But the talk shows, which charge a premium for commercials, are far more profitable enterprises.

Nightline still loses a small amount of money for ABC—although not nearly as much as it did when Mr. Koppel was running things, two sources said. Given the fixed costs of putting on a broadcast, a majority of Nightline’s senior management believes that the extra advertising revenue from stretching the show to an hour could put the program in the black for the first time in a long while.

Two sources said that Mr. Goldston described Mr. Kimmel’s show as losing “buckets of money” during the conference call.

Still, one ABC News executive urged caution. “I would not read a whole lot into this,” the executive said. “We are always experimenting and trying things. This is an idea that bubbled up from Nightline, and it would not be unusual for the network occasionally to look to Nightline to do an hour here or there, and it also is a potential hedge against a writers’ strike down the road.”

The ABC writers’ guild has been without a contract for over two years, and the network sees the threat of a strike as distant but feared.

Aside from anchor adjustments, the hour-long pilots filmed Feb. 9 looked a lot like the regular show, the three sources said. Ms. McFadden and Mr. Bashir took turns introducing a slate of pieces that had already appeared on the program. Leading the fake broadcast was a piece by veteran correspondent John Donvan on South Carolina schools. Also included was an interview that Mr. Bashir conducted with Forest Whitaker, a piece by Jessica Yellin about a company whose employees are all nice to each other, and a story about giant rabbits. There were a few other tweaks and innovations, including a contribution of some sort from a star of the Australian version of American Idol. The sources had difficulty precisely explaining the singer’s role.

Nightline hasn’t always had luck with test pilots in the past. In early 2005, the network tried out a few unconventional ideas, which drew snickers when they leaked to the press. One featured a nightclub-like setting, complete with smoke machines.

When Mr. Goldston took over in the summer of 2005, he brought considerable but measured change to the critically beloved news show. He went from one anchor and one topic per half hour to three anchors and multiple topics. He moved the show, which had always been produced in Washington, to New York, where it was filmed live out of the Disney-owned second-floor studio at 1500 Broadway.

The new Nightline has paid more attention than the old version to popular culture, with Ms. McFadden scoring a big get early on with Angelina Jolie. One of Mr. Goldston’s innovations has been to use celebrities as a vehicle for telling serious news stories—as in a piece following Hotel Rwanda star Don Cheadle around Africa.

Purists have reacted badly to the new version. Washington Post critic Tom Shales, who panned the 1979 debut of Nightline and then reversed his opinion in print weeks later, also panned the second generation when it debuted, calling it a “sallow shallow shadow of its former splendid self.” Mr. Shales hasn’t retracted that opinion—nor have other critics—but he did laud the new Nightline a few months later for pressing on in its tenuous commitment to the coverage of foreign news.

Viewers, meanwhile, seem to enjoy the new Nightline—certainly more than they enjoy the midnight talk show that follows it. Nightline’s audience has grown steadily in the last year and a half, and on its best nights, it has occasionally topped five million viewers.

At the moment, Ms. Couric was occupied on her cell phone, discussing the Bush administration’s claim, trotted out by the First Lady on MSNBC, that the media is overly negative about the situation in Iraq.

“I do think it’s a conundrum,” Ms. Couric said, “because—hold on two seconds.

“Yes, I’d like a hot dog with everything on it. Hi, yes, I am Katie Couric. Nice to meet you too!”

She had started this job four months ago, at a salary of $15 million a year, with a contract of four years. The network spent around $10 million advertising Ms. Couric and refused millions more from advertisers in the form of in-house spots.

Ms. Couric was en route from Fort Stewart—where she had interviewed a raft of servicemen and their families for “Honor and Sacrifice,” a weeklong series of reports pegged to the President’s Jan. 10 announcement of his plan for Iraq—to Savannah, where she would catch a plane home. She would return on Monday to anchor that night’s newscast, again flying home the same night.

“Sorry,” she said. “I’ve thought about it a lot, and I do think, for security reasons, it’s sometimes hard for journalists to get a broad perspective of what’s going on in Iraq.”

Ms. Couric is responsible for obtaining and quickly disseminating some such broad perspective to approximately 7.5 million American television viewers every night. That is between one million and two million fewer than her competitors at NBC and ABC, depending on the week. She is the first solo female anchor of a national network newscast, and that suits her in that she must be what she mostly already was: starlet, cultural icon, feminist pioneer, media doyenne and now, theorist of the war.

“I’m not saying it’s all hunky-dory by any stretch,” she said of things in Iraq. “It has been hard to give the overall picture and even to tell the story in a multi-dimensional way, to show a day in the life of the average Iraqi or profile the Sunni family living next door to a Shiite family …. ”

Her loaded-up dog arrived at last. “Isn’t television glamorous?” Ms. Couric asked.

Her lunch called to mind an old joke about what the Dalai Lama said to the hot-dog vendor: “Make me one with everything!” Only in this case, the punch line isn’t a double-entendre; it’s a lifestyle choice. Ms. Couric isn’t looking for spiritual unity. She actually wants everything.

She wants it in a way that makes her the ultimate 21st-century career woman. She is a smart, rich, yoga-fied prima donna, surrounded by assistants and adoring underlings. She makes more than Brian Williams or Charlie Gibson, instead of some fraction of their manly dollars. At the same time, she’s a frequently self-described “single mom” raising two polite daughters in a dangerous world, waiting in line at the movies, hastily applying her own eyeliner and scarfing trans fats.

There is already tension in the sprawl between the $60 million contract and the advertising and the calls—from her army of publicists—for less media attention. There is tension between the morning chitchats of her 15 years at the Today show and the structure of evening news. Certainly there is tension in being two women, the uptown society lady and the just-a-regular-news-gal.

Unsurprisingly, then, she was having two birthday parties.

The first was with workfolk, on Jan. 4, at 4:30 p.m., in a conference room at the network’s studios on West 57th Street. She wore a powder-blue cable-knit cashmere sweater and rushed—she is often rushing—to the casual gathering with her executive producer, Rome Hartman. There was vanilla cake with chocolate frosting and green lettering on top.

The second, on Jan. 13, would be held among the jewel cases of Tiffany. It sounded like a little girl’s dream. Everyone would be there, and the dress code was black tie optional.

"I'M GOING TO TRY TO HAVE COFFEE or lunch with a different correspondent every week,” Ms. Couric said. “It’s one of my many New Year’s resolutions. I’ve gotten to know some folks, but there’s still a lot of people I want to get to know better. The newsroom is pretty quiet. It’s a very collegial environment. People are busy working. They have a lot going on. It’s a nice open space that lends itself to a lot of camaraderie. People are really nice there.”

But not everything is hunky-dory. Under Ms. Couric’s regime, the broadcast’s already tight 22-minute news hole has evolved in other ways: Correspondents have gotten less airtime and the anchor more; big-get interviews run longer and sometimes higher in the broadcast.

There has been scattered conflict between the star anchor and the network’s impressive bench of on-air correspondents. Ms. Couric described herself as a “significant investment” for the network—and if her bosses didn’t use her to her fullest abilities, she said, that would make her a “bad investment.”

“I look at it as a good thing for the correspondents,” Ms. Couric said over lunch one day. “Now, instead of having to rush to get pieces on the air every night, they get an extra day or two to work on them.”

The correspondents, and their agents, don’t uniformly see it that way.

In the newsroom—called the fishbowl—are crammed three groups, compared by one dramatic industry type as the Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds of network news. There is the old CBS crowd of Mr. Rather’s era; the new CBS crowd of Mr. Hartman’s; and the privileged clutch of producers who came to the network with Ms. Couric, the NBC crew. They aren’t exactly warring factions, nor are they a seamless melting pot.

Since Ms. Couric joined the network in September, there has been staff shuffling. All executives said those moves were in the works before her arrival. The medical correspondent, Elizabeth Kaledin, was moved to Sundays and her contract not renewed, making way for Ms. Couric’s longtime medical advisor, Dr. Jonathan LaPook. Kelli Edwards, Ms. Couric’s first network publicist, was “promoted” down to the Early Show. One veteran producer had asked to transfer off the broadcast, two network sources said. He was denied.

The tight-knit NBC crew includes producer Lori Beecher; booker Niccola Hewitt, who landed Ms. Couric’s interview with Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki in Jordan; Bob Peterson, another of her producers who was hired as the “creative director” of the Evening News; writer and former on-air personality Mary Alice Williams; and producer Matt Lombardi.

Members of this group often accompany Ms. Couric to the many swanky benefits and events thrown in her honor. There was a Nov. 17 gala for the American Cancer Society, for which Ms. Couric dressed herself like a head of state and attended as such. There she received honors for her substantial efforts to increase awareness of colon cancer, the disease that killed her husband, Jay Monahan, in 1998. The ceremony was in the Grand Ballroom of the Waldorf-Astoria, and Ms. Couric’s NBC crew sat at the designated CBS table, two away from the head table where the anchor sat with her daughters.

Ms. Couric is always mobbed at events and rarely has time to eat or socialize. She is also accompanied at all times by her assistant, immaculate, devoted and prompt. She is protective of Ms. Couric and her daughters and a ruthless guardian of the anchor’s busy schedule. That is yet another way in which Ms. Couric resembles Hillary Clinton, with whom she has shared an independent publicist, Matthew Hiltzik. (The Senator had him first.)

Mr. Peterson and his colleagues have developed a subtle hand signal—a two-finger peace sign saluted up and out from the forehead—that they use instead of a wave to communicate with their boss across crowded banquet halls. He demonstrated at the Waldorf. The same signal was employed by others at a Museum of Television and Radio event honoring Ms. Couric on Nov. 13.

At that event, Pat Mitchell, the former head of PBS and an old friend, said in her opening remarks about the anchor that “you can detect an unerring sense from her of what really matters.” At this, back in the second-to-last row, Andy Rooney came momentarily alive to nod enthusiastically and lift an empty glass.

Later, Ms. Mitchell described Ms. Couric as having a “golden gut.”

It is in that respect that Ms. Couric perhaps most resembles her fellow Big Three anchors and alumni—the belief, often taken for arrogance, that she knows best.

“Katie and Peter [Jennings] are alike in many ways that are fascinating to me,” said Paul Friedman, the executive in charge of the CBS Evening News. “They are very smart. They have terrific instincts. And like him, she believes in herself. Sometimes she believes, as he believed, that she knows better than anyone else in the world what is right and what is wrong.”

AFTER THE MONTHS OF BRAINSTORMING, tinkering, big-idea generation and throwing-it-against-the-wall that began well before Ms. Couric announced she was taking the job in May 2006, her broadcast is in a distant third place. Her newscast has found some new viewers in the 25-to-54-year-old demographic demanded by advertisers, but it has alienated almost as many as it has gained with innovations that aren’t sitting well with former CBS loyalists.

The anchor, her producers and her executive team—CBS News president Sean McManus; Mr. Friedman, who was Peter Jennings’ longtime executive producer at ABC; and Mr. Hartman, a veteran of 60 Minutes—are continuing to tweak the broadcast, seeking the perfect balance of traditional elements and Couric-tailored innovations.

“I don’t think there’s going to be one day when I say ‘Aha! That’s it. We’re a success,’” Ms. Couric said during a conversation over lunch in December.

Success, she said, was a hard quality to quantify. Aren’t ratings a pretty easy way of quantifying it?

“That’s really not how I operate,” she said. “That’s not how I measure success.”

“We’re exactly where we thought we were going to be, ratings-wise,” said her boss, Mr. McManus, who alongside his star will be held chiefly responsible for the success or failure of the new Evening News. Mr. McManus said he felt “tremendous pressure” to make the project work.

Anyway, the ratings issue will sort itself out, Mr. McManus said. How? “If you put on a better television program, more people will watch.”

There is in the news division a professed unwavering belief in quality as an attraction for the masses.

Most—but not all—weeks, Ms. Couric is up in total viewers over her popular, temporary predecessor, Bob Schieffer. Where both NBC and ABC are losing younger viewers, she has gained 35 percent over last year in some weeks.

But her ratings gap is largest during big news events, like the President’s meeting with Mr. Maliki in Jordan on Nov. 30, when, despite landing a brief interview with Mr. Maliki—Charlie Gibson at ABC had a full-length sit-down—Ms. Couric trailed her competitors by nearly two million viewers.

To a degree, Mr. McManus blames the media. The reporters who cover television are “predisposed to negativity”—didn’t we hear this from Laura Bush?—about Ms. Couric, he said, and thus have ginned up “an absurd set of expectations for her.”

Mr. Friedman said he could imagine “lots of venal human reasons that people have been, I think, essentially unfair to her.”

All the fiddling has been in service of a single goal: “to be nimble and smart,” said Mr. Hartman during a meeting in his office on the morning of Dec. 12. “This is not a laboratory experiment, though. It’s not something where you can apply the scientific method.”

“It’s not brain surgery,” said Mr. Friedman in his own office on Jan. 4, “although from some of the mistakes we’ve made, you’d think that it was.”

“The most stunning thing about this experience has been to discover how resistant people are to change,” Mr. Friedman said. “In the beginning, we seriously underestimated—as in, we were mistaken—about how different the audience wants you to be at 6:30. The answer, it turns out, is ‘Not that different.’ That has been a great disappointment to me.”

“The second shock to me was that there is a big part of our audience out there who still finds it difficult to have a woman anchor,” he said. “That stunned me. But it’s true.”

Other novelties have received mixed reviews.

One of Ms. Couric’s innovations—or corruptions—of the form is that she occasionally offers up her own reaction to the stories that appear on her broadcast. A vestige of her chattier Today Show days, these frequent interjections are the subject of much deep thought and close analysis in the halls of CBS—and the subject of sniggering elsewhere in television news.

A sampling: On Sept. 7, after a piece about the cervical cancer vaccine that mentioned teen sex practices, Ms. Couric, a mother of two adolescents, told correspondent Jonathan LaPook that he had “just ruined my day.” On Oct. 27, she handed correspondent Steve Hartman a pair of pink slippers after his feature about a Texas sheriff who makes his prisoners wear pink. On Oct. 30, in her introduction to a story about Arnold Schwarzenegger, she mimicked the California governor’s pattern of speech.

“I don’t think any of us wants to inhibit her honest, sincere reactions,” Mr. McManus said. “We don’t want to lose sight of why we hired Katie Couric.”

Mr. Friedman said he likes some interjections and finds others to be “dead wrong.” “Sean and I disagree on some of these examples,” he said. “It’s a matter of feel and taste.”

Ms. Couric batted the issue away.

“I think I’m pretty judicious about it,” she said. “I think that, probably it may be off-putting at times to some people who are used to a very, very buttoned-up newscast that doesn’t have much leeway for an occasional glimpse of personality, but you know, I try. I’ve always had the ‘less is more’ philosophy, believe it or not, but there are times when I think it’s personally fine. If people feel discomfort, maybe they should consider a suppository.”

On television, Ms. Couric may be the picture of girlish good taste, but off-camera she is known to have a bit of a salty side.

“Yeah,” she said. “Suppository—very salty.”

DURING A TWO-HOUR LUNCH on Dec. 12 at Gabriel’s, an Italian restaurant in Columbus Circle frequented by CBS higher-ups, Ms. Couric discussed her own vision for her broadcast. Mr. McManus dined with 60 Minutes correspondent Steve Kroft on the opposite side of the room. Ms. Couric had the fish special, which came heavily buttered, atop a bed of broccoli rabe. Messrs. McManus and Kroft came by on their way back to the office to say hello and lavish tasteful praise.

The meal presented a convenient metaphor.

“If news is broccoli,” Ms. Couric said, aiming her fork in the direction of her plate, “then our job is to make it more appetizing to people, so more of them want to eat it.”

The news is narrative. From Monday night’s transcript, in the report from Fort Stewart: “Unidentified Child: I’m sad that my daddy’s leaving.”

“Our common interest is in being really ambitious in stories and storytelling,” Mr. Hartman said. Mr. Hartman talks about news in almost spiritual terms, often not even bothering to attach an article: It is always story.

“During our meetings this summer,” he said, “we never spent much time on anything other than our ideas about story.”

Like Brian Williams, Ms. Couric has begun a blog. Unlike Mr. Williams, her blog—called Couric & Co. and written, she said, “with help”—is concerned more with her particular feelings about “story.”

Her entry for Jan. 5 is called “Notebook: Legacies,” and it begins with Ms. Couric—or “Ms. Couric”—urging her readers not to forget about everyone who died in 2006, “people who left a huge legacy even if they weren’t famous enough to get an obituary in The New York Times.”

She mentions five. All but one did, in fact, receive full-length obituary treatment in The Times, but that barely detracts from the stated moral: “Everyone leaves a legacy, whether they’re famous or not.”

Other entries on Couric & Co. spotlight the anti-Muslim statements from Virginia Congressman Virgil Goode (titled “Goode Behavior”); what she and her two daughters planned to name their new puppy (“Cecilia”); and her personal memories of Gerald Ford (“a steady hand”).

Katie Couric, blogger, has had only a few opportunities so far to demonstrate the full range of her anchoring abilities on a story of national or international significance. Her most prominent work has included an interview with Michael J. Fox; a 60 Minutes piece about Condoleezza Rice; a tearful fireside chat with the Mt. Hood widow, Karen James; the midterm election (a widely praised evening of coverage—although, at one point, she did quote Rodney King in wondering why Democrats and Republicans can’t just get along); and, most recently, the Ford funeral.

Ms. Couric sees these experiences as vital to helping her develop into the “maestro” of her broadcast. “The Ford stuff was really another great experience,” she said. “Every time I get something under my belt—the midterms, the trip to Jordan, the death of a President—when I’m spearheading the coverage, it’s a great experience for me, and it helps viewers feel more comfortable with me in the role. I love those opportunities—not having to do 12-second intros, but getting to interview people, to talk at some length about things, to make my own observations about why Betty Ford was important to women in the 70’s. It gives me an opportunity to be more myself.”

Like actors and their roles, real newscasters speak mostly about themselves when they speak of their stories. It is this trait that allows a person to appear on live television and guide the country through a war, a national election, a Sept. 11.

The Ford coverage was “a situation that I really—I don’t want to say enjoy—it’s an experience I really appreciated and valued,” Ms. Couric said. “It was really helpful to me, personally and professionally, and also really helpful to the news division. Sometimes, you know, these big events don’t happen all that often. When they do, that’s when hopefully your experience and expertise really pays off—your ease in front of the camera, your ability to juggle balls in the air.”

That solipsism must be channeled into that performance. That performance, in the news division’s theoretical mathematics, is what will pay eventual dividends for the long-depressed CBS Evening News.

“The funny circle of all of this is that we’ll eventually win by quality,” Mr. Friedman said. “And we will win.”

“Look what they’ve done to my teeth,” he said, jabbing a finger at his jaw, his voice tripping into a squeal.

In the picture, part of a poster advertising the Jan. 14 second-season premiere of his show Extras, Mr. Gervais’ teeth are bright white and straight; his skin is tan and smooth, his hair just so. He wears black plastic sunglasses with stars on them, and there’s a tasteful dimple pinched into his right cheek.

In person, in a large, white-ish T-shirt and jeans, the comedian and character actor is a more stereotypically British specimen: pallid skin, slight beard growth, a smile defiantly untamed by orthodontics. Mr. Gervais was tickled by the Photoshopping. Leaning in to examine his perfect, three-inch-tall digital dimple, he giggled. It is one of the qualities his fans find most endearing: Mr. Gervais—a chubby, irritable, viceless, dark, British, atheist genius—laughs like a 9-year-old girl.

“Hoo-hoo!” he cooed. “I’ve gone Hollywood.”

The airbrushing of his giant head is just one more amusing byproduct of Mr. Gervais’ unsought-after and unenjoyed superstardom, a result of the tremendous success of his BBC masterpiece The Office.

Mr. Gervais, 45, hates being famous. He’s writing a stand-up act about it now, called Fame. The new season of Extras, in which he plays fortysomething wannabe actor Andy Millman, takes the lures and perils of notoriety as its main subject.

It all comes through in one particular scene near the end of the season premiere. Andy, who has sold a pilot to the BBC, slumps over to the craft-services table on-set after losing another creative bout with the network suits, who are turning his highbrow comedy into a schlocky sitcom. There he encounters Sean, a middling extra who claims to have given up a supporting role on the EastEnders because the writers were cheapening his character. “I just think you gotta do what you think is right,” Sean tells him prophetically.

Inspired, Andy marches over to Ian, the BBC executive. “This isn’t the comedy I set out to make,” he says. “In fact, I think it’s awful.”

Ian suggests they hash this out in private.

“I don’t care who hears what I have to say,” Andy says, “because I’m at that point now. Everyone’s interfered. It’s embarrassing. I don’t want to be on television for the sake of it. I don’t want to be famous for the sake of it. I want to do something that I’m proud of, and I won’t be proud of shouting out catchphrases in a stupid wig and funny glasses. I want to do what I want to do, otherwise I’ll hate myself for the rest of my life. And I tell you what, a case in point—Sean on EastEnders. They started to turn his character into a joke, and he walked away, at the top of his game. That’s called integrity. It doesn’t matter what happens to him now, ’cause he’s got his dignity.”

Sean, who has filled his coat with candy from the catering table, is watching off-camera. Just as Andy finishes speaking, a few pieces of candy fall to the ground. Then, in an extended gag, the candy comes pouring out from the bottom of his coat, as if from a punctured piñata.

The scene pretty much captures Mr. Gervais’ current worldview. Everywhere he goes, he faces down his own outsized self.

“I have to be louder, more confident, slightly more outrageous than normal,” he said on Dec. 30, on the phone from London, where he lives with his girlfriend of 20 years, a television producer. This makes the standup work a particular exertion. “If it was just me, I’d go up there and say, ‘I don’t really feel like talking.’ But show business doesn’t allow that.”

At the beginning of December, Mr. Gervais was in town for two weeks, helping to promote Night at the Museum, a movie he did with his friend Ben Stiller. Mr. Stiller stars in the film as a head-in-the-clouds security guard at the Museum of Natural History. The plot revolves confusingly around a magical Egyptian tablet that causes the museum exhibits to anthropomorphize after dark. Robin Williams plays Teddy Roosevelt. Dick Van Dyke is one of the villains. Mr. Gervais does a turn as the stammering, inept guy-in-charge—another David Brent, the ne plus ultra of idiot bosses, only in this case with not enough screen time.

Mr. Gervais likes the film because “I’m hooked for anything that starts with a big sweeping shot of Central Park,” he said.

On one of his last days in the city, Mr. Gervais went over to HBO for a two-hour lunch. He had the Caesar salad followed by chicken with gravy, Perrier and a latte. He talked about God, mostly, with side rants about cigarettes, racism, censorship, evangelicals, John Stuart Mill and corporal punishment. He said nothing about Extras, Night at the Museum, his new children’s book, the very successful American version of The Office (of which he is an executive producer), the Christopher Guest movie For Your Consideration (in which he played a small role), or any of his other upcoming projects.

“I don’t even know if it’s innate to be good, to be sociable,” he said in response to a question about his Christmas plans, which led to a discussion of his religious beliefs, or lack thereof, which lead to a monologue about personal morality. “I have no idea. We know what’s right and wrong. We do know that. But I know that I don’t do it for a reward because there isn’t everlasting life. It’s a shame. It’d be great. It’d be amazing. But I’m just—I’m afraid it’s not true. It’s regrettable. It’d be amazing if there were a God. But there isn’t.”

Mr. Gervais holds a degree in philosophy from University College London. The only novel he’s ever read start to finish is The Catcher in the Rye. When he was a little boy, he used to draw pictures of Jesus—“I thought he was terrific. I thought he was a superhero”—until his brother set him straight.

He spent Boxing Day with his family. They got him “socks, jumpers, T-shirts and whiskey.” His girlfriend got him a “lovely carving, a 17th-century Russian box.” He got her a laptop. They had a happy secular Christmas all by themselves, he said. “We painted the house black and I sacrificed a goat.”

Fame will be his third major stand-up act. The first was called Animals, the second Politics. “The title is just a vehicle,” he said. “Those things often are a Trojan horse as a structure to go off on tangents.” This show will be the “purest” in that it is shaping up to be the most autobiographical, he said. “I’m basically myself, but now and then I get things wrong for comic effect.”

He prefers television—although the tension of live comedy does hold a certain appeal. “I like people wondering whether they should laugh or not,” he said. “There is something nice about worrying people for a split second. It’s naughty.”

He explained the problem with most comedy these days. “Good observational comedy is not saying something everyone’s thinking,” he said. “It’s saying something nobody’s thinking until you said it.

“I see these comedians and they’re saying things like, ‘Who remembers ABBA?’ And they get a cheer. And I’m like, ‘What’s that?’ Or, ‘Old people say funny things, don’t they?’ I’ll go, ‘Well, what are you doing with it? That’s found art, that’s all right—but what are you doing with it?’ It’s lazy.”

Mr. Gervais stars in Extras alongside Stephen Merchant, his creative partner and co-writer on The Office. The two recently guest-wrote an episode of the American version of The Office, which stars Steve Carell and which, together with Howie Mandel’s twice-weekly bikini-lady-suitcase-funshow Deal or No Deal, is sustaining all of NBC. Mr. Merchant plays Mr. Gervais’ loser agent in Extras.

“He was doing some standup recently,” Mr. Gervais said, “and his character was a loser blaming the audience for not laughing. There was a guy before him doing the difference between black people and white people, and the audience could not be laughing harder. He thought, ‘So why am I doing this?’ And I said, ‘Because they’re not your audience. You don’t want them.’ The people coming to my shows aren’t the same people going to those shows and laughing when someone says, ‘You know, it’s weird—you bring an umbrella, it doesn’t rain. But you don’t, and it does!’ My head bursts when I hear observational comedy like that.”

These sorts of things weigh heavily on Mr. Gervais.

“Arguing whether something is funny with someone is like arguing whether they’ve got a pain in their leg,” he said. “Largely pointless.”

In the second episode of this season of Extras, Mr. Gervais has written perhaps the finest tragicomic scene for television since David Brent received notice of his redundancy while wearing a chicken suit in the second season of the original Office.

Andy goes to a fancy pub, where a few respectable British showbiz types are taunting him about his crappy TV show. Depressed, Andy buys his way into the V.I.P. area, where he pours his heart out to David Bowie. “I think I’ve sold out, to be honest,” he says. Mr. Bowie listens sympathetically, then swivels around to a previously unseen piano. The entire crowd at the restaurant gathers around, and Mr. Bowie improvises a song.

“Little fat man who sold his soul,” Mr. Bowie sings. He progresses to a vision of Andy’s suicide. “Fatso takes his own life. He blows his bloated face off. No—he blows his stupid brains out. He sold his soul for a shot at fame, catchphrase and wig and the jokes are lame.” The crowd gleefully joins in for a chorus. “Little fat man with the pug-nose face!”

Mr. Gervais sits by on the couch, a fake smile fading from his cheeks.

After a few seconds of cheerful nattering about long lines at the post office, they kicked it over to meteorologist Audrey Puente for her forecast.

“If the line extends out the door, no problem!” said a glowing Ms. Puente. “Because the temperatures will be nice and comfortable for everyone waiting on those lines, whether it’s at a store or the post office today!”

Global warming may be turning the earth into a shriveled, flooded, lifeless

swamp faster than Al Gore can jet around the country trying to stop it. But then also, the sun is shining; the skies are clear. There are no blizzards, no rain and no snow for the TV weather folk to report, no nor’easters coming up the coast and no southwesterly winds carrying accumulation from the Great Lakes. Manhattan has all the balmy imperviousness of Venice before the plague. The unpredictable weather patterns are yet to come.

On Dec. 11, the National Center for Atmospheric Research released findings showing that because of greenhouse emissions, the retreat of Arctic sea ice is increasing so rapidly that there won’t be any ice left in the Arctic Ocean in the summertime in 2040. On Dec. 19, government and private researchers projected the heat spell will last well into January. Someone named Mike Palmerino of the private firm DTN Meteorologix pronounced the chances of anyone in the Northeast enjoying a white Christmas “very unlikely.”

So put away those parkas and go for a stroll, New York! The only thing better than last-minute Christmas shopping is doing so on the eve of the apocalypse.

“In terms of people being out and about, shopping for the holidays, looking at the tree in Rockefeller Center, this is great weather, especially for tourists,” said Janice Huff, a meteorologist for WNBC, who called Monday evening after delivering another sunny forecast for the 6 p.m. local news. “I know some people are wondering, ‘Oh, is the world coming to an end?’ I say, ‘Enjoy it while you got it.’”

That this has been the warmest year on record since 1881 did not particularly trouble Ms. Huff or many of her fellow weather people. The current bout of freakish weather isn’t inexplicable, she said, so it’s not keeping her in night sweats. The “very mild pattern” is a mix of El Niño churning up the Pacific, bringing heavy, wet weather to the West Coast and record-breaking temperatures (71 degrees on Dec. 18 in Atlantic City!) to our neck of the woods.

“What’s sad about 60 degrees in December?” she asked. “There’s nothing dangerous about it. There’s nothing sad about it. It puts smiles on people’s faces. Everyone’s been thanking me—not that I had anything to do with it.”

Ms. Huff is part of a small but influential cabal of TV weather people in New York, which member Dave Price, of the CBS Early Show, calls “a little fraternity.” There has been very minimal consternation within the fraternity about the day-to-day reality of this winter’s weather. Most of the time, he said, “we’re the happiest guys on the air.” Still, when they run into each other at cocktail parties or upscale midtown lunch spots, the conversation now turns, on occasion, to the current climactic oddities.

“All I can tell you is, we know as a group—Al [Roker] and Sam [Champion] and myself—that right now we are avoiding the ice rinks, anyone in a vehicle with a snowplow attachment, and anyone with a ski rack on their car,” said Mr. Price, who is also Bob Barker’s probable successor as host of The Price is Right. “Right now we are not popular with those groups.”

Mr. Price, who is accustomed to being yelled at on the street, said the heckling has gotten worse lately. “They say, “Weatherman, what’s the deal?’” he said. “I must hear that 40 times a day. I usually yell back, ‘If you have a few hours, I’ll go get a chalkboard and we can talk about global warming.’”

“Personally, I’m a warm-weather person,” said Roger Clark, the morning feature reporter for NY1. Mr. Clark has been chronicling the earth’s steady burn in an occasional series of on-the-street reports. The project recently took him to a Christmas-tree stand in Chelsea operated by a woman in town from Alaska.

“It’s almost like a tropical vacation for her here,” he said. Mr. Clark spent the morning asking passers-by if it’s “hard to get into the holiday groove when it’s not cold?” The vast majority said no. “Most of the people—all of them, really—were like, ‘Eh, it’s not really a big deal.’”

The icy voice of reason in this July-in-December frenzy is Sam Champion, the Good Morning America weather anchor/meteorologist/walking, talking Ken doll. On the urging of his bosses at ABC News, Mr. Champion ventured to Jökulsárlón, Iceland, in November to show firsthand the devastating pace of global warming.

“We’re not really concentrating on the ‘Gee, isn’t it funny that we can dance in the 60-degree temperatures in Times Square?’ angle to this story,” he said.

Mr. Champion recently focused his laser-like meteorological gravitas on the problem from atop a 7,000-foot-tall (for now!) glacier, the highest peak in Jökulsárlón and a destination that ABC deemed the third modern wonder of the world. From there, on Nov. 13—timed to coincide with the United Nations’ concurrent Climate Change Conference in Nairobi—he interviewed locals who’ve seen the glacier melt over the course of their lifetimes. He told viewers that Arctic ice has been shrinking 8 percent a year for the last 25 years. Diane Sawyer, wearing long johns and teleporting in from ABC studios in Washington, wondered if he was freezing.

“Oh, no,” he told her. Later in the report, he cut to tape of Waleed Abdalati, a scientist from NASA, who said, “If I give you [an estimate] on a scale of one to 10, the attention we should pay would certainly be a 10.”

But until Dan Rather laces up a pair of crampons and straps himself to an ice floe, that 10 seems unlikely. Weather is a happy story, up there in the newscast with local school kids visiting nursing homes during the holidays and the ups and downs of college sports. The tone of the coverage will remain largely speculative, the substance largely substance-free.

“What tends to happen with meteorologists is that we tend to like to have something to talk about,” said Ms. Huff. “December can be exciting for us, in that way.” Typically, New York doesn’t get heavy snowfall until January or February, she said, but still—there’s the anticipation.

“I’ve been too busy forecasting to enjoy the fun of it,” Mr. Price said.

“We had a little song we sang,” said the younger Mr. Abrams, now 40, who in the intervening years has attended law school, earned a living as a television legal correspondent and, as of six months ago, served as the general manager of MSNBC. Dan claimed no memory of most of the words. Floyd remembered it perfectly and happily sang a verse. (The song goes to the tune of “Frère Jacques.”)

“Going to the o-ffice. / Going to the o-ffice. Yes, we are. / Yes, we are. / Daddy will read a bookie. / Daniel will eat a cookie. / Yes, we are.”

The elder Mr. Abrams, 70, is a leading First Amendment attorney and a partner at Cahill, Gordon & Reindel. He said that he raised his two children—Dan and his sister, chief of the general-crimes bureau at the U.S. Attorney’s office Ronnie Abrams, 38—just as he had been raised: “with the air of the law in my own home.” At night, instead of bedtime stories, he told legal morality tales: for example, one about a 19th-century Kentucky schoolteacher who bought coal to heat her classroom and sued the school district after it declined to reimburse her. Earlier in the evenings, he would try out closing arguments on the children.

“There was a time, when Ronnie was around 11, when I used to use her in particular as a sounding board for oral arguments,” said Mr. Abrams père. “I found that she had about the same level of patience as most judges. She would say, ‘What are your cases about?’ She’d listen for a minute or two. She’d ask, ‘What do you say? And what do they say?’ Then she would rule.”

Efrat, Mr. Abrams’ wife—a former Hebrew-school teacher and Guggenheim docent—is the only non-J.D. in the immediate family. (The extended Abramses include some non-lawyers—and Floyd’s first cousin Elliott, President Bush’s deputy national-security advisor, with whom the New York Abramses maintain distant, if not chilly, relations.)

Dinner-table conversations can get wonky. “There are definitely times when my mother feels left out,” said her son.

Mr. Abrams senior grew up in New York, first in the Bronx, then in Queens. His father manufactured artificial flowers; his mother stayed home. He considered becoming an academic, but chose Yale Law School when he realized that he couldn’t satisfy the two-language requirement of the Graduate Record Exams. His children trained as lawyers because what else were they going to become?

Ronnie was bound for the bar at an early age. Dan followed the same track, but spent much of his youth aspiring to be the next Ted Koppel. Not till he had his law degree in hand and a clerkship beckoning, though, did he veer off into television.

“If my dad had been a real legal purist,” said the son, “he would’ve said, ‘Come on—you can’t give up a prestigious clerkship.’ He was very encouraging of my taking a $22,000-a-year job at Court TV.”

While the Abrams lawyers consult each other frequently on legal matters, father and son claim not to have run into any serious conflicts of interest.

“There have been some amusing moments,” said Floyd. The elder Mr. Abrams made a number of television appearances during the 2000 Presidential-election dispute. “I was on Dan’s show when he had a program together with Geraldo, and I was on and Dan was doing the interviewing on it. They had one of these boxes where you have four people on screen at once; it looks like you’re on Hollywood Squares or something. Anyway, he asked the first person for his views, then the second, then the third, then he came to me. I realized he didn’t know what to call me.”

During the first exchange, Dan called his father “Mr. Abrams.”

“Apparently, there was laughter in his ear from his studio,” Floyd Abrams said. “So the next time, he said, ‘Floyd, what do you think about that?’ Apparently, there was louder laughter. The last time he called on me, he said, ‘Well, I now call on the chief justice in our home.’”

Mr. Philbin was speaking on Dec. 5, on live television, during a taping of his early-a.m. Metamucil chug-down with Kelly Ripa. The “huggie” he described is Richard Leibner, the baby-faced paterfamilias of television’s most powerful talent agency, N.S. Bienstock, which Mr. Leibner, in his late 60’s, runs with his wife, Carole Cooper, who declined to give her age, and their two sons, Jonathan and Adam, both in their late 30’s, and a couple dozen or so employees who feel like extended family.

Bienstock represents many of the top producers, correspondents and anchors in the TV news business, including Bill O’Reilly, Anderson Cooper, Dan Rather, Chris Matthews, Jim Rosenfield, Liz Cho, Paula Zahn, James Goldston, John Roberts, Byron Pitts and Michael Gelman, the executive producer of Live with Regis and Kelly. Carole and Richard had bumped into Reege and his wife Joy at dinner the previous night, and as the talk-show king told of the encounter that morning, all of N.S. Bienstock sat rapt before their computers.

The elder Leibner was in Jonathan’s office as Mr. Philbin described how the agent “swooped down” on them during the meal. “Did you use your pepper spray?” Ms. Ripa asked.

Richard let out a heavy laugh. “Gelman loved it,” he bellowed. “I just talked to him. He loved it.”

Jonathan smiled. His office, like all the offices on the 24th floor of 1740 Broadway, has an entire partition devoted to family photos. The hallways here are adorned with framed newspaper clippings featuring members of the Leibner family, as well as random pictures into which Richard’s head has been Photoshopped for comedic effect. The Leibner voices ring through the corridors at all times. Their smiling visages radiate from the walls. Jonathon and Adam commute from estates in Chappaqua—they are neighbors—and relax in adjoining weekend houses on Fire Island.

Their legacy begins one generation back, with Richard’s father Sol, a “Tin Pan Alley C.P.A.,” as Richard put it. Besides musicians, Sol’s clients included many prominent journalists and writers, including John Steinbeck. Somewhere along the line, he partnered with Nate Bienstock, a insurance man to New York creative types. Richard also trained as an accountant. But in November of 1965, recently married, he was on the verge of leaving the business to drive a cab. Sol convinced him to stay, and the father-and-son duo arranged to buy Nate’s share of the company over the next decade.

“We never thought to change the name,” said Ms. Cooper, who was producing television commercials at the time. She also has an entertainment pedigree: Her father was the lead alto saxophonist in Tommy Dorsey’s band, making frequent guest television appearances with Steve Allen, Jackie Gleason and Perry Como. “I was worried about it, to be honest with you,” Ms. Cooper said of inheriting the business. “I was scared to be leaving producing and working with my husband all the time.”

“At first,” Richard Leibner interjected, “it was a lot like Network,” the 1976 Paddy Chayefsky–Sidney Lumet film about self-obsessed television executives. “We would lie in bed at night and talk about phone calls we took that day.”

“It was horrible,” Ms. Cooper said.

They raised their sons in Great Neck. Both went to law school, then out to big firms—and then it was back to Bienstock, where Adam is a talent agent and Jonathan is general counsel. They have two daughters apiece (all under 10, none of whom are being encouraged to join the agenting business). They refer to their parents as Carole and Richard in the office and Mom and Dad outside of it.

“It’s almost a schizophrenic thing,” Adam said.

“We have a rule when we’re out of the office that we don’t talk about the business,” Richard said. “There’s a total separation.”

“Not total,” Adam said.

The Leibners claim to enjoy almost perfect professional harmony. They don’t fight, but rather “talk an issue to death.” The agents at William Morris or Creative Artists compete against each other, but the Bienstock clan shares information. One ongoing internecine dispute has to do with Richard’s professed Army service during the Berlin Crisis, which Adam points out involved his father being stationed in Indiana. Family chuckle. There are no succession issues.

“Our goal is to turn this into a place that could easily survive without them,” Jonathan said. “Not that we plan on that any time soon.”

Ms. Ross was 28 at the time the picture was taken, in June 1981, at the Vacaville State Medical Facility in California. She was preparing Mr. Manson for his first TV interview, for the Tomorrow show with Tom Snyder—executive producer, Mr. Ailes. In the picture, Mr. Manson has Ms. Ross in a headlock. He is pressing his thumb against her throat, pretending that it’s a knife, and all three are laughing uproariously.

“Oh, Charles,” Ms. Ross had said right before the photographer snapped the scene, “you’re such a kidder!”

“This ushered in the current era of controversy,” Ms. Ross said on the afternoon of Dec. 4. The veteran ABC producer, who is 53, was packing up. It was one of her last days at the Disney-owned network, where she has worked for 17 years.

Ms. Ross helped invent the form of journalism that is popularly called tabloid TV news—born of that first interview with Mr. Manson and honed to a fine point with Judith Regan’s recent abortive efforts with O.J. Simpson—and revived Good Morning America from the brink of death. Her contract is up on Dec. 31, and the network is not renewing it. ABC had no comment. Ms. Ross declined to say what she plans to do next, although she is taking meetings.

She does have regrets. “I just hope one thing you can convey is I don’t like where my innovations have wound up any more than you do,” she said. (That was on a voicemail message, left the next day.)

“Even though I believe I pioneered this kind of news, there was always a reason, a uniqueness, a philosophy, a storytelling/human-behavior core to it. Now I really feel like I watch the murder of the month, the murder of the week, the murder of the day. I just see garden-variety murders without anything interesting,” she said. “The balance is off.”

Ms. Ross has been a polarizing figure at ABC throughout her long and lucrative career there, butting heads often with News president David Westin and former anchor Peter Jennings, whom she eulogizes now as a “keeper of the flame.”

She reflected on what it’s like to be a high-powered woman in the entertainment industry—“You get caricatured as a bitch,” she said, “which everyone already knows.”

Ms. Ross began her career as a cub reporter in Florida in the mid-1970’s. In 1976, she became an editor at the National Enquirer, where she worked with Judith Regan, the publisher of the O.J. Simpson faux-confessional If I Did It, and Pablo Fenjves, the book’s ghostwriter. Ms. Ross is widely considered to be the premiere living “O.J.-ologist,” in her words. She signed a confidentiality agreement regarding If I Did It and its associated television special and declined to comment on the topic for this story.

“I don’t know that people would’ve bought the book,” she said. “But I think they would’ve tuned in” for the TV special.

Ms. Ross, who earned a reputation in the press for being an occasionally tyrannical boss, had prepared a green file folder with copies of 69 admiring e-mails from former employees and colleagues, most sent in the spring of 2004, when she was unceremoniously dumped as the executive producer of Good Morning America. The authors lean heavily on the language of battle to express their sympathies.

“You bled for ABC News,” wrote one former senior-level producer, “and I have marvelled at all you have done to keep this place in business.”

“[A]s you soldiered on,” wrote another, “you made me … all of us … leaner fighting machines in this early morning war.”

The circumstances of Ms. Ross’ departure from Good Morning America have never been clear. After seven years as the executive producer of the show—during which she rose at 2:45 every morning and often worked past midnight, and slowly but surely increased the viewership of the morning show by more than a million viewers—Ms. Ross was removed from the job and sent whence she came, the newsmagazines.

There had been concerns in the executive offices about her relationship with Charlie Gibson. There were doubts about whether she still had Diane Sawyer’s support. There were fears in the upper echelons of Disney management that Ms. Ross was too rough with her staff.

“I was reassigned,” Ms. Ross said.

Ms. Ross—always taut and intense—took it very personally. “All of this was playing out in the paper,” Ms. Ross said. “I was calling up Lloyd Grove”—then a gossip columnist for the New York Daily News—“every day and saying ‘Why don’t you get a new job? You’re a junk-food journalist.’ But he was right. Eventually David Westin asked me to his office, and he said, ‘Something’s come up and I need to reassign you.’ I was, you know, not happy about it. I can’t hide any of that.”

She has spent the last two years riding out her contract with the network. She changed the subject. Look: a small stuffed peacock, over by the window.

“I got this when NBC copied us and did their own job-switch day,” she said, recalling a 2003 gimmick when Katie Couric and Jay Leno swapped hosting duties for a day. Ms. Ross lifted the bird to reveal two pins protruding, voodoo-like, from its flank. She removed one and jabbed it several times into the stuffed animal’s beak, a reference to Mr. Leno’s ample jaw. “I call it the chin-pin,” she said.

There are three David Blaine “Drowned Alive” posters in the office, from the last major prime-time special Ms. Ross produced for the network. On a small glass-top table nearby, there is a bronze statuette of Mickey Mouse, doffing his hat in a theatrical bow. The inscription reads: “15 magical years.”

“Can you believe this?” she asked, pointing at the Disney gift.

She pointed to a series of stills from Murder in Beverly Hills, a prime-time special she produced on the Menendez brothers’ trial and her first foray into popular journalism for ABC. “Two young men may have killed their parents in Beverly Hills,” she said in a monotone. “See? I didn’t put one adjective in that. I didn’t pump it up at all.”

“Within the network, there was some embarrassment by some people,” Ms. Ross said. “Culturally.”

In 1994, in one of her most notorious coups, Ms. Ross booked the first network interview with Paula Corbin Jones. She arranged the interview for Sam Donaldson, whom she considers a close friend. To secure the interview, she said, she met with Ms. Jones and urged her, woman to woman, that there was only one way to tell the story of what led to her lawsuit against Bill Clinton and be taken seriously.

“I said, ‘If you want people to believe you, don’t tell it to Diane, Barbara, Katie, Connie or Leslie,’” Ms. Ross said.

She remembered most fondly a story she did for Primetime about AIDS mom Elizabeth Glaser and her two best friends, the three of whom would take a shot of tequila at the end of every day.

Ms. Ross and Ms. Sawyer brought the tradition to Good Morning America. At the end of every week, whatever staff members wanted to would gather for a shot of tequila before going home for the weekend.

“It was a really big bonding thing,” Ms. Ross said. It got so that producers would donate bottles of tequila for Christmas and bring back decorative shot glasses from their holiday vacations.

“I knew the people in A.A.,” she said. “They would get Snapple or Coke.” The same went for the pregnant women and the underage interns. The tradition continued until the day that an executive whom Ms. Ross declined to name found out.

“They said, ‘You can’t do this on the premises,’” she said. “So. It’s a shame.”

The indignities of corporate life. Ms. Ross looked almost on the verge of genuine emotion. “I still get tequila memorabilia,” she said and changed the subject.

Over the course of three hours, Ms. Ross polished off most of the smaller half of a turkey wrap purchased for her (“You’re buying”) at the Café Europa opposite Lincoln Square. She planned to bring the rest home to her husband, David Simone, a successful record-industry executive who has just purchased the complete catalog of Hall and Oates.

Mr. Simone and Ms. Ross share an apartment in the Bloomberg Building and a manse in Connecticut. Among his most successful career acquisitions is the catalog of a little-known Trinidadian songwriter. Hidden in the catalog was one particular gem, Ms. Ross explained. She pointed to her left ring finger, atop which sat a brilliant-cut yellow diamond about the size of a quarter. “This is courtesy of ‘Who Let the Dogs Out?’” she said, meaning the 2000 mega-hit by the Baha Men. Ms. Ross declined to provide the diamond’s carat weight for the record, although she did describe the day she passed the ring around the predominantly female Good Morning America staff, to a chorus of admiring oohs and ahhs.

“There weren’t many women in the business who showed you can have it all,” she said.

Ms. Ross was 28 at the time the picture was taken, in June 1981, at the Vacaville State Medical Facility in California. She was preparing Mr. Manson for his first TV interview, for the Tomorrow show with Tom Snyder—executive producer, Mr. Ailes. In the picture, Mr. Manson has Ms. Ross in a headlock. He is pressing his thumb against her throat, pretending that it’s a knife, and all three are laughing uproariously.

“Oh, Charles,” Ms. Ross had said right before the photographer snapped the scene, “you’re such a kidder!”

“This ushered in the current era of controversy,” Ms. Ross said on the afternoon of Dec. 4. The veteran ABC producer, who is 53, was packing up. It was one of her last days at the Disney-owned network, where she has worked for 17 years.

Ms. Ross helped invent the form of journalism that is popularly called tabloid TV news—born of that first interview with Mr. Manson and honed to a fine point with Judith Regan’s recent abortive efforts with O.J. Simpson—and revived Good Morning America from the brink of death. Her contract is up on Dec. 31, and the network is not renewing it. ABC had no comment. Ms. Ross declined to say what she plans to do next, although she is taking meetings.

She does have regrets. “I just hope one thing you can convey is I don’t like where my innovations have wound up any more than you do,” she said. (That was on a voicemail message, left the next day.)

“Even though I believe I pioneered this kind of news, there was always a reason, a uniqueness, a philosophy, a storytelling/human-behavior core to it. Now I really feel like I watch the murder of the month, the murder of the week, the murder of the day. I just see garden-variety murders without anything interesting,” she said. “The balance is off.”

Ms. Ross has been a polarizing figure at ABC throughout her long and lucrative career there, butting heads often with News president David Westin and former anchor Peter Jennings, whom she eulogizes now as a “keeper of the flame.”

She reflected on what it’s like to be a high-powered woman in the entertainment industry—“You get caricatured as a bitch,” she said, “which everyone already knows.”

Ms. Ross began her career as a cub reporter in Florida in the mid-1970’s. In 1976, she became an editor at the National Enquirer, where she worked with Judith Regan, the publisher of the O.J. Simpson faux-confessional If I Did It, and Pablo Fenjves, the book’s ghostwriter. Ms. Ross is widely considered to be the premiere living “O.J.-ologist,” in her words. She signed a confidentiality agreement regarding If I Did It and its associated television special and declined to comment on the topic for this story.

“I don’t know that people would’ve bought the book,” she said. “But I think they would’ve tuned in” for the TV special.

Ms. Ross, who earned a reputation in the press for being an occasionally tyrannical boss, had prepared a green file folder with copies of 69 admiring e-mails from former employees and colleagues, most sent in the spring of 2004, when she was unceremoniously dumped as the executive producer of Good Morning America. The authors lean heavily on the language of battle to express their sympathies.

“You bled for ABC News,” wrote one former senior-level producer, “and I have marvelled at all you have done to keep this place in business.”

“[A]s you soldiered on,” wrote another, “you made me … all of us … leaner fighting machines in this early morning war.”

The circumstances of Ms. Ross’ departure from Good Morning America have never been clear. After seven years as the executive producer of the show—during which she rose at 2:45 every morning and often worked past midnight, and slowly but surely increased the viewership of the morning show by more than a million viewers—Ms. Ross was removed from the job and sent whence she came, the newsmagazines.

There had been concerns in the executive offices about her relationship with Charlie Gibson. There were doubts about whether she still had Diane Sawyer’s support. There were fears in the upper echelons of Disney management that Ms. Ross was too rough with her staff.

“I was reassigned,” Ms. Ross said.

Ms. Ross—always taut and intense—took it very personally. “All of this was playing out in the paper,” Ms. Ross said. “I was calling up Lloyd Grove”—then a gossip columnist for the New York Daily News—“every day and saying ‘Why don’t you get a new job? You’re a junk-food journalist.’ But he was right. Eventually David Westin asked me to his office, and he said, ‘Something’s come up and I need to reassign you.’ I was, you know, not happy about it. I can’t hide any of that.”

She has spent the last two years riding out her contract with the network. She changed the subject. Look: a small stuffed peacock, over by the window.

“I got this when NBC copied us and did their own job-switch day,” she said, recalling a 2003 gimmick when Katie Couric and Jay Leno swapped hosting duties for a day. Ms. Ross lifted the bird to reveal two pins protruding, voodoo-like, from its flank. She removed one and jabbed it several times into the stuffed animal’s beak, a reference to Mr. Leno’s ample jaw. “I call it the chin-pin,” she said.

There are three David Blaine “Drowned Alive” posters in the office, from the last major prime-time special Ms. Ross produced for the network. On a small glass-top table nearby, there is a bronze statuette of Mickey Mouse, doffing his hat in a theatrical bow. The inscription reads: “15 magical years.”

“Can you believe this?” she asked, pointing at the Disney gift.

She pointed to a series of stills from Murder in Beverly Hills, a prime-time special she produced on the Menendez brothers’ trial and her first foray into popular journalism for ABC. “Two young men may have killed their parents in Beverly Hills,” she said in a monotone. “See? I didn’t put one adjective in that. I didn’t pump it up at all.”

“Within the network, there was some embarrassment by some people,” Ms. Ross said. “Culturally.”

In 1994, in one of her most notorious coups, Ms. Ross booked the first network interview with Paula Corbin Jones. She arranged the interview for Sam Donaldson, whom she considers a close friend. To secure the interview, she said, she met with Ms. Jones and urged her, woman to woman, that there was only one way to tell the story of what led to her lawsuit against Bill Clinton and be taken seriously.

“I said, ‘If you want people to believe you, don’t tell it to Diane, Barbara, Katie, Connie or Leslie,’” Ms. Ross said.

She remembered most fondly a story she did for Primetime about AIDS mom Elizabeth Glaser and her two best friends, the three of whom would take a shot of tequila at the end of every day.

Ms. Ross and Ms. Sawyer brought the tradition to Good Morning America. At the end of every week, whatever staff members wanted to would gather for a shot of tequila before going home for the weekend.

“It was a really big bonding thing,” Ms. Ross said. It got so that producers would donate bottles of tequila for Christmas and bring back decorative shot glasses from their holiday vacations.

“I knew the people in A.A.,” she said. “They would get Snapple or Coke.” The same went for the pregnant women and the underage interns. The tradition continued until the day that an executive whom Ms. Ross declined to name found out.

“They said, ‘You can’t do this on the premises,’” she said. “So. It’s a shame.”

The indignities of corporate life. Ms. Ross looked almost on the verge of genuine emotion. “I still get tequila memorabilia,” she said and changed the subject.

Over the course of three hours, Ms. Ross polished off most of the smaller half of a turkey wrap purchased for her (“You’re buying”) at the Café Europa opposite Lincoln Square. She planned to bring the rest home to her husband, David Simone, a successful record-industry executive who has just purchased the complete catalog of Hall and Oates.

Mr. Simone and Ms. Ross share an apartment in the Bloomberg Building and a manse in Connecticut. Among his most successful career acquisitions is the catalog of a little-known Trinidadian songwriter. Hidden in the catalog was one particular gem, Ms. Ross explained. She pointed to her left ring finger, atop which sat a brilliant-cut yellow diamond about the size of a quarter. “This is courtesy of ‘Who Let the Dogs Out?’” she said, meaning the 2000 mega-hit by the Baha Men. Ms. Ross declined to provide the diamond’s carat weight for the record, although she did describe the day she passed the ring around the predominantly female Good Morning America staff, to a chorus of admiring oohs and ahhs.

“There weren’t many women in the business who showed you can have it all,” she said.

That was fewer than 24 hours after she had taped an interview for Nancy Grace’s prime-time Headline News show to talk about the Aug. 27 disappearance of her 2-year-old son, Trenton.

In the days after Melinda Duckett’s suicide, Ms. Grace utilized the services of Anna Cordasco, who is the managing director of the New York firm Citigate Sard Verbinnen, which specializes in below-the-radar corporate-image resuscitation.

Ms. Cordasco, who has Martha Stewart as another high-profile TV client, is old friends with Ms. Grace’s executive producer at Headline News, Dean Sicoli. Ms. Cordasco and her colleagues immediately set to work restoring the fire-breathing former prosecutor to her pre-Duckett level of dignity and national esteem.

Except, according to three sources close to Ms. Grace, once the crisis manager stepped in, the crisis just got worse.

In mid-October, six weeks after Duckett’s suicide, Ms. Cordasco e-mailed out a letter to producers of TV entertainment and news shows, pitching them on an upbeat story about Ms. Grace’s dogged pursuit of little Trenton and, if applicable, his killer.

The letter, a copy of which was obtained by The Observer, proposed a story on Ms. Grace’s upcoming trip to Florida, where she would join the boy’s father, Joshua Duckett, at an outpost called Team Trenton Headquarters. From there, Ms. Grace would broadcast her show each night, confer intimately with the police and continue to shine her national klieg light on the case of the missing 2-year-old—undaunted by the tragic fate of his mother, who, the letter noted, “committed suicide after appearing on her show.”

Ms. Cordasco mentioned parenthetically that Ms. Grace might even “go diving” in search of Trenton. CNN could provide footage, or Ms. Grace would happily do a “video diary.”

As near as can be ascertained, no one bit.

Meanwhile, privately, to reporters, Ms. Cordasco was touting the close relationship between Ms. Grace and the local police.

Ms. Cordasco sent an e-mail to print reporters in the Florida region, a copy of which was read to The Observer over the phone. In it, she wrote that Ms. Grace “will be going to Leesburg to search for Trenton Duckett with his father Josh …. Josh and the local police have asked Nancy to come down in order to bring the national spotlight back on the case. In addition, the police want to give Nancy special access to their helicopters, etc. Nancy has already made two trips to Florida to investigate the missing-child case and assist in the search efforts on her own.”

“A lot of the media feels like we coordinated our efforts around Nancy Grace and her show coming to Florida,” said Capt. James Pogue of the Marion County Sheriff’s Department. “And honestly, that is not the truth. What happened, it had nothing to do with Nancy Grace coming to town and doing all that. Our objective was to get Trenton Duckett’s face back on national TV so that the world would know who Trenton Duckett was, what he looked like, so they would start looking for him again.”

On Nov. 22, Lauren Ritchie, a columnist for the Orlando Sentinel, pounced on Ms. Cordasco’s talking point. “Just so the truth is known, Leesburg police did not invite Grace to come here, and when questioned about it, the public-relations firm backed away from that claim,” she wrote.

Ms. Ritchie also noted that there were no police helicopters to borrow anyway.

The piece caused an uproar at CNN and Headline News. “There were certainly some people pretty upset over here,” said one high-level network source.

Two days before Ms. Grace arrived, the local police made a big announcement: After two months of operating under the premise that the boy was likely dead, the Marion County Sheriff’s Office announced that it now believed, on the basis of no particularly new information, that he might be alive. Ms. Grace arrived in a flurry of fanfare and on Nov. 16 conducted the first of two live broadcasts from Leesburg, where Trenton was last seen with his mother, at a neighborhood Wendy’s.

On Nov. 17, authorities received nearly 100 tips because of Ms. Grace’s show. None, alas, has yielded any useful information as yet.

“We were brought on to work with her specifically on the Trenton Duckett issue,” Ms. Cordasco said on Nov. 27, in a short interview with The Observer. She hung up quickly, promising to call back. The following day, she called from her cell phone. “We are on retainer; we very much work for Nancy,” Ms. Cordasco said, and then hung up. She did not respond to other questions left in messages.

One source close to Ms. Grace said the anchor had fired the crisis manager.

“Citigate has not been let go. They are continuing to work on retainer, on an as-needed basis,” said Ms. Grace through a spokesperson on Nov. 28.

In Ms. Cordasco’s pitch e-mails, she also noted that Ms. Grace was headed to Biloxi on Oct. 28 to “help actually build homes lost in Katrina … to sheet rock, paint, etc.” Ms. Grace, she noted, was “really an amazing woman.”

On Nov. 21, lawyers representing Duckett’s estate filed suit against Ms. Grace and CNN, charging intentional misrepresentation of the interview, infliction of distress, and that Ms. Grace and CNN made Ms. Duckett into a public figure and then exploited her likeness for ratings. The complaint was published by the Smoking Gun that same day.

And on Nov. 23, The Biloxi Sun Herald reported on Ms. Grace’s visit. She traveled with a group from Christ United Methodist, her church in New York, and spent a few days helping to rebuild homes on Fayard Street.

Ms. Grace went “incognito” to the job site, eschewing her usual tastefully bright power suits for a baseball cap, construction-wear and a pair of work boots, the reporter noted. “Grace did not seek out publicity on her trip.”

What Becomes a Civil War Most?

What do you call a problem like escalating sectarian violence in Iraq?

“A civil war,” said Matt Lauer on the Today show on Nov. 27. NBC brass had discussed it, he told viewers, and had come to the bold and publicity-generating—if not exactly jaw-dropping—conclusion that democracy is maybe not flourishing quite the way we planned.

The other two broadcast networks, equally boldly, have not followed suit.

“It was their decision to make and their process,” said Jon Banner, the executive producer of ABC’s World News. “We constantly discuss editorial matters here—all the time, every day. How that decis ion got made there I have no idea, nor do I want to guess.”

“To be honest with you, I think it’s a political statement, not a news judgment,” said Rome Hartman, the executive producer of the CBS Evening News. “We deal with the events of the day, and we decide the best way to describe those events based on the news of the day, not by—never mind, I’m not gonna go there.”

Then he did.

“It should be noted that the day that this pronouncement—and who makes pronouncements anyway? But that’s what it sounded like—was a quiet day, relatively speaking, in Iraq,” he said.

CNN’s official statement on the matter is: “CNN will continue to report on what is happening in Iraq on a day-to-day basis. And we will also report on the ongoing debate in academic and political circles about what constitutes a civil war.”

It perhaps goes without saying that the Fox News Channel has not leaped onto the civil-war bandwagon. Fox anchors will join most of their colleagues in television news in anticipating their own Cronkite Moments.

“Every news organization is entitled to make editorial calls how they see fit. This was not a decision we came to lightly, without a great deal of discussion. We reached out to experts, military analysts, historians, people on the ground in Iraq, and they all unanimously agreed this was the appropriate label for the conflict,” said Allison Gollust, a spokeswoman for NBC News.

Meanwhile, all three broadcast network anchors, plus Anderson Cooper of CNN and Shep Smith of Fox, are scuttling off to Amman, Jordan, on Nov. 29—producers, security details and White House correspondents in tow. There they will cover President Bush’s summit with Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki regarding whatever it is that’s happening in Iraq. The Big Three, according to their executive producers, will stay for a day or two—maybe longer if necessary.

“This is a critical time in the war in Iraq,” said Nightly News executive producer John Reiss. “It just made sense to send Brian [Williams] there.”

“It seems we’re on the cusp of something big with regard to the way we’re going in Iraq,” Mr. Banner said. “Everyone seems to be making a final push before there is some decision about what to do next. It’s important for us to get there.”

That was fewer than 24 hours after she had taped an interview for Nancy Grace’s prime-time Headline News show to talk about the Aug. 27 disappearance of her 2-year-old son, Trenton.

In the days after Melinda Duckett’s suicide, Ms. Grace utilized the services of Anna Cordasco, who is the managing director of the New York firm Citigate Sard Verbinnen, which specializes in below-the-radar corporate-image resuscitation.

Ms. Cordasco, who has Martha Stewart as another high-profile TV client, is old friends with Ms. Grace’s executive producer at Headline News, Dean Sicoli. Ms. Cordasco and her colleagues immediately set to work restoring the fire-breathing former prosecutor to her pre-Duckett level of dignity and national esteem.

Except, according to three sources close to Ms. Grace, once the crisis manager stepped in, the crisis just got worse.

In mid-October, six weeks after Duckett’s suicide, Ms. Cordasco e-mailed out a letter to producers of TV entertainment and news shows, pitching them on an upbeat story about Ms. Grace’s dogged pursuit of little Trenton and, if applicable, his killer.

The letter, a copy of which was obtained by The Observer, proposed a story on Ms. Grace’s upcoming trip to Florida, where she would join the boy’s father, Joshua Duckett, at an outpost called Team Trenton Headquarters. From there, Ms. Grace would broadcast her show each night, confer intimately with the police and continue to shine her national klieg light on the case of the missing 2-year-old—undaunted by the tragic fate of his mother, who, the letter noted, “committed suicide after appearing on her show.”

Ms. Cordasco mentioned parenthetically that Ms. Grace might even “go diving” in search of Trenton. CNN could provide footage, or Ms. Grace would happily do a “video diary.”

As near as can be ascertained, no one bit.

Meanwhile, privately, to reporters, Ms. Cordasco was touting the close relationship between Ms. Grace and the local police.

Ms. Cordasco sent an e-mail to print reporters in the Florida region, a copy of which was read to The Observer over the phone. In it, she wrote that Ms. Grace “will be going to Leesburg to search for Trenton Duckett with his father Josh …. Josh and the local police have asked Nancy to come down in order to bring the national spotlight back on the case. In addition, the police want to give Nancy special access to their helicopters, etc. Nancy has already made two trips to Florida to investigate the missing-child case and assist in the search efforts on her own.”

“A lot of the media feels like we coordinated our efforts around Nancy Grace and her show coming to Florida,” said Capt. James Pogue of the Marion County Sheriff’s Department. “And honestly, that is not the truth. What happened, it had nothing to do with Nancy Grace coming to town and doing all that. Our objective was to get Trenton Duckett’s face back on national TV so that the world would know who Trenton Duckett was, what he looked like, so they would start looking for him again.”

On Nov. 22, Lauren Ritchie, a columnist for the Orlando Sentinel, pounced on Ms. Cordasco’s talking point. “Just so the truth is known, Leesburg police did not invite Grace to come here, and when questioned about it, the public-relations firm backed away from that claim,” she wrote.

Ms. Ritchie also noted that there were no police helicopters to borrow anyway.

The piece caused an uproar at CNN and Headline News. “There were certainly some people pretty upset over here,” said one high-level network source.

Two days before Ms. Grace arrived, the local police made a big announcement: After two months of operating under the premise that the boy was likely dead, the Marion County Sheriff’s Office announced that it now believed, on the basis of no particularly new information, that he might be alive. Ms. Grace arrived in a flurry of fanfare and on Nov. 16 conducted the first of two live broadcasts from Leesburg, where Trenton was last seen with his mother, at a neighborhood Wendy’s.

On Nov. 17, authorities received nearly 100 tips because of Ms. Grace’s show. None, alas, has yielded any useful information as yet.

“We were brought on to work with her specifically on the Trenton Duckett issue,” Ms. Cordasco said on Nov. 27, in a short interview with The Observer. She hung up quickly, promising to call back. The following day, she called from her cell phone. “We are on retainer; we very much work for Nancy,” Ms. Cordasco said, and then hung up. She did not respond to other questions left in messages.

One source close to Ms. Grace said the anchor had fired the crisis manager.

“Citigate has not been let go. They are continuing to work on retainer, on an as-needed basis,” said Ms. Grace through a spokesperson on Nov. 28.

In Ms. Cordasco’s pitch e-mails, she also noted that Ms. Grace was headed to Biloxi on Oct. 28 to “help actually build homes lost in Katrina … to sheet rock, paint, etc.” Ms. Grace, she noted, was “really an amazing woman.”

On Nov. 21, lawyers representing Duckett’s estate filed suit against Ms. Grace and CNN, charging intentional misrepresentation of the interview, infliction of distress, and that Ms. Grace and CNN made Ms. Duckett into a public figure and then exploited her likeness for ratings. The complaint was published by the Smoking Gun that same day.

And on Nov. 23, The Biloxi Sun Herald reported on Ms. Grace’s visit. She traveled with a group from Christ United Methodist, her church in New York, and spent a few days helping to rebuild homes on Fayard Street.

Ms. Grace went “incognito” to the job site, eschewing her usual tastefully bright power suits for a baseball cap, construction-wear and a pair of work boots, the reporter noted. “Grace did not seek out publicity on her trip.”

What Becomes a Civil War Most?

What do you call a problem like escalating sectarian violence in Iraq?

“A civil war,” said Matt Lauer on the Today show on Nov. 27. NBC brass had discussed it, he told viewers, and had come to the bold and publicity-generating—if not exactly jaw-dropping—conclusion that democracy is maybe not flourishing quite the way we planned.

The other two broadcast networks, equally boldly, have not followed suit.

“It was their decision to make and their process,” said Jon Banner, the executive producer of ABC’s World News. “We constantly discuss editorial matters here—all the time, every day. How that decis ion got made there I have no idea, nor do I want to guess.”

“To be honest with you, I think it’s a political statement, not a news judgment,” said Rome Hartman, the executive producer of the CBS Evening News. “We deal with the events of the day, and we decide the best way to describe those events based on the news of the day, not by—never mind, I’m not gonna go there.”

Then he did.

“It should be noted that the day that this pronouncement—and who makes pronouncements anyway? But that’s what it sounded like—was a quiet day, relatively speaking, in Iraq,” he said.

CNN’s official statement on the matter is: “CNN will continue to report on what is happening in Iraq on a day-to-day basis. And we will also report on the ongoing debate in academic and political circles about what constitutes a civil war.”

It perhaps goes without saying that the Fox News Channel has not leaped onto the civil-war bandwagon. Fox anchors will join most of their colleagues in television news in anticipating their own Cronkite Moments.

“Every news organization is entitled to make editorial calls how they see fit. This was not a decision we came to lightly, without a great deal of discussion. We reached out to experts, military analysts, historians, people on the ground in Iraq, and they all unanimously agreed this was the appropriate label for the conflict,” said Allison Gollust, a spokeswoman for NBC News.

Meanwhile, all three broadcast network anchors, plus Anderson Cooper of CNN and Shep Smith of Fox, are scuttling off to Amman, Jordan, on Nov. 29—producers, security details and White House correspondents in tow. There they will cover President Bush’s summit with Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki regarding whatever it is that’s happening in Iraq. The Big Three, according to their executive producers, will stay for a day or two—maybe longer if necessary.

“This is a critical time in the war in Iraq,” said Nightly News executive producer John Reiss. “It just made sense to send Brian [Williams] there.”

“It seems we’re on the cusp of something big with regard to the way we’re going in Iraq,” Mr. Banner said. “Everyone seems to be making a final push before there is some decision about what to do next. It’s important for us to get there.”