David Bauder
New York: Savannah Guthrie was back and almost all business at NBC’s Today show anchor desk, marking a return for the first time in more than two months since her mother’s disappearance.
“Here we go, ready or not,” Guthrie said as the show opened on Monday (New York time). “Let’s do the news.”
After running through a series of news headlines, Guthrie said that “we are so glad that you started our week with us and it’s good to be home”. Her co-host, Craig Melvin said that “it’s good to have you back at home”.
She greeted longtime co-worker Al Roker with “Good morning, sunshine”, when he noted that it was good to see her on the set. At the end of the first 25-minute portion of the show, she offered Melvin a high-five.
Emotions got the better of her before the last half hour, when she joined her colleagues in front of fans gathered at the show’s Rockefeller Centre studio. She fought back tears when one fan was seen with a “Welcome home Savannah” shirt, and clutched colleague Jenna Bush Hager’s arm and thanked people for their support.
Guthrie, one of morning television’s most recognisable faces, has been a Today host since 2012. She has acknowledged that she’s a changed person and that it’s difficult to go forward not knowing what happened to Nancy Guthrie, who authorities believe was taken against her will from her Arizona home.
Despite an intense search involving thousands of federal and local officers and volunteers, there has been no sign of the 84-year-old mother of three since she was reported missing on February 1.
The Today show has followed the story closely for the past two months, but it wasn’t mentioned during the first hour of her return on Monday.
Hoda Kotb, the former anchor who had filled in for Guthrie for much of the past two months and interviewed her former colleague, wasn’t on set on Monday.
Today has seen a ratings boost over the past two months and has even eclipsed ABC’s Good Morning America as the leader in the morning show ratings. The shows aren’t the profit generators they once were for the networks, but the rivalry is still intense.
Today averaged 3.1 million viewers for the first three months of the year, up nearly 9 per cent in an era when most broadcast programs lose viewers. It’s difficult to tell how much the Guthrie story had to do with that: NBC also aired the Super Bowl and the Winter Olympics in February, and both events tend to help a morning show’s ratings.
As part of a video message released by her New York church on Easter Sunday, Guthrie spoke about feeling “moments of deep disappointment with God, the feeling of utter abandonment”. But she said the resurrection is not fully celebrated “if we do not acknowledge the feelings of loss, pain, and yes, death”.
In announcing her return to NBC’s flagship morning show, Guthrie said she was uncertain whether she’ll feel like she still belongs.
“It’s hard to imagine doing it because it’s such a place of joy and lightness,” she said just over a week ago on Today during her first interview since the disappearance. “I can’t come back and try to be something that I’m not. But I can’t not come back because it’s my family.”
She said she didn’t anticipate faking her way through the show, which is normally light-hearted with a mix of serious, breaking news.
There had been a great deal of speculation about whether she would return.
“I want to smile, and when I do, it will be real,” she told Hoda Kotb, who came back to Today to fill in while Guthrie focused on the search. “Being there is joyful, and when it’s not, I’ll say so.”
Nancy Guthrie made occasional appearances on Today over the years, once taking part in a cooking demonstration and surprising her daughter on the set. When Savannah Guthrie returned to her hometown of Tucson in 2025 for a segment recorded for the show, the two visited one of their favourite restaurants and talked about their love of Arizona.
The Guthrie family has offered a $US1 million ($1.45 million) reward for information leading to the recovery of their mother.
Authorities believe Nancy Guthrie was kidnapped, abducted or otherwise taken against her will after finding blood near the doorstep of her home in the foothills outside Tucson. The FBI later released surveillance videos showing a masked man on the porch that night. Volunteers and search teams scoured the nearby desert terrain filled with cactuses, bushes and boulders in the first weeks after she vanished.
But attention has faded from an investigation that was declared to be a top priority for the FBI and local authorities. Investigators have not released new evidence in weeks and say the number of tips has slowed. The FBI and the Pima County Sheriff’s Department both said late last week that they had no updates.
Early on, some media outlets reported receiving ransom messages tied to the case. Guthrie said she and her siblings responded to two messages that they believed were real and offered to pay.
Guthrie said her celebrity status might be the reason her mother was taken, but said that possibility was “too much to bear”.
AP
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