There are three types of people on Toronto’s roads at 4 a.m. on a weekday. There are the garbage collectors picking up the trash, the taxi drivers taking home last night’s stragglers, and then there are the breakfast TV hosts on their way to work.
Liza Fromer is one of the latter. Fromer is host of The Morning Show, Global TV’s chatty accompaniment to your breakfast. Though she makes a career from being bubbly at some ungodly hour, when Fromer picks me up at Dupont and Spadina at 4:15 a.m., she looks like the rest of us in the morning: her hair has been hastily swept back in a clip and her right hand is glued to a large travel mug of coffee.
“It’s just like any other commute to work, except it’s at 4 a.m.,” Fromer tells me as we drive down the empty streets. Fromer stops at an intersection in a residential part of town, and co-host Dave Gerry emerges from one of the houses. He jumps in and, while the rest of Toronto sleeps in the darkened homes around us, we head off to the studio at the corner of Bloor and Church.
Fromer and Gerry front a bold experiment in breakfast TV. Since being launched a year ago, The Morning Show has been bringing viewers a daily mix of news, travel, entertainment and lifestyle stories with a heavy dose of banter between the hosts. Along with newscaster Kris Reyes and weather reporter Rosey Edeh, the pair spend much of the show chatting to guests around a large table. The aim, say producers, is for the show to feel like a dinner party — just one that’s crammed with lively and witty celebrity guests.
Both life and wit are in short supply when we make it to the production office a little after 4:30. A few of the producers are already there, but the office is quiet. There’s some talk of Madonna’s concert at the ACC the previous night, but most people are staring at e-mail inboxes or lurking in the kitchen in search of caffeine. “That’s the thing with morning people,” says Fromer, “we’re just in our own little world.”
By the time the 5 a.m. pre-show meeting starts, a division has emerged. As the eight-or-so producers and presenters gather around a kitchen-style table at one end of the office, those who will be in front of the camera have had their hair and makeup done and are looking radiant, while the off-screen guys clutch mugs of coffee bearing the logo of McCafé, the show’s sponsor, and try to stifle their yawns. Fromer, her vibrant pink shirt still untucked over a black skirt, paces back and forth in bare feet as the team rattles through the running order and the morning’s news.
From left: 4:49 a.m.: “It takes a lot of make-up for the 3 a.m. eyebags,” says Fromer, 9:44 a.m.: After the show, the studio becomes an impromptu gym, 12:05 p.m.: The afternoon agenda includes groceries — and a nap
As the clock ticks toward the show’s transmission time, Fromer makes her way to the studio. It’s at ground level and two walls are given over to floor-to-ceiling windows that allow passersby on Bloor Street to see what’s going on within. The idea is to make the show literally a part of the cityscape.
But at just before 6 a.m., the cityscape isn’t ready for company and Bloor Street is all but deserted.
Inside, the atmosphere is quiet as the crew manoeuvre equipment into position. Fromer — who has put on a pair of towering heels at some point without me noticing — sits down at the main desk with co-host Gerry. The floor manager starts counting down seconds and making hand signals that would be alarming in any other context. Then the screens around the studio flicker into life and we’re off.
Over the next three hours, Fromer and Gerry banter their way through interviews with guests, including actress Katherine LaNasa, who has a film at TIFF; an editor from The Kit, who gives out advice on cross-border shopping; and Raptor Jamaal Magloire, who impresses everyone with his huge hands. In the breaks the cast and crew get their pictures taken with their guests, refuel on coffee or, in Gerry’s case, put their feet on the desk and read the paper.
This is Fromer’s third stint in the morning slot, having previously been on Citytv’s Breakfast Television and Newstalk 1010’s Moore in the Morning. Though she tells me later she’s not a morning person at all, you’d never think it from her breezy chat and ready laughter. It’s a style that’s deliberately light, since Fromer and Co. know their audience consists of people with half a mind on doing their teeth or getting dressed or mobilizing the kids for school. “I’ve made peace with being wallpaper for people’s mornings,” she says.
At just before 9 a.m. the show plays out with two of the producers being press-ganged into dancing Madonna’s “Vogue” onscreen. In an hour, there will be another meeting where the team will thrash out plans for tomorrow’s show and beyond. As the crew mills about shutting down equipment and doing technical-looking things with the cameras, Fromer and Reyes, the newscaster, vanish. They reappear in a moment with a personal trainer called Ray Ortiz, two yellow bars and some hefty metal balls that look like they might have been used in medieval warfare.
In the middle of a studio that a few minutes earlier was broadcasting live to the GTA, Fromer and Reyes proceed to grunt, groan and curse their way through a workout that is probably best described as harrowing. It’s also surreal. Not least because there are a half-dozen technicians going about their business seemingly oblivious to the two sweaty presenters turning the air blue in the middle of the room.
Apparently, this post-show workout is a regular occurrence. The only person who seems as bemused by it as I am is Cheryl Hickey, the ET Canada host who was on the show earlier to talk about TIFF and who has been lured back to the studio to investigate the strange noises.
Fromer and Reyes are still in their workout gear by the time the 10 a.m. meeting rolls around. After the meeting, there’s some discussion of what to do for the show’s one-year anniversary on Oct. 11, then Fromer gets changed and answers some e-mails. By noon the work day is done, and we’re released into a city that’s only just getting ready for its lunch.
Afternoons for Fromer follow a regular pattern: grocery shopping, meeting with friends, a nap and then some family time at her home at Bathurst and St. Clair. At 7:30 p.m. Fromer puts her two young children to bed, then heads that way herself.
Though she says that morning hosts get into a groove, waking up at 3:30 a.m. is never easy. So why, I ask, does she do it?
Fromer pulls out her cellphone and shows me a photo of her meeting author Salman Rushdie. “When I struggle to get out of bed,” she says, “I look at that, and I think, ‘I’m so lucky to have such an amazing job.’ ”
