Entertainment

After Anderson Cooper

‘SHOW’ STOPPER: Erica Hill is the host of CBS’s “The Early Show.”

Jon Stewart got into a lot of trouble last week when he made fun of Anderson Cooper.

All over cable news and the Internet, people wanted to lynch Stewart for mocking the CNN anchor and his brush with violent demonstrators in Cairo.

Meanwhile, Erica Hill, Cooper’s high-wattage news reader, made fun of him every night for four years — and she got a promotion for it.

After letting Harry Smith and Maggie Rodriguez go last December, CBS made Hill — 34 and, by most standards, a virtual unknown — the host of its also-ran morning program, “The Early Show.”

Overnight, Hill became the newest member of one of TV’s most elite clubs — Meredith Vieira and Robin Roberts presiding.

She got there, at least in part, because some people in high places had been watching her poke nightly at the straight-laced Cooper. And they were the kind of people who knew chemistry when they saw it.

“I first saw Erica on Anderson Cooper,” Katie Couric says, “and I liked that she was cheeky and seemed to have a sense of humor.”

Not wanting to take credit for anything — especially the controversial decision to drop Smith and Rodriguez, two old

friends — Couric admits she “mentioned to the bosses that I thought she had a certain something that would do well in the morning.”

David Friedman, who took over as executive producer of “The Early Show” a year ago, says he didn’t know much about Hill until he got there and saw her anchor the weekend edition of the show.

He credits CBS News exec Barbara Fedida — an old Peter Jennings staffer — with recruiting Hill from Cooper.

“Frankly, I didn’t know who she was until she was on the show one night,” Cooper said last week.

“I knew she had a show on HLN [CNN’s sister channel], but I really hadn’t seen her.

“I can’t remember what she said, but she started poking fun at me. And it took me a second to realize what she was doing.

“I would catch out of the corner of my eye — she was rolling her eyes at me,” he says. “It became a nightly thing.”

“You get a read on people,” says Hill, sitting in her half-painted “Early Show” office three blocks east of her old job. “And I was just testing the water.

“Then,” she says, “we just kind of started giving it back and forth to each other.”

“Chemistry is a hard thing to put your finger on,” Cooper says. “It’s not something that shows up on a resume.

“Erica is able to find chemistry very quickly with other people, and that’s a rare, rare thing.

“When she left, I was incredibly sad,” he says.

Whether she can find the same chemistry at 7 a.m. with a new partner, former Ch. 2 anchor Chris Wragge, is yet to be deteremined.

The morning show has been a problem child for CBS since before Hill or Wragge was born.

The show makes money, says Friedman — without saying that it makes about half as much as “Today” and “Good Morning America” or that ad revenues went down 10 percent or so last year, according to figures supplied by Kantar Media.

Friedman also doesn’t have to say that this irks his boss, CBS President Les Moonves, no end.

“It’s not like they said: ‘We’re giving you this job and we expect you by X date to make a change,” Hill says. “That was never part of it.

“But I’m sure that’s the hope,” she says. “We’d be idiots if we didn’t want to move a little bit.

“But I also think you have to be realistic about coming out of the gate and getting some crazy spikes,” she says.

Hill, who has two kids (4 years old and nearly 1) with her lawyer husband, and Cooper are both embarking on scary new adventures this year.

Green and still untested, she will have to be the new signature figure of a show that has not turned out a female news star since Diane Sawyer 30 years ago.

Cooper’s days of running around world hot spots will come to an abrupt end this fall when he starts a syndicated afternoon talk show — so long, Oprah! — this fall.

Who will have it tougher?

“It ain’t coal mining,” Cooper says.

“These are all good problems to have.”