The deal to bring Piers Morgan, the “America’s Got Talent” judge, to CNN to fill Larry King’s spot won’t come cheap. According to sources, CNN will pay Morgan a whopping $6 million a year over the next three years.
Morgan, a former British tabloid editor, has been the No. 1 candidate for the coveted King spot for several months — ever since Katie Couric let it be known she did not want the job when her CBS contract expires next summer.
The decision to hire Morgan represents a huge gamble for CNN — handing over its most famous show to a personality who is basically unknown in the US.
In years past, CNN executives have felt that King’s type of long-form interview show was no longer in style and that they would probably change it when King stepped down.
Inside CNN, staffers say they were surprised when it became clear that the network was going to stay with King’s old format — despite the disastrous ratings slump to just 700,000 viewers per night.
The big question now is whether Morgan, 45, will be able to book the kind of big-name guests King was famous for.
“Celebrities went on ‘Larry King‘ because they knew they weren’t going into hostile territory,” said one insider. “It was a conversation, not an inquisition.”
Morgan, who began in the sharp-elbowed world of Fleet Street newspapers, does not have a reputation as a gentle questioner.
Still, CNN brass seem willing to make him the highest-paid personality on the network — though the salary is not as much as the $10 million a year it had been paying King.
The deal does not include any contractual “outs” which would give one side or the other the chance to end the deal mid-contract, according to knowledgeable sources.
NBC chief Jeff Zucker said on CNBC yesterday that Morgan would be staying on as a judge on “Got Talent” for another three years and that NBC had no problems with him appearing both on CNN and NBC.
“I don’t think they’re mutually exclusive,” Zucker said.
As well, Time Warner, which owns CNN, apparently gave NBC some financial concessions on other programs — the two companies, for instance, jointly own the nightly entertainment magazine show “Extra“–to sweeten the deal.
Morgan also had to shed his British TV deals — for “Britain’s Got Talent” and his interview show “Life Stories” — to move to New York, where he’s expected to start apartment-hunting next month.
King is set to step down in November.
Couric, meanwhile, is expected to finish out her contract as anchor of CBS’s “Evening News” — but negotiations have not begun yet on re-signing her, according to reports. — Additional reporting by Claire Atkinson and Emily Smith