Insiders say Savannah Guthrie faces an uncertain future at NBC’s Today show after the disappearance of her mother, Nancy.
Several TV news veterans who spoke to Status doubted whether Guthrie would ever return to her role as anchor on Today, given the incredibly public way the abduction saga has unfolded.
“There’s no way Savannah’s coming back,” one executive told the outlet, adding, “I can’t imagine she would even want to.”
Guthrie, who had only recently returned to the program after vocal cord surgery when her 84-year-old mother was reported missing from her Arizona home, has hosted Today since 2012.
While NBC is supporting Guthrie as she publicly navigates the horrific ordeal—with her fellow hosts rallying behind her and former co-anchor Hoda Kotb returning to the show in Guthrie’s absence after leaving last year—the question of what happens next looms.
One television executive Status spoke to said, “If you could pick one person across the span of morning TV that a show would not want to lose, it would be Savannah.”
“Savannah was always the glue on that show, and without that, this whole paradigm of our morning anchor team as a family, that connective tissue has just been ripped out.”
The report mentions rumors that Guthrie was contemplating leaving Today at the end of 2026, with the insiders who spoke to Status pointing to Guthrie’s stint hosting a pilot for a game show based on Wordle as a sign of a possible move away from the popular morning show.
The Daily Beast has contacted NBC News for comment.
While insiders noted that Kotb’s return could be extended in order to facilitate a transition to a new anchor, it would ultimately just be a “band aid,” according to one executive, while another said that Kotb isn’t a “long-term answer.”
“She left for a reason, which was because they weren’t paying her as much.”
The executives interviewed for the report suggested potential replacements for Guthrie could include Carson Daly, Willie Geist, and Laura Jarrett, with one insider saying, that Kotb could give the network “a chance to try out people internally, without it being an optics problem.”
“The fact that there isn’t an automatic, natural odds-on successor is partly due to NBC,” one television veteran said, adding, “It’s partly due to the state of morning television and linear broadcast.”
Nancy Guthrie was first reported missing on Feb. 1 after being abducted from her home in Tucson in the early hours of the morning. Local authorities have been working with the FBI in the weeks since in order to locate Guthrie, and have released footage of the potential suspect taken from a security camera at Guthrie’s home.
Savannah and her siblings have released several videos pleading with the kidnappers, with the 54-year-old reminding her mother’s abductors in her most recent post that “it’s never too late to do the right thing.”
“It’s been two weeks since our mom was taken, and I just wanted to come on and say that we still have hope, and we still believe,” Guthrie said in the video posted to Instagram on Sunday night.
“I wanted to say to whoever has her or knows where she is, that it’s never too late,” she added.
“You’re not lost or alone and it is never too late to do the right thing, and we are here. We believe in the essential goodness of every human being and it’s never too late.”
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