“Alright, here we go. Ready or not, let’s make some news.”
With that, Savannah Guthrie returned to her role as co-host of Today after more than two months away from the morning show — a vacation he began just after his mother, Nancy Guthrie, was reported missing from her home in Arizona.
As Savannah summed up the day’s headlines (potential trouble in Iran, rising gas prices, UCLA’s win in the NCAA women’s basketball championship) she wore a bright yellow dress, its lace overlay hinting at delicate flowers. His co-host, Craig Melvin, was wearing a yellow tie, with a yellow pocket square peeking out from his blazer and a yellow ribbon pinned to his bag. The table they shared was surrounded by yellow flowers: roses, mostly, resembling full-blown sunflowers.
Yellow, used in this way, is the color of hope—hope, specifically, that a lost loved one will return home. On top of Today put, though, was also the color of contempt.
Guthrie’s comeback is a refusal to accept the personal horror that has become a widely followed national news story. Very little has changed since the early days in the case of the disappearance of his mother: no new breaks reported, no new evidence revealed. His decision to return, he has suggested, is instead a move whose time has come. The TV anchor is known for his smile—wide, slightly crooked, proof that poets got it right when they compared a smile to a ray of light. Now, he suggested, that smile would speak for itself. “My joy will be my march,” Guthrie told his old man Today co-anchor Hoda Kotb, who had filled in for Guthrie in his absence, in interview aired at the end of March.
The protest, though, is also a concession: an acknowledgment that Nancy Guthrie’s disappearance remains an unanswered question, and a story without a conclusion.
Details of the compensation the family received after Nancy’s disappearance have not been officially confirmed, although Guthrie has said he found two to be credible. Footage captured by a Ring camera at Nancy’s front door shortly before she disappeared—showing a man at her door, masked with gloves and apparently armed—led to the fact that, apparently, they weren’t. The case is growing cold. “We need answers,” Guthrie told Kotb. “We cannot have peace without knowing, and one can do the right thing. And it is not too late to do the right thing, and our hearts are focused on that.”
When you expect a happy ending, you may not think that one day, you can recover from any ending. But here’s the hard truth of true crime: The crime itself is rarely solved as beautifully as a made-for-TV presentation might suggest. Sometimes, it doesn’t solve it. The dynamics involved will be familiar to anyone who follows the news regularly: Most news events are, in some ways, never-ending stories.
In the weeks after Nancy Guthrie’s disappearance, the massive search effort received special coverage on CNN and other networks. New York Times live-blog its progress. The case was the subject of frequent updates in gossip and entertainment channels such as People and TMZ. (TMZ channels acknowledged the role the site itself played in the story-like recipient of a letter purporting to be sent by Nancy’s alleged captor.) It was a consistent theme in part because it produced few meaningful scenes. Each twist, while shaky as a lead or a clue, seemed to give a new reason to hope that he might still be found and reunited with his family.
Hope remains. But it grows weak. The Guthries have lived, as The The New YorkerVinson Cunningham to put it last week, “an experiment that most of us can only think of as part of the plot of a movie or a high-drama TV show.” The show makes a basic promise that it will come to an end. Grief offers no such guarantee.
*Image credit: Brandon Bell / Getty; Peter Kramer/NBC/Getty; Heritage Art / Heritage Images / Getty
