Two for the Road

It would be hard to describe the revamped "World News Tonight" as anything but serious and solid. But critics, as is their wont, have focused more on the theatrical aspects, and many have been unkind.

While Washington Post columnist Tina Brown called Vargas "hot," San Diego Union-Tribune critic Robert Laurence complained about her "histrionic" facial expressions and "dramatic vocal inflections." New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd dubbed Woodruff a "pretty boy android," while Comedy Central's Stephen Colbert branded him a "robot."

"We all care what people think," Woodruff says. "But so much is at a personal and stylistic level."

"They're entitled to their opinion," Vargas says. "I'm too busy to focus on it."

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As an Army brat, Vargas didn't have an easy path to the top.

After growing up in Germany and Okinawa without a television set, Vargas was reporting at a Reno television station in the mid-1980s when she applied for an anchoring job in Phoenix.

"She wasn't very good," says Phil Alvidrez, a former executive at KTVK who reviewed her tape. "She wasn't polished enough to be an anchor in Phoenix." But Alvidrez hired her as a reporter, and "she was special. She was headstrong and ambitious but really coachable. She wanted to get better. She was passionate." When Alvidrez passed her over for a weekend anchor job, she left the ABC affiliate for the CBS station in Chicago.

By 1993 Vargas had made it to NBC, where she became a correspondent and anchor for "Dateline" and "Today," and weekend anchor for "NBC Nightly News." She was one of the few Hispanic women ever to play at that level -- her father is Puerto Rican, her mother Irish American -- and naturally seemed to draw media attention.

ABC lured her away in 1996, and she became the news anchor for "Good Morning America" amid widespread speculation that she would succeed Joan Lunden as a co-host. Vargas drew a spate of bad press when anonymous executives suggested she was insisting on star treatment, and she was soon reassigned as a correspondent.

"It's hard to join a show as a member of an anchor team that's been there for a very long time," Vargas says.

She soon became a gossip-column staple during a romance with actor Michael Douglas. "That was just weird," she says. "It was really impossible to date someone that famous for a few years and not have it be picked up on."