For Meredith Vieira, it's finally ‘Today’

Meredith Vieira was sick of talking about Meredith Vieira.

She was heading off the other day to do what she said felt like her “gazillionth interview” since she was named the new co-host of NBC’s Today Show. “I can’t answer one more question about myself,” she was thinking. “I am so over myself.”

Then she got a call telling her that a friend’s son had died. “It shocked me back into reality,” Vieira says.

The boy had died of something called shallow water blackout, and his death could have been avoided if he had more information about the little known syndrome. At the funeral, the grief stricken mother approached Vieira and asked, “How do I get the word out?”

“It hit me at that moment, it wasn’t that I have this position, it’s what I do with this position,” Vieira says. “It made me realize that I have the power to help people.”

Vieira says she’s planning to do a segment on shallow water blackout. “I can provide information so that no other parent has to go through this,” she says. And that, Vieira has concluded, is really what her new job is about. “You rise to a bizarre celebrity status,” she says. But it’s a mistake, she knows, to get caught up in all that. “If you think it’s about you – it’s not.”

Since Vieira was named to replace Katie Couric as the new co-host of NBC’s long running and top-rated morning show in April, the 52-year-old newswoman has been center stage, but she’s hardly a stranger to the spotlight. She has a hard-news background, including a gig as a correspondent for CBS’s 60 Minutes, but fans of ABC’s talk show “The View” know her goofy, self-deprecating, fun-loving side: the time she wore fake hair in her armpits, the show where she planted a full-on smooch on co-host Joy Behar, or her often-repeated on-air confession that she doesn’t wear panties – as long as she’s wearing panty hose.

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When Vieira begins the gig on September 13, the “Today” show’s nearly six million viewers will see both her hard-news woman and wacky side. “These are people who are getting up and it’s the first news of the day for most of them,” she says. “There are days that will be very difficult and [viewers] are looking to you to help them navigate through those difficult times. There are days when they might be a little low and you have something fun to share.”

In the coming weeks, she’ll do a segment taking her second son, Gabe – who wants to be a sportscaster — golfing with Matt Lauer. She’ll also go restaurant hopping around Manhattan with Al Roker, and go rock climbing with Ann Curry. “That Ann is adventurous!” she says. “She wanted to go sky diving!”

And what challenges does she have in store for her new co-workers? “I’m going to play Millionaire with them,” she chortles, referring to her gig as host of the syndicated game show “Who Wants To Be A Millionaire.” “Then we’ll see how smart these smart alecks really are!”