Annette Sharp: New co-host Sarah Abo will shake things up at Today

New co-host Sarah Abo is a breath of fresh air for Today, writes Annette Sharp, and she’s unlikely to be a mere foil for serial prankster Karl Stefanovic’s tired gags.

Sarah Abo’s Today show appointment sends some clear messages to breakfast show veteran and serial prankster Karl Stefanovic, who last month was reprimanded by bosses after criticising Nine colleagues.

The first is that the Syrian-born Abo — who initially caught the eye of news executives around the nation when she showed her grit in the reporting field while covering the European refugee crisis in 2017 for SBS — is unlikely to be a mere foil for Stefanovic’s tired gags.

Abo, a relative newcomer to Nine who was recruited to 60 Minutes in 2019 — bucking the trend of internal appointments to that show — has not been shaped by a commercial TV culture that for decades treated talented and smart women presenters as decorative sidekicks to their f’uglier male counterparts.

In contrast, 36-year-old Abo’s career and personality have been shaped by a big world view, a love of travel and photography, different newsroom cultures and a sharpened sense of political justice.

She’s also demonstrated a willingness to make sacrifices — to change cities and networks, from Melbourne to Adelaide back to Melbourne and now Sydney, from Ten to SBS to Nine — to establish her name and reputation to get to this juncture in time.

Sarah Abo is the new co-host of Today on Channel 9. Picture: Supplied

This is in stark contrast with the woman she replaces at Today, Ally Langdon, who has spent her entire career at Nine, and has Nine’s DNA in her bones — and now, too, in her bloodline, courtesy of her marriage to Mike Willesee’s son.

Langdon moves to A Current Affair in 2023, although not without first shedding a few public tears for her deceased father-in-law, the pioneer host of A Current Affair whose long and brilliant career was almost entirely undone with one drunken on-air appearance on the program in 1989.

Allison Langdon has moved on from Today, to host ACA.

Following that emotional display last week, this columnist suspects it’s time we at last put to bed persistent rumours of an estrangement between Langdon and her husband Mike Willesee Jr, who once harboured his own ACA ambitions, and Willesee Sr in his later years.

After four years at Nine, Abo is still regarded as something of a newcomer and outsider, something that suggests she may not be as willing to roll with the punches that at times have come fast and furiously for the seven women who have been paired with Stefanovic during his 17-year tenure on Today.

That alone has the potential to be a game-changer for a show, if producers are prepared to absorb that news.

If Today with Stefanovic and Langdon was all about having “fun”, Today with Stefanovic and Abo will principally be about growing the program’s audience, which has been going backwards at a rate of knots since its longest-serving female host Lisa Wilkinson left the show in 2017.

Karl Stefanovic and Allison Langdon on the set of Today.

Producers have ABC’s News Breakfast – a program that has made gains on the commercial breakfast shows in recent years with a more multicultural cast of players – firmly in its sights, something Abo’s appointment (made years after this columnist first bemoaned the lack of cultural diversity at Nine and it’s unhealthy obsession with blonde female presenters) addresses.

As for on-screen chemistry, of which much emphasis is generally put in breakfast television, there is little evidence Stefanovic and Abo have any yet.

And that may be the very thing that forces Stefanovic to dig deep and rediscover one of the touchstones of great media partnerships: respect.

While some of Abo’s fans have already lamented Nine’s influence on the beauty’s Instagram page since her recruitment to 60 Minutes in 2019, with the advent of more fashion-related posts, there is much riding on the view that the more serious Abo will in fact rub off on her new co-host rather than the reverse.

Hopefully that proves the case.

Got a news tip? Email [e-mail]