by Tomika Anderson | Photography by Adam Fedderly | Styling by Billie Causieestko
Loutelious “T.J.” Holmes and his wife, Marilee, move decisively through a maze of Asian inspired small plates as the sun begins to dip over New York City’s Central Park. It’s just after 5 on a humid September evening, dinnertime at the Holmes’ home-away-from-home: the luxurious Jumeirah Essex House just off Fifth Avenue, where the couple lives during the week. (Rare BlackBerry-free weekends are spent golfing near the couple’s cavernous home inside Atlanta’s city limits.)
Holmes—finally breathing easily inside the stately South Gate restaurant following a sardine-can-packed day of meetings and conference calls—pushes away his yellow fin tuna tacos, smiling knowingly at his partner of two years before excusing himself from the table.
They’re accustomed to family dinners being interrupted, though not always for something as glamorous as an interview.
RELATED: Behind the Scenes at the TJ Holmes Cover Shoot.
The former Marilee Fiebig, who goes by “MrsTJHolmes” on Twitter—is a business immigration attorney who pulls long hours at a top law firm in Atlanta. And her semi-famous husband— who, until last December, was one of the most recognizable black faces on CNN—is working round the clock to help lock in guests, finalize show rundowns, and secure as much press as possible for his new late-night TV show on BET before its October debut.
“We launched a bus tour during the Republican National Convention,” the self-assured yet lowkey talking head said of his street team’s election-season hustle to get the word out on Don’t Sleep! He compares the slyly named series to HBO’s Real Time With Bill Maher, but “with my credibility, journalistic background, personality, and black sensibility.”
Holmes was actually in Tampa that day when two white male attendees of the Convention taunted a black female employee of CNN, throwing peanuts at her, sneering, “This is how we feed animals.” While Holmes won’t divulge which political party he checks off in the polling booth, he refuses to diss Republicans for an incident many deemed reflective of the party’s overall stance toward blacks.
“It was incredibly unfortunate there were a couple of idiots in the crowd,” Holmes says weeks later, while sipping on an Amstel Light, casually clad in his favorite work uniform—crisp white V-neck tee, stylishly shredded blue jeans, black leather flip-flops, and a gleaming silver Breitling watch. “You hate when something like that happens because it takes away from what the party is trying to do. Yeah, they have some problems with perception, but I would never want anyone to disqualify an entire party or hold that against every Republican out there because of a few bad apples,” he insists.
So will this Switzerland-neutral-type position Holmes embraces go over well with the predictably pro-Obama black viewership he’ll face this fall? Maybe not, but he’s crossing his fingers. “I’m not going to take that kind of opinionated political left or right position,” warns the 35-year-old West Memphis, Ark. native, who was born on the same day as that other famous guy from “the Natural State,” Bill Clinton. “I love to talk to folks who are engaged, and who I may even disagree with, but we can be passionate about what we’re talking about and still respect each other. I think that is so lacking in our discourse in this country. We’ve gotten to a point now that we can’t disagree,” Holmes says shaking his head. “It’s not ‘I’m right and you’re wrong.’ It’s ‘I’m right, you’re wrong, your mama’s ugly, I hope you get a flat on the way to work and I hope you get fired.’ We hate each other. People jump on social media and say whatever they want to.”
He should know. Back in August Holmes found himself coming under Twitter fire from black folks as he reported live from the RNC after Republican candidate Mitt Romney’s wife, Ann Romney, was speaking. “It’s not that I was saying anything complimentary or supporting her husband’s position,” he recalls. “But just the fact that I was not criticizing her and dogging her, people were jumping on my shit like, ‘What’s wrong with you? How are you supporting this Stepford wife?’ That’s what politics has become.”
It’s completely new territory for the on-air heartthrob— who rose to fame as a primarily “just the facts, sir” talking head for Turner Broadcasting— covering the Joplin, Mo., tornadoes in 2011; the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in New Orleans in 2010; and the 2007 mass shootings on the Virginia Tech campus in Blacksburg, Va. Not that he didn’t have an opinion back then.
He then manned CNN’s Saturday and Sunday mornings for four years on CNN Newsroom alongside fellow news anchor Betty Nguyen, until she took a job at CBS in 2010. The show’s ratings soared when he took over as solo newscaster for the program before stepping down on Christmas Day 2011. His experience in the spotlight whet the award-winning journalist’s appetite for primetime weekday exposure—something he says, quite frankly, CNN did not move fast enough to give him.
“CNN—the stories I covered over there—domestically, internationally, all of it—that experience was invaluable,” Holmes begins cautiously, giving credit to his former employer for recognizing his talent and scooping him up from NBC affiliate KNTV in 2006. “But it’s been a long, ongoing public battle to some degree, and source of contention between the people who are on-air, the networks, and others who have criticized [the networks’] lack of diversity,” he says.
“Why is it that we can’t get those primetime jobs?”asks Bob Butler, VP Broadcast of the National Association of Black Journalists. “I know what these companies say. The say their personnel decisions are ratings driven. But what they’re really saying is we’re not going to put a person of color on the air because they’re not going to succeed. And I don’t know how you can say that if you’ve never tried it.”
“When I left CNN in December of last year they aired programming from 5 a.m. to midnight every single day, Monday through Friday. In all of those shows there was one person of color anchoring a show at 11 a.m.,” says Holmes. “You turn on the weekends—Saturday and Sunday—and there’s the morning shift I was on, the afternoon CNN Newsroom and the evening CNN Newsroom. Three African-American anchors on Saturday and Sunday mornings. Now you can make your own guess as to why that was, you can call it just a coincidence, you can say we all sucked and weren’t as good as those people Monday through Friday—whatever your opinion may be,” Holmes says crisply.
“But the onus was not on them to put me in a different spot—the onus has to be on me to look at the landscape, see what’s happening, think about my real options at a network that is, frankly, not known for a lot of diversity Monday through Friday. So in that regard it was not too difficult of a decision to leave.”
CNN eventually did offer him at least close to what he’d been wanting all those years—but only after he’d packed his bags and was headed for the door.
“I’m not sure I’ve officially said this to anybody before, but right before I left, and they saw I was for real about leaving, CNN did offer me a Monday through Friday show,” he revealed. “It wasn’t primetime, but it was still a Monday through Friday show,” said Holmes. “So unlike what I hear some folks saying, I didn’t just take this new gig because I didn’t have any other options, and I didn’t want to go back to weekends. No, this new show is actually something I believe in doing.”
It certainly helps that BET offered Holmes carte blanche: Don’t Sleep!, which will air four nights a week in the 11 p.m. slot, is just part of a multiyear, multiplatform deal the newsman signed with the network before the ink on his exit paperwork for CNN had dried.
He’s in an enviable position: As the only marquee name in the network’s news division, Holmes is now literally the face of BET politics during this critical presidential election cycle. He’s been given real estate on the network’s Web site; he’s already popped up on the network’s No. 1 show 106 & Park, moderating a discussion about racial profiling (a topic he made news for himself back in July when he was pulled over by cops a mile away from his Atlanta home); and will obviously be the go-to anchor for any and all news-related BET specials. There’s no question, for example, that if President Obama stops by BET before November 11, Holmes will get the interview—not a bad transition for a guy once relegated to the sidelines of network television news.
BET’s president of Music Programming and Specials Stephen Hill said he’d had his eye on the award-winning anchor for years. It’s a big deal for the self-branded entertainment portal—Holmes is the first hard-news show the network has invested in since it dismantled its BET News division in late 2009.
“I kept asking him when his contract with CNN expired,” jokes Hill recalling his first meeting with Holmes after he watched him emcee a breakfast sponsored by the National Association for Multi-Ethnicity in Communications in Washington a few years back. “He was masterful,” Hill remembers. “He took a congressman to task for not reading a tax bill, but he did it in such a way that didn’t offend folks. There’s a skill to being able to make fun of a person and have them laugh, too, because it’s all good-natured. Basically he did everything in that breakfast that I envisioned him doing on television.
“Don’t Sleep! is a show that has been rattling around in our collective brains for the past seven years or so,” continues Hill. “And T.J. is a perfect choice as host. He’s confident, cool, smart, funny, and clever—all the best ingredients.”
Though Holmes is careful not to give too much away (“Let’s just say we might have the Speaker of the House on one night sitting next to Chris Rock sitting next to someone you’ve never heard of,” he teases), he will say his biggest ambition— besides providing smart, biting social commentary on significant issues important to African- Americans—is to mentor the generation behind him, encouraging them to vote, no matter who it’s for.
“I want to lead by example at a network where I have the most number of young black people watching,” says Holmes, the father of a boy and girl from a previous marriage. “I would never, ever tell you who I’m voting for, but I can tell you right now that I’m supportive of President Obama. I was supportive of George W. Bush. I was supportive of President Clinton,” he adds. “I will be supportive of whoever is in the White House because that is my president and I want him to have a good day every single day he goes to work. We have to make sure young people get as excited about politics as the older ones.”
With the next phase of his career firmly on course, Holmes, who sports a block-lettered Roman numerical tattoo of the date March 3 on his wrist—his wedding day—jokes that his only concern now is to make sure Marilee (who has the same tattoo in the same place) doesn’t face the same throngs of female groupies in New York that they sometimes encounter in Atlanta.
“You would not believe some of the women!” he says of his numerous run-ins, including one such incident when a fan literally pushed his wife out of the way to get closer to him. “It was a difficult decision to move to New York because we love Atlanta so much,” he says seriously. “We went back and forth about it,” he says of his love, with whom he was serendipitously set up on a lunch date. “But I just couldn’t imagine not taking advantage of this opportunity. I couldn’t imagine not doing this show. I would just have too many regrets.”
