America: The build-up lasted months, complete with a "listening tour" of the US and fevered speculation about everything from what she would wear to how she would sign off. So when on Tuesday Katie Couric finally became the first woman to anchor a network news show alone, it was difficult at first to see what all the fuss was about.
Critics had warned that Couric, a former breakfast TV host who has laboured for years under the recurring epithets of "fluffy" and "perky", was too trivial a figure to fill the shoes of Edward R. Murrow, Walter Cronkite and Dan Rather on the CBS Nightly News.
The network was more optimistic, gambling Couric's reported $15 million (€12 million) annual salary on the promise that she could rejuvenate the flagging show, which draws fewer viewers each evening than its rivals on NBC and ABC and is playing to a rapidly-ageing audience.
The show shot into first place on Tuesday, with more than 13 million viewers, 10 million of whom tuned in the following evening as well.
Beyond CBS, television executives are watching Couric's performance to see if she can halt the dramatic decline in popularity of the networks' evening news shows, which were still an essential part of the day for most Americans a decade ago.
A survey by the Pew Research Centre for the People and the Press in July showed that the proportion of people who regularly watch the network news fell from 60 per cent in 1993 to 28 per cent in 2006.
Despite her perky profile, Couric is an experienced interviewer with an appealing, down-to-earth manner who opened Tuesday's show with a report from Afghanistan on the resurgence of the Taliban. The most headline-grabbing item was the first photograph of Tom Cruise's and Katie Holmes's baby, Suri, and the most striking innovation was a nightly monologue called "Free Speech", delivered by guests from across the political spectrum.
Cronkite's voice introduced Couric - a detail which may have been lost even on CBS News's venerable audience because Cronkite retired from the show all of 25 years ago. Couric began with the words "Hi, everybody", turning her back on the pompous solemnity which characterises the other network news shows.
In fact, Couric has turned her back on conventional TV news altogether, and her show is more a magazine than a news broadcast, pushing the day's news to the margins.
It is none the worse for that. Americans now have access to so many news sources that they have no reason to feel left out of the loop. On television alone, the choices range from the hectic brashness of Fox News to the ponderousness of Jim Lehrer's News Hour on PBS, which cultivates a solemnity not seen on TV anywhere in Europe since the collapse of communism.
Perhaps the most surprising feature of Couric's debut was the fact that, in a country where more than half of all newsreaders are now women, the first female solo anchor still has the power to excite.
Some po-faced critics expressed concern that Couric may even have excited viewers in an inappropriate way, noticing that a number of shots showed her legs, universally regarded as one of her finest features.
"It doesn't belong on a news show - making somebody a little bit sexual. Showing off someone's legs is probably not a good message to be showing the viewers," said Belle Adler, an associate professor of broadcast journalism at Northeastern University.
CBS insisted that it shot Couric in the same way it would any presenter and said that no special effort had been made to show off her legs.
Perhaps the most sensible comment came from Carol Jenkins, a former TV news anchor and Women's Media Centre board member, who said it was good to have more women on television, regardless of the shape of their legs.
"We have to get used to seeing women's legs without falling down and pointing and giggling like we haven't seen women's legs before," she said.
