Winfrey joins ‘60 Minutes’ for 50th anniversary year
Newhart gets TV marathon
NEW YORK, Sept 16, (AP): CBS’ “60 Minutes”, the newsmagazine that can credit consistency for much of its success as it enters its 50th anniversary year, is about to see a major change with the addition of Oprah Winfrey.
Winfrey will debut Sept 24, reporting on a story about America’s political divisions.
It’s a testament to the power of the Sunday-night newsmagazine that it seeks to absorb one of television’s biggest stars into its fabric instead of the other way around. One of the medium’s best-known celebrity interviewers will do some, but will largely work against type in reporting stories, said Jeff Fager, the show’s executive producer.
“She wants to do stories with impact”, he said. “She’s driven by that and so are we. That’s part of why this is such a good fit for her”.
Many of the names that made “60 Minutes” great — Mike Wallace, Morley Safer, Ed Bradley, Don Hewitt — are gone now. But the stopwatch keeps ticking every Sunday at 7:00 pm. While everything in media seems to have changed around it, the show’s mix of investigations, newsmaking interviews, esoteric and entertaining features timed to the length of founding executive producer Hewitt’s attention span remains remarkably unchanged.
“It’s a miracle”, correspondent Lesley Stahl said.
When she joined in 1991, Hewitt told Stahl that he wanted correspondents to be like actors in a repertory troupe who could play all the roles, and that’s still the philosophy she uses to plan stories she pursues.
Gone, too, are the volatile days of throwing coffee cups, shouting matches and feuds, of Wallace peeking at colleagues’ notebooks to steal stories. But it’s still keenly competitive. Newcomer Bill Whitaker told Fager he dreamed of screening a story that his bosses found so perfect it merited no changes. Fager leaned in and told him, “that’s not going to happen”.
There’s a different pressure from the daily deadlines of the evening news, Whitaker said. At “60 Minutes”, correspondents have time, talented producers and travel budgets. So they’d better deliver.
“Everyone is trying to find an original story, something that breaks news or helps people to understand a big story”, Fager said. “That’s what we do. New people up here realize that’s a higher bar than is set anywhere else”.
“People think it’s cutthroat”, he said. “It’s not like that, the way our image would suggest. But it’s a tough place to succeed. Part of how you’re judged is how original your reporting is, and how well you cover a big story”.
Scott Pelley, Stahl, Steve Kroft, Whitaker and Anderson Cooper make up the show’s core. Charlie Rose, Winfrey, Sharyn Alfonsi, Lara Logan, David Martin, Norah O’Donnell and Jon Wertheim are among the contributors who also do stories.
“There are a lot of people who are contributors who have other jobs, and that has changed the feel of the place”, Kroft said. “I don’t think the show has changed very much on the air”.
Fager, who just completed a book on the show to mark the anniversary, talks now about how hard it was to replace Hewitt 15 years ago. Colleagues say his status as an insider at CBS News and “60 Minutes” helped him, along with the absence of an ego-driven need to make changes for change’s sake.
Harvey Levin likes to keep a secret — at least when it involves him — so you’ll have to watch his new Fox News Channel series to find out which celebrity keeps a rock as a precious memento.
The founder of the TMZ celebrity website is the creator and host of “Objectified”, which premieres on Fox Sunday at 8:00 pm Eastern. The program features celebrities showing off personal memorabilia in their homes, starting this weekend with “Judge Judy” Sheindlin. Levin tested the idea last year with Donald Trump in Trump Tower, and that special reached more than 4 million viewers, a big hit in the cable world. The initial idea was to do separate episodes with Trump and Hillary Clinton, but since Clinton declined, the Trump episode was held until a couple of weeks after the election.
Besides Sheindlin, other participants in the first “Objectified” season include Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, former California Gov Arnold Schwarzenegger, Martha Stewart, television mogul Tyler Perry and Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban.
Each celebrity picks seven things from different periods of their life that are used as starting-off points for discussion.
In his trademark low-key way, Bob
Newhart says he’s pleased that his 1970s sitcom about a psychologist and his quirky patients and pals will mark its 45th anniversary with a TV marathon.
But Newhart, who turned 88 earlier this month and still does standup gigs, can’t resist cracking wise when asked if he’ll watch the 84 back-to-back episodes of “The Bob Newhart Show” airing on the Decades channel from 1:00 pm EDT Saturday and ending 6:00 am EDT Monday.
“Well, I know the ending of most of them”, he said, drolly.
Decade’s airing of the sitcom counted among TV’s all-time best comedies falls on Emmy Awards weekend, which is ironic: The 142-episode “The Bob Newhart Show” received only four nominations and zero Emmys in its 1972-78 run on CBS. Two of those nods went to Suzanne
Pleshette, who played witty wife Emily Hartley to Newhart’s Dr Robert “Bob” Hartley. But Newhart, a former accountant who became a comedy sensation with his 1960 album, “The Button-Down Mind of Bob Newhart”, received none for his role.