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You can't avoid superlatives in discussing CBS' "60 Minutes," which celebrates its 25th anniversary Sunday night with a two-hour special (6 p.m., Ch. 5).It is, after all, the longest-running prime time show still in production.
It is the most popular, most profitable, most watched news program in television history. To date, it has collected 47 Emmy Awards, six Peabody Awards and many others.
The granddaddy of TV news magazines is, quite simply, the crown jewel of the Tiffany Network.
About 680,260,000 viewers have tuned in since the broadcast's inauspicious debut on Tuesday, Sept. 24, 1968, in a killer 10 p.m. Eastern time slot.
Its anchors were Mike Wallace and Harry Reasoner, who died in 1991. Alpo Dog Food sponsored the entire hour. Don Hewitt, who'd devised the show as a kind of Life magazine for TV, directed. The first season tanked.
And yet, eight seasons later, "60 Minutes" had found its Sunday night berth and Nielsen's Top 20, finishing 18th of 117 shows. The next season it reached No. 4 and has remained in the Top 10 ever since, never lower than No. 8, for a record 16 consecutive seasons.
It was TV's top-rated show in the 1991-92 and '92-93 seasons, and is dead certain to finish in the top five this year.
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Sunday night's special is a "60 Minutes"-style profile of the show and its stars, Mike Wallace, Morley Safer, Ed Bradley, Steve Kroft, Lesley Stahl and their patron and executive producer, Hewitt.
You get warm, fine-grained closeups of the stars, whose off-camera lives have rarely, if ever, intruded on the stories they have covered.
A cynic might argue that devoting most of the two-hour show to its newspeople whiffs faintly of self-indulgence, but how can you argue against a team of newspeople who have become an American institution?
How can you carp about a show that invented its own audience and changed the rules for broadcast journalism?
"I think "60 Minutes" may have done the greatest disservice to broadcasting anybody's ever done," Hewitt said in May, delivering the inaugural William S. Paley lecture at the Museum of Television and Radio.
"Because of us," he said, "you can't do news on television any more unless it's profitable."
And who at CBS would say no to a program that has earned the network upwards of $1.3 BILLION dollars?
And who's going to complain that the show should have aired back in September? Hey, there aren't any ratings sweeps in September.
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