Jane Pauley and CBS’s ‘Sunday Morning’: Baby-Boomer Comfort Food

Just a few weeks in, Jane Pauley has settled in nicely as host of CBS News Sunday Morning, replacing the bow-tied, rumble-voiced, rhyme-prone Charles Osgood. Pauley was a wise choice to replace Osgood after he’d introduced his final, hushed, show-closing “moment of nature.” Pauley is a baby boomer and thus representative of this Sunday TV institution’s core demographic. Moreover, her voice is, in its own way, just as welcoming and warm as Osgood’s, and Pauley is a pro — she can navigate the show’s wincing puns that introduce each segment (“Will Josh Groban’s Broadway show about a comet send his star streaking across the Great White Way?”) with a tartness that cuts the cloying sweetness.

Conceived in 1979 by hallowed CBS producer Robert Northshield as “a Sunday version of a newspaper … art stuff, long and more thoughtful stuff,” as he once put it, Sunday Morning has strayed only a little from Northshield’s mission statement, even unto retaining the classical-music trumpet fanfare that provides a clarion call for wrinkled eyelids to open and tune in. The show is at its best when doing stories that would occur to no other TV outlet, such as its Oct. 30 profile of a charming gravedigger in Maine.

While CBS touts Sunday Morning’s sturdy ratings, the fact is — like other boomer touchstones, such as the Garrison Keillor-less version of public radio’s A Prairie Home Companion — a long-running work needs to be a work in progress: It must evolve or become ignored by subsequent generations, who need a TV version of a Sunday newspaper about as much as they require a print newspaper itself these days.

It’s a tricky transition to navigate, yet Sunday Morning is doing it pretty well. The show picks stories that have universal appeal — an Oct. 30 segment about what our dogs do in our homes after we leave for work; a pretty-picture essay from Oct. 23 about how the glaciers are melting in Glacier National Park. These are not stirring broadsides edited to get your blood boiling with either outrage or passion — they merely want to tickle your brainstems with a bit of new knowledge. Sunday Morning would never editorialize on what you should think about anything.

Except, maybe, to persuade you to buy a book that will put a penny or two in the CBS coffers: Almost all the segments in the past two weeks featuring books, from Bruce Springsteen’s autobiography to one about the behavior patterns of dogs, came attached with the publisher’s name and the voice-over disclaimer, “a subsidiary of CBS.” As things go these days, that’s a minor sin, I suppose.

Sometimes more problematic are the correspondents guiding you through a story. Whenever I hear the nasal squawk of Mo Rocca yammering about the scariness of clowns or giving a rictus smile to New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd, I yearn for the more subtle wit of longtime correspondent Bill Geist. Martha Teichner is a solid performer, always briskly to-the-point. But I wince at the cutesy pauses and quizzical locutions of correspondent Conor Knighton, who seems to have studied speech at Ira Glass Public Radio University. Tracy Smith deploys her dazzling smile shrewdly, to disarm an interviewee before asking a sharp question. On the other hand, Anthony Mason, who does most of the show’s interviews with musicians, is all too laid-back, soft-leather-jacketed and lackadaisical when putting Qs to the likes of Springsteen or Bonnie Raitt. I end up jotting down notes: Why didn’t you ask this question, or follow up on that answer? Sometimes I want to roll up my sleeves and get in there and produce the segments myself — that’s how much I want this good show to be better.

Part of the problem is that, in the waning days of Osgood, the profile segments seemed to be getting shorter and shorter — it was as though Sunday Morning had succumbed to the most idiotic of TV-executive pressure: that false notion that younger viewers have no attention spans, so let’s shorten and quicken things up. The results can be terribly superficial. I remember a 2014 segment taped at a ventriloquist’s convention that could have been so uniquely interesting if it had gone a bit deeper and five minutes longer. I’m pleased to say that the Pauley-led show has, thus far, demonstrated a willingness to let a segment find its own shape and length: good; keep doing that, please.

May I also make one more request? At a time when a show’s online presence is important, Sunday Morning has a treasure trove of segments it ought to make available on its website. I particularly want to see all of John Leonard’s wonderful, frequently amazingly written and spoken TV reviews made available to a new generation of budding TV critics as well as ordinary folks. See what you can do about that, won’t you, Jane Pauley? Thanks.

CBS News Sunday Morning airs Sundays on CBS. Check your local listings.