Charles Osgood Exits, Jane Pauley Enters ‘Sunday Morning’
Charles Osgood presided over his final CBS News Sunday Morning, with 90 minutes’ worth of Charles Osgood. This being Osgood and Sunday Morning, the entire hour and a half was conducted with the kind of quiet modesty the show’s viewers have come to expect, qualities that increasingly make the program rare and more valuable.
There were segments on Osgood as a piano player and a writer of light verse. There was a typically too-cute-by-half Mo Rocca segment on Osgood’s penchant for wearing bow ties. There were, best of all, looks back at some of Osgood’s broadcast work, covering everything from the Indy 500 to the artist Keith Haring. At each commercial break, various CBS fixtures bade him farewell, including David Letterman, all sincerity and white beard. One of Osgood’s final acts was to perform, at the piano, a version of Woody Guthrie’s “So Long, It’s Been Good to Know Yuh.”
At the end of the show, Osgood presented his successor: Jane Pauley, a choice that will probably prove felicitous. When Osgood took over for original host Charles Kuralt in 1994, viewers doubtless fretted that the program would change for the worse; it didn’t, of course. If anything, Osgood carried the broadcast into the 21st century in an excellent manner, introducing viewers who seek out the show for relief from raucous pop culture to — well, some degree of raucous pop culture, which they might otherwise have resisted.
Pauley has the right combination of warmth, puckish humor, and, when the news of the day demands it, seriousness that doesn’t become exaggerated ponderousness. Congrats to her, a warm farewell to Osgood.
CBS News Sunday Morning airs at 9 a.m. on CBS.
