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Good Night, and Good Luck, the new play by George Clooney and Grant Heslov directed by David Cromer, has announced that it has recouped its initial investment of $9.5 million in only 7 and a half weeks on Broadway. The acclaimed new play broke history many times over and recently announced that it holds the all-time record for the highest grossing play in Broadway history and is the first play to surpass a gross of $4 million in a single week (week ending 5/4/25).

Good Night, and Good Luck is currently playing at the Winter Garden Theatre and recently received 5 Tony Award nominations, including Best Performance by a Leading Actor in a Play for Clooney. In addition, it was recently announced that, in partnership with TodayTix, 2,000 tickets are being subsidized by the production to New York City Public School students – including those studying journalism.

The play, with commensurate high ticket prices, has been reeling...

The stopwatch will keep ticking into the 2025-26 TV season. To no surprise, CBS has renewed 60 Minutes for a 58th season. The venerable program's 57th season is currently airing.

A newsmagazine series, the 60 Minutes TV show was created by Don Hewitt and Bill Leonard in 1968. The longest-running network primetime series features investigative reports, interviews, human interest segments, and news-maker profiles. Three long-form news stories typically air each episode. The CBS News correspondents and contributors include Lesley Stahl, Scott Pelley, Bill Whitaker, Anderson Cooper, Sharyn Alfonsi, Jon Wertheim, and Cecilia Vega, with Norah O’Donnell. Read More…...

The stopwatch will keep ticking into the 2025-26 TV season. To no surprise, CBS has renewed 60 Minutes for a 57th season. The venerable program's 56th season is currently airing.

A newsmagazine series, the 60 Minutes TV show was created by Don Hewitt and Bill Leonard in 1968. The longest-running network primetime series features investigative reports, interviews, human interest segments, and news-maker profiles. Three long-form news stories typically air each episode. The CBS News correspondents and contributors include Lesley Stahl, Scott Pelley, Bill Whitaker, Anderson Cooper, Sharyn Alfonsi, Jon Wertheim, and Cecilia Vega, with Norah O’Donnell. Read More…...

Don Hewitt, the brilliantly contentious founder of 60 Minutes, saw to it that the most impactful characters in key segments turned out to be the “heavies.” Hewitt wanted his audience to understand the threat posed by “bad guys” — hence an ambush interview or some other dramatic confrontation.

During his 37-year reign, Hewitt never would have imagined the list of alleged “bad guys” presently casting a shadow over his show. They include the principal stockholder of CBS, the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission and a major sector of the legal establishment. Welcome to the Trump media universe, Don.

Last weekend 60 Minutes sent a defiant signal to the prospective “heavies,” who include Shari Redstone and FCC chairman Brendan Cox as well as The President. The nation’s highest rated TV news show announced it would not back off its coverage nor support financial appeasement of its adversaries. The show’s boss, Bill Owens,...

Good Night, and Good Luck, the new play by George Clooney and Grant Heslov, and directed by David Cromer, has broken its own all-time record for highest grossing play in Broadway history and is the first play to surpass a gross of $4 million in a single week.

For the week ending May 4 2025, the production grossed $4,003,482 for 8 Performances.

Good Night, and Good Luck is currently playing at the Winter Garden Theatre, where it surpassed the previously held record by The Music Man (with 9 performances) and is now the highest-grossing production in the history of the Shubert Organization.

The production recently received 5 Tony Award nominations, including Best Performance by a Leading Actor in a Play for Clooney. In addition, it was recently announced that, in partnership with TodayTix, 2,000 tickets are being subsidized by the production to New York City Public School students – including those studying journalism.

Based on the 2929 Entertainment and Participant...

Here at FandomWire, we search high and wide, turn over every stone, and search to the ends of the earth to cultivate a list of “The Best 100 Television Shows of All-Time!” Why? Because we can! So, please sit back, read our list, and write down what you have seen and agree with. Lastly, jot down quickly which of these great shows you must check out immediately!

100. Jeopardy! (1964 – present) Jeopardy | Image via Sony Pictures Television

Created by Merv Griffin

I’m not sure you can include a list of the best television shows ever without mentioning the American game show classic Jeopardy! The show has become ingrained in the American lexicon, with host Alex Trebek becoming a television and trivia icon. You simply can’t discuss the best shows without it.

99. Bargain (2022) Bargain Season 1 (2023)

Created by Jeon Woo-sung

Bargain is a near-perfect K-drama horror thriller. With performances brimming with anxiety-ridden stress and humor,...

A former producer on “60 Minutes” is suing CBS, CBS News and parent company Paramount Global for gender discrimination, claiming that she was wrongfully terminated from the newsmagazine program.

In a complaint obtained by Variety, which was filed on Tuesday in New York federal court, producer Alexandra Poolos says the network fired her after she was falsely accused of bullying an associate producer she supervised. Poolos indicates discrepancies in how her firing was handled by the company compared to several male producers and editors of “60 Minutes” who’ve allegedly been the subject of multiple sexual harassment complaints.

“Sexism and misogyny defined the workplace of CBS, including CBS News, over many years,” according to the complaint. Poolos cites sexual misconduct and harassment claims against former CBS chairman Leslie Moonves, ex-network anchor Charlie Rose and former “60 Minutes” executive producers Don Hewitt and Jeff Fager, as well as several other current producers on the program.

A producer on CBS’s 60 Minutes is suing the network for firing her after she was accused of harassment while turning a blind eye to “far more egregious misconduct” by male employees.

The producer, Alexandra Poolos, says in a gender discrimination lawsuit filed against CBS on Tuesday in New York federal court that the company terminated her in violation of civil rights laws after she was falsely accused of bullying an associate producer she supervised. She points to discrepancies in how her firing was handled opposed to several male producers and editors of the program who’ve allegedly been the subject of various complaints for sexual harassment.

According to the complaint, “sexism and misogyny defined the workplace” at the network. She cites sexual misconduct and harassment claims against former CBS chairman Leslie Moonves, ex-network anchor Charlie Rose and former 60 Minutes executive producer Don Hewitt, as well as several...

Vulture Watch

The clock keeps ticking. Has the 60 Minutes TV show been cancelled or renewed for a 57th season on CBS? The television vulture is watching all the latest cancellation and renewal news, so this page is the place to track the status of 60 Minutes, season 57. Bookmark it, or subscribe for the latest updates. Remember, the television vulture is watching your shows. Are you?  

What's This TV Show About?

A newsmagazine series airing on the CBS television network, the 60 Minutes TV show was created by Don Hewitt and Bill Leonard in 1968. The longest-running series in network primetime, the program features investigative reports, interviews, human interest segments, and news-maker profiles. Three long-form news stories typically air each episode. The CBS News correspondents and contributors include Sharyn Alfonsi, L. Jon Wertheim, Bill Whitaker, Lesley Stahl, Scott Pelley, Cecilia...

It's crazy to think that one of the most-watched shows on television has been on the air for more than half a century. 60 Minutes has been a staple of CBS' Sunday night schedule for longer than many viewers have been alive. Could 60 Minutes be cancelled or is it guaranteed to be renewed for season 56? Stay tuned. *Status Update Below.

A Sunday night newsmagazine, 60 Minutes was created by Don Hewitt and Bill Leonard in 1968. The longest-running series in network primetime, the program features investigative reports, interviews, human interest segments, and news-maker profiles. Three long-form news stories typically air each episode. The CBS News correspondents and contributors include Sharyn Alfonsi, Anderson Cooper, Seth Doane, Norah O'Donnell, Scott Pelley, Lesley Stahl, L. Jon Wertheim, and Bill Whitaker.

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The stopwatch still has a lot of "ticks" in it and will be back for Fall 2023. CBS has renewed 60 Minutes for a 56th season.

A news magazine, the 60 Minutes show was created by Don Hewitt and Bill Leonard in 1968. The longest-running series in network primetime, the program features investigative reports, interviews, human interest segments, and news-maker profiles. Three long-form news stories typically air each episode. The CBS News correspondents and contributors include Sharyn Alfonsi, Anderson Cooper, Seth Doane, Norah O'Donnell, Scott Pelley, Lesley Stahl, L. Jon Wertheim, and Bill Whitaker. Read More…...

Longtime stunt coordinator Jery Hewitt, known for his work on the Coen Brothers’ films, including “The Big Lebowski” and the Academy Award-winning “No Country for Old Men,” along with Wolf Entertainment shows such as “Law & Order,” died Saturday, his family confirmed. He was 71.

Over the past 30 years, Hewitt worked on more than 300 episodes of Dick Wolf programming, including “Law & Order,” “New York Undercover” and “Law & Order: Svu.” Known as one of New York’s most prominent stunt coordinators and performers, he was working on the 22nd season of “Law & Order: Svu” prior to his death earlier this month.

Hewitt worked on 14 of the Coen Brothers’ films, with his efforts bringing iconic moments to life, such as teaching actor Tex Cobb how to ride a motorcycle in 1987’s “Raising Arizona” to sending his wife and collaborator for the past 25 years, Jennifer Lamb, hurtling into a snake pit...

“All right. I am told there is a tie.”

— Presenter N.J. Burkett, president of the New York chapter of NATAS, at the 2014 News & Documentary Emmy Awards

For decades, the biggest names in television news were honored at the annual News & Documentary Emmy Awards through a voting system that was designed to generate a bewildering number of ties.

Since the awards were launched in 1980, more than 280 categories ended in ties, including some crazy ones in the early years. At the inaugural awards in 1980, there were two nine-way ties and an eight-way tie. In 1981, a category ended in a 21-way tie. By 1985, a total of 24 awards – nearly half of all the those presented – ended in ties. During the 1990s, there were 124 ties, averaging more than 12 a year.

Records provided to Deadline by the National Academy of Television Arts & Sciences reveal that since 1980, only four of 39 shows didn’t include at least one...

2018 was a wild ride in the TV news business. Shocking reports in the wake of #MeToo forced the industry to vomit out more sexual harassers. Some high-profile programs suffered ratings consequences. Meanwhile, TV news executives licked self-inflicted wounds, and, once again, viewers said so long, for now at least, to a super-successful TV news host who tried to change the daypart and network simultaneously.

CBS News veteran Jeff Fager, only the second person to executive produce 60 Minutes in its five decades on the air, got the hook in September following more reports of inappropriate behavior, which would follow in the footsteps of mentor Don Hewitt. But it was Fager’s threatening text to a reporter that got him jettisoned.

Meanwhile, NBC News got the ammo it sought in its struggles with its $69 million morning-show host Megyn Kelly, when she delivered on-air a nostalgic defense of blackface costumes during a Today panel discussion for Halloween.

The bodies and the settlements at CBS keep piling up. There were two on Thursday alone.

Actress Eliza Dushku was secretly paid $9.5 million to settle her contract after she complained about sexual harassment from the star of “Bull,” Michael Weatherly, we learned in The New York Times.

This followed a revelation earlier in the day from Cybill Shepherd, the smart and sassy blonde on ’90s network television, that her show was canceled shortly after she rebuffed a sexual advance by CBS chief Les Moonves.

Also Read: CBS Paid Eliza Dushku $9.5 Million to Settle Sexual Harassment Claim Against 'Bull' Star Michael Weatherly

According to the Times, Weatherly made comments about Dushku’s appearance in front of the crew. She said he made a rape joke and a comment about a threesome.

What happened when she complained? Did a human resources professional consult with her and make Weatherly take sensitivity training?

Ha-ha,...

They’re getting ready to start the stopwatch again at CBS’ “60 Minutes.”

Over the course of its more than half-century of life, the venerable CBS newsmagazine has had only two chiefs, Jeff Fager and Don Hewitt. Now it has none. That won’t keep the show off the air. “60 Minutes” will kick off its 51st season on Sunday, even though CBS News has yet to name a new executive producer for the program.

Viewers can expect to see a profile of Paul McCartney in which the former Beatle offers intimate anecdotes about his relationship with John Lennon to correspondent Sharyn Alfonsi. The producer of the segment is Bill Owens, who also happens to be the show’s executive editor and is viewed as an internal candidate for the executive producer slot. And correspondent Bill Whitaker will offer the sixth in his series of examinations of the nation’s opioid epidemic,...

With Les Moonves having self-immolated, the intriguing question about CBS and Viacom comes down to this: Can a corporation successfully re-invent itself when its merger status is still unresolved and its management still up in the air? Shari Redstone has won her battles with her father and now with the old CBS board — a formidable triumph of dynastic empowerment –but the pressure is now on every segment of the company to prove its post-revolution viability.

The new CBS board, which hasn’t even met yet, now confronts not only a Moonves succession battle but also growing disarray within CBS News, signaled by the angry departure of its 60 Minutes boss Jeff Fager. Fager succeeded the brilliant and famously petulant Don Hewitt, who invented 60 Minutes; his demise stems from a toughly worded internal memo to a staff reporter — an incident which many CBS staffers feel has been mishandled at the corporate and news division levels.

CBS News has big shoes to fill at “60 Minutes,” now that it has ousted the show’s longtime executive producer, Jeff Fager. The CBS unit faces a big question: Should it hire someone for the job who hasn’t recently trod the halls at the show’s West 57th Street headquarters?

The list of people who have held the top job at “60 Minutes” is so minuscule it can’t even be called short: Since the venerable newsmagazine launched in 1968 with Harry Reasoner and Mike Wallace, only two executives have supervised it: Don Hewitt, its founding producer, and his successor, Jeff Fager. Hiring an outsider would be unthinkable to many on the staff.

Without years of experience reporting and editing stories at a very high level, said one person familiar with the show, a new boss would not be welcomed. Two people familiar with the show said the executive producer role...

Jeff Fager, the executve producer of CBS’ “60 Minutes” is in a position these days similar to that of the newsmagazine’s TV audience: He is watching a ticking clock.

Fager remains in his role at the CBS News program, which is supposed to kick off its 51st season on Sunday, September 30. But he and many other CBS News staffers are waiting for the parent company’s board to sift through the findings of a recent investigation into the culture of CBS News. Insiders are not quite sure when that work might be done, and the board did not disclose a timeline in a filing made with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission Monday. A probe into CBS News culture led by the law firm Proskauer Rose has been rolled into a larger investigation into the overall company that is being conducted by the CBS board of directors in...

Newsflash: Seth Rogen (Neighbors 2: Sorority Rising, above) will portray famed CBS newscaster Walter Cronkite in Newsflash. Based on a script by Ben Jacoby, the film will dramatize events on November 22, 1963, when President John F. Kennedy was assassinated, from the perspective of a television newsroom. David Gordon Green (Stronger) will direct. Other key real-life characters to be cast include Cronkite's producer Don Hewitt, reporter Dan Rather and their boss Jim Aubrey. [Deadline]   Creed 2: Back in October, Sylvester Stallone indicated he was "looking forward to producing and directing" the sequel to boxing drama Creed (above), with Michael B. Jordan returning to star in the titular role. Now, however, Jordan and Stallone have selected Steven...

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Newsflash: Seth Rogen (Neighbors 2: Sorority Rising, above) will portray famed CBS newscaster Walter Cronkite in Newsflash. Based on a script by Ben Jacoby, the film will dramatize events on November 22, 1963, when President John F. Kennedy was assassinated, from the perspective of a television newsroom. David Gordon Green (Stronger) will direct. Other key real-life characters to be cast include Cronkite's producer Don Hewitt, reporter Dan Rather and their boss Jim Aubrey. [Deadline]...

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Seth Rogen is set to portray CBS news legend Walter Cronkite in Newsflash, The Hollywood Reporter has confirmed.

Stronger's David Gordon Green is directing the drama, featuring a script by Ben Jacoby. The film recounts the events of Nov. 22, 1963, as television news stations raced to report the facts of President John F. Kennedy's assassination in Texas. Cronkite's producer Don Hewitt, boss Jim Aubrey and young coworker Dan Rather are also characters in the movie.

Greg Silverman, the former Warner Bros. Ww production head who recently launched Stampede Ventures, is producing with Adam Kolbrenner. Production is set to begin next...

Seth Rogen is officially set to play iconic CBS newsman Walter Cronkite in an upcoming JFK assassination drama called Newsflash. The film is being directed by David Gordon Green (Pineapple Express) and this might be Rogen's most dramatic movie role to date. I guess it was bound to happen! Most comedians end up trying their hand at a heavy drama.

According to Deadline, "the film takes place on November 22, 1963, the day President John F Kennedy was assassinated in Texas. It was that day that television network news came of age, and Cronkite became the most trusted TV newsman voice of America, even if he wasn’t first to announce the president had died (NBC did that)."

The film was written by Ben Jacoby and the story is said to revolve around Cronkite, "his producer Don Hewitt, their boss Jim Aubrey, and Dan Rather, a young news man who happened to...

Longtime 60 Minutes correspondent Morley Safer has died just days after he formally retired from the CBS news program, The New York Times reports. Details regarding Safer's death were not immediately available. He was 84.

Safer was with 60 Minutes for 46 seasons, during which time he covered an array of subjects: He interviewed Jackie Gleason in a bar, became one of the first to report on the health benefits of red wine and helped overturn the life sentence of Lenell Geter, an engineer wrongly convicted for a robbery. Over the course of his career,...

Philip Scheffler, whose half-century career including a long stint as creator Don Hewitt’s right-hand man on CBS’ 60 Minutes, died today at New York Presbyterian/Weill Cornell Medical Center in Manhattan. He was 85. Scheffler had a direct hand in producing every 60 Minutes report for nearly a quarter-century — from when he was named newsmagazine’s senior producer in 1980 until his retirement in 2003. He later was executive editor for several years. Before his senior…...

She's known as an expert at extracting information out of others, but these days, storied journalist Meredith Vieira is opening up about her own story.

As she launches her new NBC daytime talk show, The Meredith Vieira Show, premiering next Monday, the wife and mother of three sat down for this week's issue of People to discuss the woman behind the journalist – and the choices that have led her to where she is today.

On the Choice of Education

"My parents putting me in a single-sex school had a great impact on who I am. I attended an all-girls Quaker school in Providence.

She's known as an expert at extracting information out of others, but these days, storied journalist Meredith Vieira is opening up about her own story. As she launches her new NBC daytime talk show, The Meredith Vieira Show, premiering next Monday, the wife and mother of three sat down for this week's issue of People to discuss the woman behind the journalist - and the choices that have led her to where she is today. On the Choice of Education"My parents putting me in a single-sex school had a great impact on who I am. I attended an all-girls Quaker school in Providence.

It's hard to say no to Meredith Vieira. While putting together her new daytime show, NBCUniversal executives let the host pick her executive producer, sidekick, band — even the furniture on her set (a tatty, pet-ravaged couch from her Westchester, New York, home). Perhaps the "suits" — as Vieira calls them — are aware that she is one of the rare TV talents who is not afraid to walk away from it all.

After becoming, at age 35 in 1989, the youngest correspondent ever hired by 60 Minutes, she left the prestigious CBS newsmagazine two years later to have her second child when then-executive producer Don Hewitt refused her request to work part-time. Her very public decision sparked a national conversation on the challenges for women who balance motherhood and career. After an Emmy award-winning stint on the ABC newsmagazine Turning Point, she changed course, becoming a founding panelist on the daytime coffee klatch The View...

I have to admit that when I see the name Opie, I immediately think of Mayberry, Andy Griffith and Ron Howard before he shaved. Now I understand that shock jock Anthony Cumia was fired last week by Sirius Xm for being, I think the technical term is, a tweeting moron. His on-air partner Greg Hughes — known to all by the same moniker as Sheriff Taylor’s kid — is said to be “devastated.”

Take heart, Opie — I promise, your Anthony will be back. Just remember what happened to Andy Rooney.

In the late winter of 1990 David Burke, the newly appointed president of CBS News, suspended Rooney, who was 71 at the time and the most popular cast-member of Sunday Night Live — I mean 60 Minutes — for three months. The trouble had begun a few weeks earlier, during a year-end special, when the curmudgeonly commentator expressed his opinion that “too much alcohol, too much food,...

On April 7, Mike Wallace, the lion of the TV news magazine died. Wallace was more than a news man. He was a former actor and game show host who found a way to seamlessly blend news and entertainment into a combination that was far more than a sum of its parts. Wallace -- first on Night Beat, then on 60 Minutes -- didn't just investigate or report. He turned interviewing into a blood sport -- becoming both one of the most liked and feared men on television as a result. He brought the same intensity and enthusiasm to every interview -- be it entertainers, world leaders or criminals -- even once calling Ayatollah Khomeini a lunatic, to his face.

This got him into trouble at times -- settling a lawsuit with General Westmoreland; losing a battle with CBS over a tobacco industry whistleblower -- but it also made him something rare...

On April 7, Mike Wallace, the lion of the TV news magazine died. Wallace was more than a news man. He was a former actor and game show host who found a way to seamlessly blend news and entertainment into a combination that was far more than a sum of its parts. Wallace -- first on Night Beat, then on 60 Minutes -- didn't just investigate or report. He turned interviewing into a blood sport -- becoming both one of the most liked and feared men on television as a result. He brought the same intensity and enthusiasm to every interview -- be it entertainers, world leaders or criminals -- even once calling Ayatollah Khomeini a lunatic, to his face.

This got him into trouble at times -- settling a lawsuit with General Westmoreland; losing a battle with CBS over a tobacco industry whistleblower -- but it also made him something rare...

Michael Jackson and same day Farrah Fawcett. CBS's Walter Cronkite and a month later CBS's Don Hewitt. Ted Kennedy and next day Dominick Dunne. Forget Earth's overpopulation -- enough already!

Added to miles of accolades already wrapped around Ted Kennedy can only maybe be unknown vignettes. Take his everydayness. Moving from one house into another, the Famous Senator, awash in eager hands, did his own packing. Specific items to the library, personal stuff marked for his bedroom.

Don Hewitt, who changed the course of broadcast news by creating the television magazine “60 Minutes,” died Wednesday at his home in Bridgehampton, N.Y. He was 86 and also had a home on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. The cause was cancer, his wife, Marilyn Berger, said. Mr. Hewitt said in an interview on March 18 that doctors had detected a cancerous tumor on his pancreas, and that he was being admitted to Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center for treatment.

Newsman and producer Don Hewitt has died at the age of 86.

Hewitt is probably best known for creating 60 Minutes and ushering in the genre of the TV news magazine show. He also produced The CBS Television News in the late 40s and later The CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite. He also directed various TV shows and specials, including See It Now (Grant Heslov played Hewitt in the 2005 movie Good Night, and Good Luck), Presidential Timber, and One Plane, One Bomb, and even produced the first Presidential debate on TV, Nixon vs. Kennedy.Continue reading Don Hewitt dead at 86

 

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Don Hewitt, who helped shape TV news and in 1968 created the feature-magazine program 60 Minutes, died Wednesday at his Bridgehampton, N.Y., home, CBS announced on its Web site. He was 86 and reportedly had been battling pancreatic cancer. Hewitt started at CBS News in 1948 and went on to oversee the network's nightly 30-minute broadcast with Walter Cronkite starting in 1963. In 1960, he directed the decisive first televised debate between presidential candidates John F. Kennedy and Richard M. Nixon. He was portrayed by the actor Philip Baker Hall in the 1999 movie The Insider, about 60 Minutes' exposé of the tobacco industry, and he stepped...

Don Hewitt, who created "60 Minutes" and pioneered many of TV's news reporting methods, has died. He was 86. The cause of death has not been announced.

"60 Minutes" was the first TV program to use a newsmagazine format and has been widely copied. According to industry estimates, CBS' profits from "60 Minutes" are in excess of a billion dollars, the most of any program in TV history.

During his more than 50 years at CBS, Hewitt produced and directed broadcasts of the last half-century's major news events, including the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II, the installation of Pope John Xxiii and the first face-to-face debate between presidential nominees John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon during the 1960 campaign.

After his longtime stewardship of "60 Minutes," Hewitt stepped down as executive producer in June 2004 at age 80 but continued as a consultant to Jeff Fager and as an executive producer at large for CBS News. It was not...

Long-running and respected CBS news magazine show “60 Minutes” recently hit it big last week with their sit-down with the president elect Barack Obama and his wife, the future First Lady Michelle Obama. The interview garnered 24.5 million viewers that Sunday night according to Nielson estimates. That gave “60 Minutes”, which as been running 1968, its biggest audience since its 1999 season. “60 Minutes” is an investigative television news magazine which has been running on CBS News since 1968. It was created by long time CBS News producer Don Hewitt, who helped to establish its unique format of in-depth investigative journalism coverage. “60 Minutes” has been among the top-rated [...]...

60 Minutes will bid farewell to its creator, famed newsman Don Hewitt, with a special episode in May featuring clips and reminiscences from the newsmagazine's correspondents. The 81-year-old Hewitt is retiring at the end of the 2003-04 season as executive producer of the program, although he will remain at the network as a producer of news specials and adviser to CBS News president Andrew Heyward. Speaking to reporters Saturday at the Television Critics Assn. winter press tour in Hollywood, Heyward said the tribute program is envisioned as Don's All-Time Greats, featuring clips of Hewitt's favorite segments together with commentary from Mike Wallace, Morley Safer and the rest of the 60 Minutes team. Hewitt's retirement has been a long time coming. He and the network engaged in a delicate dance for months that, at least on CBS' side, seemed aimed at prying him away from the flagship newsmagazine while keeping his dignity intact. His successor will be Jeff Fager, the executive producer of 60 Minutes II. Hewitt told the crowd that he was "not a happy camper" when first confronted with the idea of leaving the show he created in 1968. But when CBS offered a contract that would give him at least some continuing role in the network, he reconsidered. "What in the hell do you have to complain about?" he said he asked himself. "Nothing, absolutely nothing."...

NEW YORK -- Josh Howard, a veteran producer at CBS News' 60 Minutes and a protege of several of the unit's most iconic figures, will take over the reins at 60 Minutes II in June, replacing Jeffrey Fager, who is moving over to head the venerable Sunday night newsmagazine, the company said. Howard's ascension surprised few inside the news business because of his close ties to Fager and other CBS executives, including Dan Rather, Mike Wallace and Don Hewitt, the founder of 60 Minutes, who is stepping down from the show after this season. Howard moved up to executive editor in June in a promotion that was widely seen as grooming him for the 60 Minutes II slot.

NEW YORK -- 60 Minutes executive producer Don Hewitt said he believes CBS may be having "some second thoughts" about its reported plans to convince him to prepare for a transition to new leadership at the network's flagship news magazine. "I have a feeling -- my radar tells me that if I come back here a year from now, I will still be the producer of '60 Minutes, '" Hewitt told CNN's Larry King on Tuesday night, adding that "I have a feeling that whatever they've sort of decreed, I think they're having some second thoughts." In response to a question about what he would do if CBS moves to replace him, Hewitt replied, "I've already had two offers. ... I'm not going to die in a row boat. And I'm not going to die playing backgammon or even Scrabble. And if they don't want me, which is highly unlikely, somebody will." The story about Hewitt's future at CBS was first reported in the New York Times on Nov. 25. In that story, CBS News president Andrew Heyward said, "At the appropriate time, and I don't know when that is, I know Don will help ensure a smooth transition to a successor to keep this vital franchise alive for decades to come ... I hope he works here forever." Hewitt also told King that while "I'd love to phase in somebody. ... It's just that I'm not going to get off the stage. At least -- if CBS wants me off their stage, I'm going to go on somebody's stage." He said CBS has "a lot of very good people" who could eventually take his spot, but mentioned specifically only one: Jeffrey Fager, who holds the same job at 60 Minutes II. A CBS spokeswoman said, "We hope Don is here forever. That's where we stand."...