Behind CBS’ Plan to Supercharge ’60 Minutes’ (Exclusive)
CBS is planning to supercharge the long-running newsmagazine 60 Minutes for its 57th season, giving it additional time on the broadcast network and adding a slew of digital spinoffs, including a podcast and a FAST (free, ad-supported streaming) channel.
According to 60 Minutes executive producer Bill Owens, “The first thing we wanted to do was make sure that the bar was going to be as high for anything we do, wherever we put it out, as it is for the Sunday show.”
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In digital, that means CBS News correspondent Seth Doane will lead a new podcast extension called 60 Minutes: A Second Look, which will dig into the show’s archives to unearth never-before-heard interviews, as well as conversations with the correspondents and subjects. Among the episodes are a look at Saturday Night Live (including never-heard audio from creator Lorne Michaels), and reporting on Taylor Swift, featuring a conversation that took place in conjunction with her second album.
“When I came back to be a senior producer at 60 Minutes, [former EP] Don Hewitt was still emeritus executive producer, and I was used to working over at the evening news and being in very early. So I would be at my desk early, and Don was always in very early, and he would come and plop himself down on my couch and say, ‘Kiddo, we’ve got to figure out a way to use these archives. It’s the most valuable thing in television. We got to figure it out.’ He was right,” Owens recalls. “We do have this unbelievable trove of material that touches everything. It touches politics. It touches emerging technologies and science, cultural profiles, music, actors, etc.
“Seth Doane is one of the best journalists at CBS News. He’s a big fan of 60 Minutes, and I’m sure one day he’ll work at 60 Minutes,” Owens adds. “So he’s the perfect host for the podcast, and to take advantage of this great material.”
And CBS will release a new 60 Minutes FAST channel today, beginning on Paramount+ and Pluto, with other platforms to follow. The channel will be programmed with “legendary interviews by Mike Wallace, essays by Andy Rooney and iconic moments featuring leading political figures, celebrities, artists, athletes and innovators,” per CBS.
“The FAST channel stuff can get grouped in very interesting ways. Some of it can be thematic. An hour on climate change, an hour on emerging technologies, AI, supercomputing or what have you,” Owens says. Nicole Young has been named senior producer of the program, including oversight of the FAST channel.
On TV, 60 Minutes will get a pre-election CBS primetime special on Monday, Oct. 7, featuring the latest reporting on the Kamala Harris and Donald Trump campaigns (the show on Sunday, Oct. 6, is being impacted by an American Music Awards special).
And for the second straight year, six episodes of 60 Minutes this fall will expand to 90 minutes, with Owens explaining that they will take a slightly different approach to the 30 minutes that reach into the 8 p.m. hour.
“My approach to those is there should be some adventure to them, we should try to bring people places,” Owens says. “Each of them will be two-part stories, a little bit shorter, 11 minutes rather than the 13 and a halfish that you usually get in the 60-minute original program. So that last half hour will be filled with two-part stories that will be adventures and bring people places and tell them things about those places that they might not know, but they feel at home in primetime.”
There will be one big change at the show, however, at least for those who work there: 60 Minutes has moved to new office space on the 14th floor of its West 57th Street offices, leaving behind its longtime home on the ninth floor.
The changes are part of a broader effort to keep 60 Minutes relevant, even among people who don’t watch much — or any — traditional TV. 60 Minutes senior producer Matt Polevoy is leading the podcast effort, and helped push the show onto other platforms, including TikTok and YouTube, where the show has seen more than 200 percent and 60 percent growth in video views year-over-year.
“He’s been the one who has come to me and made the case for, for example, joining TikTok, and how to do that in a way that isn’t offensive [to the show’s format and heritage],” Owens says. “We’re not trying to be something else. We’re just 60 Minutes on that platform, which happens to reach younger people, like my college-age kids.”
But the show will still do what it does best: longer-form TV news storytelling, led by compelling correspondents.
On Sunday’s premiere episode, for example, Cecilia Vega will report on the conflict between China and the Philippines in the South China Sea. And she and her team were able to see the conflict firsthand when a Chinese ship rammed the Philippines Coast Guard ship they were staying on.
“I’m asleep in the sleeping quarters that they’ve set aside for us, my team is sleeping nearby, 4 a.m. pitch black,” Vega recalls. “There is this impact, this kind of boom, and I had no idea what it was. I immediately thought we hit a rock or a ship or something like that. And then came the wave in the wake of the hit. And then immediately all of these emergency sirens just start going off. And there’s all this kind of chaos I hear out in the hallway. I stumble out. I mean, I literally stumble out, and my team is there, and the Filipinos are running between decks. They’ve got helmets on, and one of my producers turns to me and tries to very calmly, but not so calmly, say, ‘We’ve been hit by a Chinese boat. We’ve been told you have to put a life jacket on immediately.’
“It’s unclear if we are taking on water, if we’re going to take on water. It’s unclear if the Chinese are going to try to board this ship,” Vega continued. “The Filipinos are holding clubs and standing behind a door. They’ve told us to stay in this cabin area for our own safety. They’ve got the clubs out in the event that the Chinese do try to board, they’re going to go to hand-to-hand combat and try to fight them off.”
Her story, in which they “reconstruct the entire incident,” will be a big part of the season premiere on Sunday.
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