- A segment on decoration of nails
- Practice for mermaid wannabes
- An interview with the actor-rapper Common
- An interview with actor Julianne Moore
- A brief account of how a car mechanic became a mid-career emergency room physician
- The New School's dance school
And that wasn't more than 40% of the show. Yes, Virginia, there is such a thing as soft news.
Or no news, as news can be defined. I mean, do I really need to know that Julianne Moore borrowed her stage names from both her parents? Or that some kids really do believe in mermaids? I mean, really. At times, I have to ask myself: Just why am I spending my time here?
This has host Jane Pauley's fingerprints all over it. It is thoroughly feminine, thoroughly artsy, and thoroughly runs away from anything remotely resembling the furnace of what's going on in the daily grind of ferocity. CNN and MSNBC, eat your hearts out.
Pauley used to do the Today Show with the likes of Tom Brokaw and Bryant Gumbel, fighting for female recognition. She's there now, and so is her gender. Women have not only been given the anchor positions of nightly newscasts, but one also has her own, solid, weekly presentation that's been a staple for forty years (Where did that go?), and by golly, it's going to be as soft as cotton candy and nearly as sweet.
Do we need it? It isn't news. It doesn't really come close to that which we would call it. It's more like a cultural review, a who-knew flyover. And it's hidden, kind of, within Sunday morning, where folks can always invent reasons not to watch it, or half-watch it while getting ready for church, Sunday school, or brunch. It's casual, slow-moving, a way to get off the noisy freeway.
It's quirky, too, perhaps even more so than when it began in 1979 with the late Charles Kuralt as host. He passed the baton to Charles Osgood in 1994, who guided it until Pauley took over three years ago. If anything, it has become even softer, quieter, gentler. It is a 90-minute compilation of all the kinds of stories that the nightly newscasts feature in their last three minutes, meant to remind us that despite the strife and ferocity, some people still do neat things somewhere in America.
Maybe there isn't enough of that. Maybe there should be an entire network of soft news. There are worse things. That way, you know what you're getting. After all, there is a channel exclusively devoted to comedy, another one for game shows and, of course, ESPN for sports. Back in the '90s, a Milwaukee radio station announced that it would only have 'good' news on its reports. It completely ignored anything remotely resembling topics one could have an argument about. Whenever I heard it, which was rare, I just rolled my eyes. I do not need this, I kept thinking. It was mocked by those representing professional journalism, in the day in which we could actually tell the difference, pre-internet. But it held its ground.
It was directed toward an audience to which it had shifted with its music: Adult contemporary and throwback pop--Sinatra, Tony Bennett, Patti Page, Perry Como and the like. In other words, the World War II generation that was retiring and had no need for the intensity of rock, the crash of day-to-day news, and the portent of what might come from it. Here's a place where you don't have to worry about a thing, it seemed to say.
Now the baby boomers, those who are still clashing and trashing each other (and will, I predict, until the last one of us does The Twist), just might need this respite. It's genuinely exhausting to follow all the conflict and crises, real or imagined, of this jackass president and his minions. It's endlessly stressing. You can just feel your shoulders fall on Sunday morning, watching, well, Something Else other than the cruel stupidity that 45 displays daily. If a sigh doesn't come with an occasional smile, you must be watching it in another language.
I can't say that it's my favorite show. I can say, though, that I hope it continues to do for us in cultural information gathering what the rest of the week fails to do much or well--remind us of the goodness of most of the rest of humanity, and that in creativity, there is joy, happiness, hope and inspiration. We could use a bunch of that right now.
Next week, they're going to Florence. They've already been there, so it could very well be a repeat. I might watch it anyhow. Damn, it was good. You can see the Renaissance emerge right in front of you. What an exciting time that had to have been. Never mind that the pushback against it has never really died out, that everywhere that new thinking has surged, reactionaries usually affiliated with government and/or religion have pulled power moves to try to quash it. But none of them worked. They never have.
In its own way, CBS Sunday Morning reminds us that in large places and small, the artistic inclination to make more of one's world than exists at any one moment is the kind of striving that always wins, that brings with it the best in human experience. May it forever be so.
Be well. Be careful. I'll see you down the road.
Mister Mark
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