Easy like 'CBS Sunday Morning'

NEW YORK -- The 26-year-old "CBS Sunday Morning," more an oasis of calm than an outpost of cool every weekend, is quietly growing in popularity despite a more crowded news environment.

The leisurely paced "Sunday Morning" averages 5 million viewers each week, up slightly over last year and at its highest point in a decade. That's about a million more than the audience for the Sunday "Today" on NBC, with CBS's lead more than doubling in the past year, according to Nielsen Media Research.

The increase comes despite ABC's relaunch of "Good Morning America" on Sunday over the past year. It is seen by 1.9 million people a week.

The show that has had two Charles as hosts -- first Kuralt and, since 1994, Osgood -- has stuck to its mission of being like a Sunday newspaper for viewers sipping coffee on their couches.

"I like to think we've approximated the pace of a Sunday morning where you can go out to your yard, speak to your neighbor over the back fence, come back and still feel like you're in step with the show," said Rand Morrison, the show's executive producer.

There was a time you could do all that and still see the same story that was on before you left for a walk.

A "Sunday Morning" signature has always been long feature stories on single subjects, longer than most TV magazines would dare. Since arriving in 1999, Morrison has brought a quicker -- one would never call it fast -- pace.

He's tried to vary the story mix. Instead of putting two 12-minute features back to back, he'll throw in a two-minute one just to change things up.

"Rand came in like a whirlwind," said Estelle Popkin, a senior producer who has been with the show since its beginning. "We were all a little bit shocked at first. But it was a good shake-up."

Morrison said he knew enough not to unsettle regular viewers.

It was a lesson driven home one Sunday when, before a commercial break, he decided to show a still photo related to the story that had just finished instead of the show's logo of a brightly shining sun. The e-mails were instantaneous: Where is the sun? What happened to the sun?

The sun quickly returned.

"What's good about the show is it's pretty true to its tradition," Morrison said. "We like to think we know what we do well and we like to think we try to do it each week. It's not a reinvented show."

A popular tradition is to end each week with a scene from nature that includes the sound as well as the picture. Viewers don't just see a brook, they hear it babble. Recent scenes have included a lush field of wildflowers in Death Valley, Calif., a cypress swamp in Eastern Texas and elephant seals playing in the water just south of San Francisco.

"Sunday Morning" likes to illustrate all of its stories with as much natural sound as possible. You'll hear the crack of a bat or the ball popping into a mitt in a story about a baseball player, or birds when someone walks down the street on a spring day.

The idea is to help the stories breathe. It also allows viewers to follow along if they happen to be reading the Sunday paper at the same time.

The show's adventurous spirit and free format allowed it to pay tribute to retiring CBS News producer Bruce Dunning by replaying his story about the fall of Vietnam, and run one of the Oscar nominees for best animated short feature in full the morning of the Academy Awards.

Arts coverage is another hallmark of "Sunday Morning." There was a time when only classical or jazz musicians were featured; Morrison has broadened things, and recent profile subjects included John Mayer, Moby and Lindsay Lohan. The show also reported on the trend toward good-looking classical music stars.

A few times a year "Sunday Morning" will have to concentrate on breaking news, but mostly it looks for the offbeat, like Barry Petersen's story about how owning a Buick was a sign of hipness in China.

Viewers "don't feel as if they are being lectured to," said Osgood, 72, a veteran radio commentator whose alarm clock is set at 2:30 a.m. six days a week. "We never talk down to the audience. We never pretend that we're smarter than they are. In fact, we feel that they're smarter than we are."

Osgood recently signed a new contract and says he wants to stay on the show "forever."

"Sunday Morning" is a bastion of old-fashioned storytelling, with packaged and prepared features more than in-studio interviews. Humorist Bill Geist, a former reporter at The New York Times, and correspondents Rita Braver, Russ Mitchell and Martha Teichner are the "Sunday Morning" regulars.

Good writing, the kind that doesn't necessarily draw attention to itself, is valued.

Between "Sunday Morning" and "60 Minutes," Sunday is an island of success in a troubled news division. On weekdays, both the CBS morning and evening news programs run a distant third in the ratings.

"Sunday Morning" succeeds because it's unique, said Andrew Tyndall, a consultant who studies the content of news programming. Although they don't always compete directly, "Today" and "GMA" fit into the more traditional morning formats of consumer-oriented news and features. ABC, CBS, NBC and Fox all have Washington-based political talk shows on Sunday morning, too.

"It's very rare in the world of network news to have counterprogramming," Tyndall said.

Tyndall's a fan, but he still has a bone to pick: "I liked it back in the old days when (the nature segment) was too long. Now they just show a couple of flowers and move on."

See the tightrope Morrison walks? "Sunday Morning" regulars feel so personally invested that when former executive producer Linda Mason left for a new job in 1992 she got letters from strangers: I didn't notice your name anymore in the credits. Is everything all right? Are you OK?

"You can become a parody of yourself or you can keep growing," Morrison said. "The thing that we have done well is to keep growing."