CBS, Showtime putting together monthly ’60 Minutes’ telecast on sports
Posted Sep 13, 2012 12:53 pm.
This article is more than 5 years old.
NEW YORK, N.Y. – CBS is expanding “60 Minutes” into cable television for the first time with a monthly version of the newsmagazine on Showtime devoted solely to sports.
“60 Minutes of Sports” will begin in November, featuring regular “60 Minutes” correspondents as well as CBS Sports contributors like Jim Brown and Jim Nantz.
“We all feel very confident about the end product being what people expect from ’60 Minutes,'” said CBS News Chairman Jeff Fager. He’s executive producer of “60 Minutes,” as well, and will team with the weekly newsmagazine’s executive editor, Bill Owens, as co-executive producers of the sports show.
Fager said the signature newsmagazine has been looking for expansion possibilities, particularly after the success of “60 Minutes Overtime,” a webcast that airs after the Sunday night broadcast with outtakes and additional material from the featured stories.
Showtime, a corporate sister of CBS at CBS Corp., has other sports programs like “Inside the NFL” and “Inside NASCAR.” The most obvious competitor for “60 Minutes of Sports” is HBO’s “Real Sports,” a monthly magazine show on sports topics hosted by Bryant Gumbel.
Each month’s show will feature two original segments and a newsmaker interview, along with an updated rerun from the “60 Minutes” archive. Among the sports stories that the newsmagazine has done in recent years is a piece on concussions in the NFL and profiles of LeBron James, Drew Brees, Albert Pujols and sports agent Drew Rosenhaus.
“60 Minutes” has been on the air for more than 40 years and its Sunday interview with a former Navy SEAL who participated in the raid that killed Osama bin Laden was the top-rated non-sports show on TV last week.
