Hey, NBC! That Hour Belongs to ’60 Minutes’

Like trick birthday candles that can’t be extinguished, “60 Minutes” keeps glowing and glowing. While its competitors keep blowing and blowing.

You’d think there would be some chivalry among old foes, that NBC, for example, would be so contentedly fat with its own epic success in the Nielsens that it would magnanimously sit back and pay homage to an enemy’s greatness--as ancient opposing warriors were said to have done--by no longer challenging the longtime supremacy of 28-year-old “60 Minutes” on Sunday nights.

After all, even while floundering on Sundays, NBC has continued to roll in profits due to its remarkable success elsewhere in prime time. So it could well afford to do the honorable, gallant, romantically old-world thing and mercifully keep hands off this relatively tiny fiefdom of success on lowly CBS.

But nohhhhhh!

There are no respectful tips of the lance in television warfare, which makes the Balkans look like Switzerland. Being third or even second is never good enough. Coexisting is never good enough. The siege never ends. No matter the circumstances, the goal is annihilation of the enemy, no prisoners taken, the wounded shot and left for vultures to pick at.

Ah well, it’s a living.

So . . . was CBS at all apprehensive about the expansion of “Dateline NBC” to 7 p.m. Sundays opposite “60 Minutes”? Afraid of that pipsqueak, that ungrateful pretender of a newsmagazine that would not even be in existence were it not for the astonishing record of “60 Minutes” in pioneering this format? Nahhhhhh.

Except, funny thing, for the first time in memory, “60 Minutes” last week offered TV critics early access to its lead segment--a highly advertised profile of physically ailing Muhammad Ali--in case they’d be so kind as to write about and publicize it in advance of Sunday, which coincidentally was the first night of competition between the CBS series and “Dateline NBC.”

In effect, “60 Minutes” was boiling some oil for NBC’s invaders advancing up the ladder.

It needn’t have bothered, at least initially, for Sunday’s ratings found “60 Minutes” winning the hour with its usual-size audience. But “Dateline NBC” did dramatically inflate NBC’s audience in that time period, running a respectable second by drawing viewers not from “60 Minutes,” it appeared, but from ABC (reruns of “America’s Funniest Home Videos”) and Fox (reruns of “The Simpsons”).

Where was their boiling oil?

NBC says that it’s satisfied with that performance from “Dateline NBC.” And perhaps it is--for the moment. But you just know that the high will be fleeting from merely beating Fox and the video fright wigs and google eyes on ABC with advertiser-friendly, young demographics, that down deep, NBC will never be satisfied until it sees the heads of a vanquished Mike, Morley and the rest of the “60 Minutes” troops mounted on poles.

Nonetheless, perhaps Sunday’s Nielsens will encourage the wizard of “60 Minutes,” executive producer Don Hewitt, to rethink at least one of the changes he had announced would be forthcoming. More breaking news? Fine. No more summer reruns? Absolutely. But more commentary? Who needs it? The show already has a resident furrowed brow in Andy Rooney, and there are times when he is one commentator too many.

At last word, though, Rooney is to be joined by a rotating trio of commentators--Molly Ivins, P.J. O’Rourke and Stanley Crouch--hailing back to the show’s “Point Counterpoint” segment of the 1970s in which columnists from opposite political poles (conservative James J. Kilpatrick and liberals Nicholas Von Hoffman and Shana Alexander) bickered back and forth in infantile ways that rendered them caricatures. It was one of Hewitt’s few false moves.

No matter the newcomers’ individual merits as thinkers, dueling one-liners inevitably will intervene, with what they say becoming less memorable than how cleverly they say it. Forget it. “Dateline NBC” or not, a Ferrari like “60 Minutes” isn’t improved by acquiring purple fins.

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On Sunday, for example, “60 Minutes” typically floated like a butterfly and stung like a bee, its swell piece on Ali (reported by Ed Bradley and produced by John Hamlin) at once affectionate and candid in showing the former heavyweight champ in the tremoring, speech-slurred throes of the Parkinson’s that his doctor said resulted from his career in the ring. Yet he still thinks clearly, viewers were told, and still twinkles mischievously. “If you have a smile on your face,” his wife said, “you’ll see a smile on his face.”

The show’s remaining two segments (a story connecting Holland’s marijuana boom to the United States and another about a mysterious military base near Las Vegas) were also worthy. The work on “60 Minutes” is not always consistent, however. There are times that you question its tactics, too, and observers are still taking sides regarding its controversial tug of war with giant Brown & Williamson regarding a tobacco expose that was initially yanked by CBS management, then reinserted a few months later.

As a journalistic spinner of stories, though, “60 Minutes” still owns this franchise. There are Sundays when it bats three out of the park, and to its credit, it withstood withering competitive pressure in airing not one story specifically on the O.J. Simpson case. Don’t they award a Nobel Peace Prize for that?

“Dateline NBC” reportedly aired a whopping 60 Simpson stories on its three weeknight shows, becoming one of the most frenzied feeders on that gnawed-on carrion. Its own purple fins include a gimmicky history quiz, and while the program is vastly more consistent than it used to be, it remains a hit-and-miss hour in its pursuit of viewers younger than the golden oldies more inclined to watch “60 Minutes.”

Yet the extended piece it opened with Sunday was a very strong investigation (reported by Bob McKeown and produced by Meade R. Jorgensen) into a disturbing emergency room scandal in Oklahoma.

The hosts of “Dateline NBC” are Stone Phillips and Jane Pauley, whose interview Sunday with Russian Ekaterina Gordeeva about life without her skating partner and husband, Sergei Grinkov, who died last year at age 28, soared like a rocket off the sentimentality scale but nonetheless was the kind of genuinely moving TV that engaged you.

Gordeeva’s last words to Pauley: “And as long as they can see me on the ice, they will remember Sergei.”

No contest whether to bawl over this or cry from excruciating pain while watching “America’s Funniest Home Videos.” Or whether to still choose “60 Minutes” over both of them.