Highlights give proof of a show’s formidable ticker

Thirty-FIVE years of chutzpah ain’t bad. Actually, it’s been not quite that long, for “60 Minutes” did not arrive on CBS until Sept. 24, 1968. But May is a ratings sweeps month, September isn’t, so rev up the oompahs now, and bring on the anniversary boys.

They include my favorite “60 Minutes” correspondent, Morley Safer, 71, a former print reporter who was hired for the series in 1970 and will join 85-year-old Mike Wallace in cutting back half his workload by year’s end, creating more opportunity for relative newcomer Bob Simon.

I asked Safer recently what he thinks of anniversary shows like the one CBS is airing Sunday. “Honestly?” Safer answered from his home in Chester, Conn. He paused, then said: “I think they’re nostalgic for those of us who worked on this over the decades. How much the audience cares, I don’t know.”

Actually, famous birthdays are God’s gift to television, and programmers never met one they couldn’t dress up as a highly profitable show. This two-hour tribute to “60 Minutes” features “the delectable and the detestable,” as CBS puts it. That ranges from Tom Hanks and Katharine Hepburn wooing viewers, to the shah of Iran on torture and Manuel Noriega struggling mightily to explain how he amassed $400 million (prudent investments?) on a $50,000 salary.

No epiphanies here. There’s been no shortage of earlier “60 Minutes” anniversary shows, and Americans know by now about the influence and durability of this landmark TV magazine that Don Hewitt created at a time when “Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In” was TV’s most popular series.

“Laugh-In” ended its run as a weekly series in 1973, but after a slow start “60 Minutes,” as they say, kept on ticking.

And ticking and ticking, spawning an assembly line of copies (including a “60 Minutes 2” spinoff) while becoming a huge profit center for CBS, both in its own right and as a brawny lead-in for shows that followed it on Sunday nights. Remarkably, “60 Minutes” remains a force in television and in the Nielsens even as a codger, although it’s not the ratings animal it once was and octogenarian Hewitt, facing removal by acetylene torch as an alternative, has agreed to fade away graciously.

When he does leave he’ll be recalled not only as a formidable and combative executive producer, easy both to respect and dislike, but as a brilliant innovator who advanced the cause of TV news in prime time, for the better and the worse. It’s not Hewitt’s fault that the era of magazine shows he initiated pierced the heart of network long-form documentaries or that NBC’s “Dateline” -- one of many “60 Minutes” clones -- turned out to be NBC’s “Dateline.”

Even success stories aren’t entirely successful, and the journalism that “60 Minutes” presents with such seductive flair also has a less endearing side.

From time to time, the show betrays viewers’ trust by bending stories to its own agendas and predispositions, deserving points of order for its points of view. And on occasion, its omissions are stunning, as in a Lesley Stahl piece this year that doted on a school in India with soaring academic standards without questioning why the student body, with only few exceptions, appeared to be all male.

In addition, the much-heralded Clinton-Dole debate experiment is every bit the giant dud it promised to be, and although a show that values service ribbons and tenaciously bucks TV’s pervasive youth culture deserves praise, Andy Rooney’s commentaries are expendable. Give him his gold watch with thanks, and send him on his way.

These blemishes pale compared with the nicotine stain that soiled “60 Minutes” in 1995 when it caved in and initially killed, on orders from CBS top bosses, an interview with a former Brown & Williamson executive that would have exposed some of the tobacco industry’s malevolence. Depicted in a 1999 movie, “The Insider,” that disastrous episode is cited Sunday, said CBS, along with the show’s highlights.

There are plenty. Although Safer says adding more commercials has caused stories to shrink to 12 minutes from 18 minutes through the years, no one on TV tells a story quite like personality-driven “60 Minutes,” whose correspondents famously insinuate themselves into stories.

Fame and popularity bring scrutiny. “60 Minutes” has been under stethoscopes and microscopes, and closely eyeballed by academe, with communications scholar Richard Campbell, for one, suggesting that it sees the world in terms of mystery, adventure, arbitration and therapy.

Speaking of highlights, has there been a TV story in recent years more therapeutic for the psyche than the one Steve Kroft reported and Rebecca Peterson produced about a production of “West Side Story” performed by young people in Worcester, Mass.? Art and life fused memorably here, for many of the heavily Latino cast had troubled, gangbanging histories like those of the characters they played. And cast as comic Officer Krupke was the city’s actual police chief whose men, some cast members said, had pepper-sprayed and arrested them outside a community center.

Cool, boy, real cool.

Especially dear to Safer’s heart is his 1983 expose, produced by Suzanne St. Pierre, that freed Lenell Geter from the life term he was serving after being wrongfully convicted of armed robbery in Texas after authorities had ignored evidence exonerating him. “Within days of the broadcast, he was out of jail,” Safer said from his house.

A bit of that story surfaces Sunday, as does one so affecting that I choke up each time I see it.

The best human interest piece I’ve seen, which was produced by John Tiffin, it monitors Safer’s 1987 visit to Casa Verdi, a home that famed Italian composer Giuseppe Verdi established in Milan for retired opera performers. Its warmth, humor and irony are qualities Safer expresses in a way that makes his work distinctive.

“In the last part of his life,” he explained on the phone, “Verdi decided to leave everything he had to artists who worked in the opera, to the superstars and especially the chorus, who don’t get the recognition or the money. So what you have in this house is everyday life as opera, including the extraordinary pecking order where the soloists would not dare sit with the chorus.”

And there they were on the screen, from creaky spear carriers to antique divas, music uniting them and class dividing them, filling the halls with vanity along with voices because, as Safer noted then, “if there was not ego, there would not be art.”

Ego is central to “60 Minutes,” too. But thankfully, so is art.

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Howard Rosenberg’s column appears Mondays and Fridays. He can be contacted at howard.rosenberg@latimes.

com.