Trivia / 60 Minutes

• The Pete Best: In the 70s, the show would end with a segment called Point/counterpoint in which a Conservative and a Liberal would debate an issue of the day. Parody Displacement has made parodies of the segment in the movies ( "Airplane!") and TV ("Saturday Night Live") more familiar to modern audiences than the segment itself. In the early 80s the segment was replaced by the more familiar "A Few Minutes with Andy Rooney".
• Sunday Night Death Slot: Not for this series obviously, but for decades, any other show on the competing networks scheduled in this time slot against this popular and relative inexpensive show was too often doomed to be cancelled early.
• Screwed by the Network: During NFL season, the show rarely, if ever, starts on time due to CBS often not allocating enough time for NFL games and postgame coverage, even when moving its time slot back from 7:00 to 7:30 when needed. While the show does always air in its entirety when it starts late (and this is always stressed by the commentators of the preceding NFL game around the time where the show was supposed to start), it causes those who DVR the show to not get the entire program, as it will cut off at the end of the show's originally-scheduled time slot, unless the viewer adds extra time or records the program listed afterwards.
• What Could Have Been: CBS was considering adding Michele Clark; one of the first well-known black network correspondents as well as one of the more prominent female correspondents on network television then, to 60 Minutes starting in 1973. However, Clark was killed in the United Airlines Flight 553 crash on December 8, 1972 along with 44 others^note among them Illinois Congressman George W. Collins and Dorothy Hunt; wife of E. Howard Hunt of the then-brewing Watergate scandal; sparking several conspiracy theories as to whether the crash was really an accident months before her scheduled promotion. CBS would not have a woman join the 60 Minutes team as a full-time correspondent until Diane Sawyer in 1984 (Sawyer would remain at that position until leaving for ABC News in 1989), while three years prior to Sawyer joining the series, CBS White House correspondent Ed Bradley became the first black correspondent to join 60 Minutes, succeeding Dan Rather when Rather was promoted to CBS Evening News anchor following the retirement of Walter Cronkite.
• David Letterman once showed a clipreel with dinosaurs to illustrate the advanced age of most of the 60 Minutes reporters at that time, with the usual voices, "I'm Ed Bradley," "I'm Mike Wallace," and so on. Then, "Those stories and Andy Rooney tonight on 60 Minutes," with an orangutan swinging through the trees.