Is There an Echo in Here? CBS Emphasizes That Katie Couric Is Staying Put

"It's not going to be like, 'How do you like the weather in Jordan, senator?' " Couric agreed.

One critic wondered whether CBS News considered "The Daily Show" "some sort of inspirational competition."

"Yes, I'd like to go right on record. Jon Stewart is my inspiration. I want to be Jon Stewart when I grow up," Schieffer shot back, while smiling his disarming smile.

He gave props to Stewart and Stephen Colbert, whose Comedy Central show follows Stewart's.

"I look on them as I do the editorial cartoonists on the editorial page of a newspaper," he explained.

"You know, the editorial cartoonist is the one person on the newspaper that has the right to lie because, you know, they're dealing in parody. And that's basically what you're seeing with Jon Stewart and Colbert."

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William Petersen's Gil Grissom will be replaced on "CSI" this season with a latent serial killer-doctor-scientist played by an actor "of stature," CBS Entertainment chief Nina Tassler told TV critics at Thank God We're Still Working Summer TV Press Tour 2008.

Petersen decided to exit as a series regular, after the coming season's 10th episode, though Tassler insists he will still show up from time to time. She says he left because of "his artistic decision" to do something else, reminding critics they should not "forget his roots [in theater] as an artist." As if Petersen would let them forget.

The new character will not be the head of the crime scene investigation at first and no one else in the CSI will know about his serial-killer "DNA," she said.

One critic noted it sounded suspiciously like the lead character on Showtime network's "Dexter," edited episodes of which played with some ratings success on CBS this past season as a means of filling time left open because of the three-month writers' strike. "Dexter" is about a forensics specialist named Dexter Morgan who works with a police department and is also a serial killer. One important difference: Dexter has serial-killed; the new guy on "CSI" has not.

"I don't think [the character] was informed by Dexter," Tassler said.

Otherwise, her session was remarkably controversy-free. CBS is the only network that managed to deliver pilots of most of its new series to critics before the tour, so they actually had seen an episode of the series they were going to have Q&A sessions about, so they could ask, you know, informed questions. Even so, some critics felt it just went to show you how 2007 CBS was -- stuck in the past, bound by tradition.

One critic said he was "tempted to ask a question about [CBS's canceled conspiracy-theory drama] 'Jericho' just to drive up traffic on our Web site."

Another critic wanted to get to the bottom of the whole Britney/"How I Met Your Mother" story.

"Did Britney Spears save 'How I Met Your Mother'?" the critic asked.

"She certainly didn't," Tassler said. "It was never in any danger."

Another said ABC Entertainment division chief Steve McPherson had offered to buy him a bottle of wine if he'd ask Tassler if she was seriously studying to become a cantor, thus giving credibility to the theory of a great swath of the TV industry that TV critics are a joke and can be bought pretty cheap, which, we suspect, was McPherson's point. And yes, she is.