CBS News and CMT Honour Dolly Parton With Tribute Specials and Music Video Marathon
Dolly Parton, who died at 80 in Nashville, will be honoured across CBS and CMT on the evening of 25 August — a coordinated tribute spanning a prime-time special, a music video marathon, and a planned film broadcast.
CBS News has scheduled a one-hour special, "Dolly Parton – An American Icon," to run from 10 to 11 p.m. ET/PT on CBS, with streaming on Paramount+ Variety. Gayle King, Tony Dokoupil, and Anthony Mason — CBS News senior culture and senior national correspondent — will lead the on-air tributes.
The special will draw on CBS News archives, including a 2009 60 Minutes interview conducted by Morley Safer, a 2023 Person-To-Person interview with Norah O'Donnell, and past interviews conducted by Dokoupil and Mason Variety. A CBS News correspondent will report on location from Dollywood, Parton's theme park in Pigeon Forge, Tennessee.
CMT is running its own slate of programming. CMT, CMT Music, and Equal Play — a channel on Pluto TV, Paramount's free ad-supported streaming service — will air Parton's music videos beginning 25 August through the following morning Variety. CMT has also planned a "CMT Remembers" special honouring Parton, to air at a later date, and will broadcast her 1989 film Steel Magnolias later in the week.
Beyond the networks, tributes have come from across country music. Reba McEntire paid public tribute to Parton, her longtime friend CBS8. Funeral plans for Parton have been announced, and fans have been invited to leave messages at dollyparton.com or tag @DollyParton on social media CBS19.
The archive material selected for the CBS special spans nearly fifteen years of interviews, meaning viewers will see Parton in conversation across different chapters of her life — from the 60 Minutes sit-down with Safer when she was in her early sixties to the Person-To-Person interview with O'Donnell just three years ago. Together with the on-location reporting from Dollywood, the broadcast is structured less as a news recap than a portrait assembled from a network's own collected footage.
For a general audience, the scheduling is straightforward: the CBS special airs in the final hour of prime time on 25 August and streams on Paramount+ for those who miss the broadcast or do not have a CBS affiliate. The music video marathon runs across three CMT-branded channels overnight. The Steel Magnolias broadcast and the "CMT Remembers" special follow on dates yet to be confirmed.
