iHeartPodcasts and CBS News
59 episodes listed below
PRESS PLAY
“CBS News Sunday Morning” correspondent Mo Rocca has always loved obituaries. Each episode of Mobituaries covers his favorite dearly departed people and things. This season profiles legendary athlete Jim Thorpe in "Death of an All-American", iconic singer/songwriter Peggy Lee in "Death of Cool", and even the death of the mid-Atlantic accent, best known from the likes of Katharine Hepburn, Franklin Roosevelt and Jacqueline Kennedy. Mo even has a few new things in store including an episode that looks back at folks who "Died on the Same Day.” Think: Michael Jackson and Farrah Fawcett; John Adams and Thomas Jefferson; Jim Henson...
Based on 5 episodes we listened to · September 2026
Mo Rocca turns archival entertainment into sharp history about reputation, language, politics and the cultural work of television.
Mobituaries with Mo Rocca treats popular culture as historical evidence, pairing archival recordings with interviews and Rocca's amused, exacting commentary.
Lauren Bacall sells decaf; you get a surprisingly good reason to care about dropped R's.
Press play if you want
Short reviews from the PlayNext desk, based on the episodes we processed.
A sharp look at a very special sitcom episode and the uneasy sincerity around it.
Mo Rocca uses a 1983 Different Strokes special to take a clean look at early 1980s TV earnestness. He follows the episode tied to Nancy Reagan's Just Say No campaign and shows why a very special installment could be hard to ignore.
A brisk look at how Lear turned sitcoms into family arguments worth having.
Norman Lear's legacy lands best when it is treated less like nostalgia and more like a question about what sitcoms were for. The episode does that well by linking his childhood, his father's prison sentence, and the antisemitism he faced early on to the comic instincts behind…
A sponsor-heavy piece that briefly turns logistics and nicotine warnings into the clearest material.
The piece opens as a sponsor-dense run of retail savings pitches, telehealth promotion, and a South Carolina corporate segment. Its clearest stretch comes with Volvo Cars' 10-year anniversary in the state, where the focus settles on infrastructure, proximity to the port, access…
A comedy hit story that ends, uncomfortably, in the shadow of Dallas.
Mo Rocca frames the episode around a sharp break in American pop culture: Vaughn Meter, the comedian whose JFK impersonation made him a phenomenon, then found the work that carried him fading after Dallas.
A sharp look at how Lauren Bacall's voice carried class, history, and performance.
Mo Rocca uses Lauren Bacall's accent to open up a small cultural history story, and the move to an early 1980s High Point coffee commercial gives it some bite.
Three hosts dissect video game design, from Halo's hidden tutorials to Battlefield's chaos.
Overlooked lives, read from the sources, talked through warmly.
Mo Rocca's former teacher Mildred 'Millie' Venisi and Rocca himself both swapped their given names for nicknames after Jeff Huebner told a middle-school gym teacher, 'He's not Maurice.
Mo Rocca examines the extraordinary life of Sammy Davis Jr through three songs that defined him, from losing an eye in a car crash to breaking racial barriers through sheer talent, and the complicated price he paid for being the ultimate entertainer.
Mo Rocca revisits the 1983 Different Strokes two-part story that pulled Nancy Reagan into the orbit of Just Say No.
Norman Lear's television legacy gets the spotlight.
The audio is mostly sponsor traffic.
Mo Rocca traces the story of Vaughn Meter, the comedian whose uncanny JFK impersonation briefly became a national phenomenon.
Mo Rocca starts with an early-1980s High Point coffee commercial featuring the Bronx’s Betty Joan Persky, later Lauren Bacall, and uses it to look at how her R-less speech may point to place, class, and performance.