SHORT TAKES : Stuffing 50 Years Into 2 Hours

NEW YORK — The toughest thing about throwing a 50th birthday party for television is figuring out the guest list.

That’s what John Moffitt has been working on as director and co-producer of “Fifty Years of Television: A Golden Celebration,” to air on CBS this Sunday, 9-11 p.m. Pacific time.

Walter Cronkite, Kermit the Frog, Miss Piggy, Carl Reiner and Jane Seymour are listed as the hosts, and guest stars include Steven Bochco, George Burns, Dick Clark, Norman Lear, Mary Tyler Moore, the Smothers Brothers, Danny Thomas, Lily Tomlin and Barbara Walters.

A major portion of the show will be nostalgic clips from the past, but that has presented Moffitt with an embarrassment of riches.

“It’s tough trying to figure out what’s going to be in and what’s going to be out,” Moffitt said in an interview. “We don’t want to clip people to death, and we don’t want to have everything go by so fast that you don’t see anything.”

For a category such as “cops, dicks and private eyes,” he said, it’s possible to mount a montage of clips and come up with something “that has a life of its own, that will bring back smiles and memories.”