Programs/Content

‘What we try to do . . . is say something new’

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“The best of American television can be traced to this one man,” said NovaExecutive Producer Paula Apsell, referring to her boss and the latest winner of CPB’s annual Ralph Lowell Award — Peter S. McGhee, who retires this month as v.p. of national production at WGBH, Boston. McGhee accepted the medal at the PBS Annual Meeting in June as recognition “of my work, and of your work, of all our work,” he said in acceptance remarks. He has overseen and in many cases launched some of public TV’s most ambitious documentaries as well as enduringly popular entertainments — no less than a third of the PBS schedule.He worked in public TV nearly four decades, since four years after earning his master’s degree in journalism at Columbia University. McGhee joined National Educational Television, New York City, in 1964 and moved to WGBH in 1969, becoming manager of its national production effort in 1975. Since then he has helped build on the earlier successes of Nova and Masterpiece Theatre while launching Frontline, American Experience, Antiques Roadshow and numerous landmark limited series.

Programs/Content

Twin ITVS goals: capturing diversity on videotape, getting it seen

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Last year was a good year for the Independent Television Service. ITVS had weathered its first 10 years as a funder and presenter of independent productions for public TV. It was feted with retrospectives at museums and film festivals across the country, which highlighted such fare as The Farmer’s Wife, La Ciudad, First Person Plural, The Devil Never Sleeps and Still Life with Animated Dogs. And it brought in a new executive director, Sally Jo Fifer. Having worked nine years as executive director of the nonprofit Bay Area Video Coalition (BAVC), Fifer was uniquely qualified to steer the difficult course between stations and independents.

Why public media?

‘Our place is to offer an alternative for those who still want to learn’

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We should not be surprised that most of television enters our people and our body politic, not as food for thought, but as an embalming fluid, a relaxing and displacing system of entertainment for those too exhausted, inert or numb to want more. But our place — your place, my place, the place of public television — is to offer an alternative to that, to serve the actual young and the forever young, the open and curious, those who still want to learn.

Programs/Content

Convict free after Bikel’s latest doc

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Frontline knows how to shake things up in North Carolina. Last week, less than a month after the series aired Ofra Bikel’s 90-minute documentary “An Ordinary Crime,” about 21-year-old Terence Garner, a state court granted Garner’s motion for a new trial. He posted bond and went home with his mother and family for the first time in more than four years. Garner had been serving a sentence of 32-43 years for robbery and attempted murder—the “ordinary crime” he insisted all along he had no part of. Bikel—whose award-winning trilogy “Innocence Lost” led the state to drop charges in 1997 in a major child abuse case in Edenton, N.C.—again turned the spotlight on criminal justice in the state.

Programs/Content

One last visit with Lance Loud

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Twenty-nine years after their pioneering observational doc series entranced PBS viewers, the filmmakers Alan and Susan Raymond are bringing back the Loud family one last time. They are talking with WETA about offering the new hour-long episode to PBS, according to Mr. Raymond and Jim Corbley, v.p. of production management at the Washington station. If a deal is struck, the film could be ready this fall, Raymond said. The occasion was the death Dec. 21 [2001] of Lance Loud, eldest son in the Santa Barbara family, who stunned his family and became a symbol of gay liberation in 1973 by coming out on national television.

Programs/Content

Forsyte Saga remake ‘goes for the youthful passion’

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… Now The Forsyte Saga is coming down the pike again, in a six-hour adaptation of the first two books in the Forsyte series. Produced for Granada Television and WGBH by Sita Williams, who was producer of the light-hearted and sexually charged PBS comedy Reckless, this Forsyte will feature a younger cast than the original’s, a snappier pace …

Programs/Content

Families try homesteading for spring Frontier House

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A diverse group of Americans placed in a remote and inhospitable locale must overcome physical challenges and psychological stress for a chance at winning a huge prize that will change their lives. Sound like an idea for a “reality TV” series? Actually, the description fits not only a forthcoming PBS series — The Frontier House, a sequel to 1900 House that’s scheduled for next April and May —

Programs/Content

The Roadshow discovers challenges of wild success

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When Chubb’s Antiques Roadshow rolled into New York City last month, appraiser John Hays hit the jackpot a full day before the doors even opened. This time it wasn’t a rare 18th-century tea table from someone’s dusty attic, but a glowing profile in the New York Times. The headline got it right: “Appraiser Examines a Newfound Treasure: Fame.” Next morning, two members of the Roadshow’s roving tribe, Leigh and Leslie Keno, could be spotted on CBS Saturday Morning explaining to a national audience why a graceful little table with delicate wood inlay was a fake. The Keno twins also have gained their share of fame from the series, garnering everything from appearances on Oprah to a major book deal for Hidden Treasures: Searching for Masterpieces of American Furniture, which has raked up a resounding $100,000 in sales, five times the norm for a book on antiques.

Programs/Content

WGBH girds for uproar from creationists

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An educational experience 4.6 billion years in the making,” says the clever tagline for WGBH’s big September series Evolution. The way the Boston producers have been preparing for the reaction from creationists, you’d think they expect the controversy surrounding it will last almost that long. “Evolution is two steps away from abortion,” said Anne Zeiser, director of national strategic marketing for WGBH, placing the flash point at which evolution ignites fundamentalist outrage. Recent polls show that 45 percent of Americans say they believe in creationism, and many Christians view Charles Darwin’s theory of natural selection as an assault on their faith. Evolution, a seven-part, eight-hour co-production of WGBH’s Nova science unit and billionaire Paul G. Allen’s Clear Blue Sky Productions, will kick off the PBS fall season Sept.

Programs/Content

Video center chief Fifer will lead ITVS

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ITVS, the CPB-funded organization operating in the tricky middle-ground between independent filmmakers and public TV stations, has appointed a leader in the San Francisco indie community as its next chief executive. [She succeeded James Yee, who died in March 2001.]

Sally Jo Fifer, executive director of the Bay Area Video Coalition since 1992, will join the Independent Television Service as its top executive in August. BAVC grew explosively under her leadership — through partnerships with Silicon Valley companies during the soaring tech boom and through job-training contracts with federal, state and local government agencies. The ITVS Board sought an executive with entrepreneurial skills and a proven ability to “raise money and think creatively,” says Mark Lloyd, chairman of ITVS and president of the Civil Rights Forum on Communications Policy. “Sally’s experience with the Bay Area Video Coalition certainly suggests that she has those qualities.”

Programs/Content

Philly gets its first airing of 1968 Wiseman film

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If Frederick Wiseman’s High School works like a time machine, transporting viewers back to their own coming of age experiences in this quintessential American institution, the journey will be bittersweet for alumni of Philadelphia’s Northeast High School, where the landmark documentary was shot. Most alums have never seen the documentary, but they remember the local controversy over how it depicted their alma mater. Threatened with what he describes now as “vague talk” of a lawsuit, Wiseman in 1968 agreed not to screen High School within miles of the city. More than three decades later, the documentary has achieved classic status among independent films. PBS will present it as such Aug. 28 [2001] as a P.O.V. Classic, a new strand developed by Executive Producer Cara Mertes.

Programs/Content

APT sees 70% carriage for animated tales of danger and heroism

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Serialized adventures of an orphan mouse who dreams of becoming a heroic warrior come to the screen [in April 2001] through American Public Television. Redwall, an animated series about woodland creatures in a medieval abbey, stands apart from PBS kiddie fare as a series that’s not appropriate for the Barney and Dragon Tales set. Redwall is for school-aged kids. British author Brian Jacques, whose books are the basis for the series, began writing them out of dissatisfaction with modern children’s stories. “I thought to meself, what’s wrong with kids discovering the magic of a real story like I used to read as a kid?”

Programs/Content

PBS version of ‘reality TV’ distills drama from real life

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As provocatively staged “reality TV” series explode on the commercial networks, PBS is expanding its own slate of what it calls “observational documentaries” in the network’s reinvention under President Pat Mitchell. In April [2001], American High, a fast-paced docusoap series dropped by Fox last summer, will lead off a new weekly PBS strand targeted to teens and young adults. Then, in the fall, Senior Year, a 13-part series that PBS execs promoted to television critics during the January press tour, will take over the same Wednesday 10 p.m. timeslot. This summer P.O.V. also will present Fred Wiseman’s 1968 film High School, a national broadcast debut that was also promoted at the press tour. With American High and Senior Year, PBS aims to create a new strand, “so the audience can find it and know it’s going to be there,” and keep tuning in, said John Wilson, senior programming v.p. PBS has scheduled repeats of American High through the summer, and is considering a second run of Senior Year after its debut.

Programs/Content

Better Saturday competition seen for the kids audience

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In a bid to expand its children’s franchise into an increasingly competitive daypart, PBS on Sept. 30 will launch Bookworm Bunch, a block of six new animated series slated for Saturday mornings. Produced by Toronto-based Nelvana Communications, Bookworm Bunch is PBS’s first offering of original children’s fare for weekends — when stations traditionally program their own selection of how-to programs and other fare. PBS created the block as a distinctive alternative to the rock ’em-sock ’em, boy-oriented fare aired by other broadcast networks on Saturdays. “It’s a tremendous thing that PBS is doing — something that’s almost revolutionary — in presenting American children with an alternative to what I call ‘toxic television,'” said Rosemary Wells, author of Timothy Goes to School, one of six children’s books to be adapted for TV in the new PBS Kids block.

Programs/Content

Video description today: For their audience, words are worth a thousand pictures

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A visually impaired person watching CBS’s Survivor cannot see the ousted member’s torch extinguished, doesn’t know what Bart writes on the blackboard in The Simpsons’ opening sequence, and can’t laugh at the antics of Eddie the terrier on Frasier. But thanks to Descriptive Video Service, he or she can understand that the silence on an episode of ExxonMobil Masterpiece Theatre’s “Our Mutual Friend” means that Bella is gazing at the fire with tear-filled eyes after scorning a suitor, that the splashing on Nature signifies grizzly cubs out for a swim, or that Arthur doesn’t look much like a real aardvark. DVS, a service of WGBH, Boston, has been around since 1987, and in those 13 years PBS has been the lone broadcast network to regularly carry programs that are accessible to the blind. By tuning their TV sets to the secondary audio programming (SAP) channel, those who have trouble seeing can enjoy Mystery!, Nova, The Living Edens, The American Experience, Wishbone, Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood and a smattering of other programs in which a narrator fills the pauses in dialogue to describe the characters’ features, clothing, and gestures; setting and scenery; action sequences and other purely visual elements. DVS, which operates under the aegis of WGBH’s Media Access Group, provides video description not only for public television but also for some films shown on the Turner Classic Movie Network, in IMAX theaters, and some first-run film releases, such as Titanic and the upcoming The Patriot.

Programs/Content

PBS President Pat Mitchell: ‘I think I’ll be learning every day of the year’

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Since she was hired as PBS president early in February [2000], Pat Mitchell has met with 60 or 70 of public TV’s managers, and station board leaders as well, in trips to stations and at the APTS Annual Meeting. To oversee station relations, she hired the network’s former board vice chairman, Wayne Godwin, away from Cincinnati’s WCET (he starts work this week at PBS). And she’s expected to announce further initiatives starting next weekend at the PBS Annual Meeting in Nashville. Mitchell, a longtime producer in commercial TV, was previously head of Time Warner’s CNN Productions, based in Atlanta. She still has yet to pack her household and move to the D.C. area.

Programs/Content

Fans’ demand prompts revival of sci-fi classic

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WNET, dastardly villain in a two-decade scheme to deprive science-fiction buffs of the coolest public TV program of all time, this summer will redeem its reputation among fans. “The Lathe of Heaven,” digitally remastered and repackaged with additional material, will be distributed to public TV stations for broadcast in June [2000]. A home video and DVD will be released in the fall. Originally broadcast on PBS in 1980, the drama inspired a cult following that never forgot the show, and never let WNET forget it, either. Fans of the program came together in an “extensive Internet community” to rage against the producing station’s “ruthless warehousing” of their favorite public TV show, and one site accused WNET of “corporate amnesia,” recalls Joseph Basile, director of program rights and clearances.

Programs/Content

Did WGBH do enough to guard veracity of its antiques hit?

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WGBH acknowledged that one of the most compelling segments on Antiques Roadshow — the so-called “watermelon sword” appraisal — was faked without its knowledge. The station severed ties late last month with Russ Pritchard III and George Juno, former partners in an antique weaponry dealership who frequently appeared on the series.

Development

Idaho bans public TV programs that ‘support’ law-breaking

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Idaho’s state legislature has imposed extraordinary restrictions on the state public TV network, in delayed reaction to its broadcast last September of the gay-friendly documentary “It’s Elementary: Talking About Gay Issues in School.” The state House of Representatives passed the restrictions March 27 [2000] by a vote of 50-16, as part of an appropriations bill that gives $2 million for DTV instead of the $3.9 million requested by the network. And the same legislation passed the state Senate April 4. It will order the State Board of Education, licensee of the network, to monitor “programs expected to be of a controversial nature,” and to reject any program that “promotes, supports or encourages the violation of Idaho criminal statutes.” In a state where sodomy is illegal, the bill could be interpreted as forbidding Idaho Public TV to rebroadcast “It’s Elementary,” a program about classroom treatment of the subject of homosexuality.

History of public media

Saudek’s Omnibus: ambitious forerunner of public TV

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When producer Robert Saudek died in 1998, his New York Times obituary called him “the alchemist-in-­chief of what is often called the golden age of television.” From 1952 to 1961, the product of Saudek’s alchemy was Omnibus, a weekly that did what public TV now aspires to do, but on commercial network TV. It turned out to be one of the last but finest gasps of the Cooperation Doctrine — the notion that commercial broadcasting could ignore the bottom line and the largest available audience. [More on the Cooperation Doctrine.]

For the December 1999 pledge drives, PBS distributed the first-ever TV retrospective on the famous series, “Omnibus: Television’s Golden Age,” from New River Media. The writers are William M. Jones, professor of political science at Virginia Wesleyan College and author of Omnibus: American Television’s Season in the Sun, from Wesleyan University Press, and Andrew Walworth, executive producer and president of New River Media.