Producers will have two summers of filming, including International Polar Year, before airdate in 2009.

Nebraska producers go to end of Earth for a national show

Originally published in Current, Oct. 10, 2006
By Steve Behrens

Over the next three years, producers from Nebraska’s NET Television will spend some brisk summer days in Antarctica developing a science education project underwritten by a just-announced $1.1 million National Science Foundation grant.

They’ll produce a one-hour high-definition doc for Nova, “Antarctica’s Icy Secrets,” in partnership with Boston’s WGBH — one of many national productions the state-operated Nebraska network has contributed to major pubTV series based at WGBH and New York’s WNET.

NET, based in Lincoln, Neb., has done three Nova episodes, including the recent “Ancient Refuge in the Holy Land”; the bio “Willa Cather: The Road Is All,” for American Masters; and “Monkey Trial,” among several histories for American Experience. Other national shows from NET are standalones, such as “Buffett and Gates Go Back to School,” which airs on many PBS stations next week and has been released on DVD.“

If we can get one or two national-quality productions a year and have three or four things in development, that’s about what we can handle,” says Michael Farrell, TV production manager at NET.

The state-operated network has invested for years in a team of producers, including a number who have remained for upwards of 25 years and who can now turn out national-quality programs for PBS, Farrell says.

“The legacy of Ron Hull is still with us,” he says, referring to the longtime NET program chief who established high standards at the network in the 1970s.

More national productions are on the way. With help from a National Endowment for the Humanities grant, Nebraska’s Christine Lesiak is scripting a doc about Standing Bear, the first Native American given standing in a U.S. court. The 1879 ruling is well known to Nebraska schoolchildren, Farrell says, but it and its significance are not widely understood elsewhere.

Few Nebraska shows take its producers as far afield as the Antarctica project, called IPY: Engaging Antarctica. It coincides with the International Polar Year — March 2007-March 2008 — a planned burst of research into the regions where temperatures have been rising and ice shelves breaking up in recent years.

Nebraska’s polar project will focus on the Antarctic Drilling Program, funded by NSF and managed by the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, home of the Nebraska network. NET plans to give its producers two summers on the ice, Farrell says. They’ll cover prospecting for dinosaur fossils and scientists’ deep drilling into the ice and the rock beneath.

While NET makes the doc, the University of Nebraska State Museum will develop community outreach materials, including a web-based “flexhibit” of images, multimedia files and student activities.