What does the future of PBS look like?
50 years ago, network broke ground and showed TV what it could be
As satires go, Robert Wuhl’s “Open Season” seemed particularly farfetched when it was released in 1996. The film’s high concept? After the television industry’s allpowerful ratings system malfunctions, a thinly disguised Public Broadcasting Service becomes the most popular network in the country. Educational programs such as “Kennedy: What’s Left to Say?” and a history of Limoges china shoot up the charts. (“What’s Limoges?” asks Regis Philbin in a cameo.)
Culture is suddenly cool; book sales and museum donations surge. So the top commercial network decides to fight back. It counters with “Greek’s Company,” “the first culturecom,” starring Alan Thicke as the counselor in a coed college dorm in ancient Greece. And Tom Selleck is cast as a renowned cellist who fights bad guys by day in “Rock Maninoff, Classical Crimefighter.” His catchphrase: “Time to face the music, scumbag.”
Alas, the glitch is discovered and the balance in the TV universe is restored.
The public network’s ratings actually come in below those of the Weather Channel, Wuhl’s character moans. Wuhl’s satire flopped, too, taking in less than $ 9,500 at the box office.
But in retrospect, the movie may just have been ahead of its time. As PBS celebrates its 50th anniversary this month, it’s not ranked No. 1, but the rest of the premise doesn’t seem so crazy.
PBS’ influence is everywhere. There’s a fairly direct line from PBS’s groundbreaking reality series “An American Family” to MTV’s “The Real World” and “Keeping Up With the Kardashians” on E! Julia Child’s “The French Chef” begat the
24- hour Food Network, 1 million- follower YouTube cooking stars and even food porn like “The Chef’s Table” on Netflix. The
DIY Network is filled with “This Old House” knockoffs. PBS made BBC naturalist Sir David Attenborough a star in the United States, but today he is just as likely to be found on Discovery or Netflix, while the descendant of Carl Sagan’s “Cosmos: A Personal Adventure” airs on National Geographic.
PBS’ signature preschool shows have also been picked off. New episodes of “Sesame Street” air first on HBO Max. Powerhouse commercial media companies ViacomCBS and NBC Universal have muscled in with their Noggin and Sprout ( now Universal Kids) services. British police procedurals and costume dramas are found not just on Netflix, Amazon Prime, Hulu and HBO Max but also on BritBox and Acorn TV. Documentaries are equally ubiquitous, with HBO and Showtime and streaming services increasingly vying for titles, hefty checkbooks in hand.
When PBS arrived a halfcentury ago, television was essentially a three- network game, and PBS thrived by championing programming and audiences ignored by NBC, CBS and ABC. But that distinctiveness has faded in today’s world of hundreds of cable channels and seemingly unlimited streaming services, many built after rivals saw the commercial value in PBS’ embrace of food lovers, costume drama obsessives, home improvement tinkerers and other niches. PBS may still execute many of its programs better than its rivals, and its content remains free and over- the- air, crucial for reaching those with lesser means and those without broadband. But in a country where the vast majority of people get their TV through a paid service, that distinction rarely registers.
This cornucopia of programming that viewers can enjoy across the television landscape only intensifies the political pressures facing PBS. Why should the federal government subsidize public broadcasting, conservative politicians and others ask, when the commercial marketplace appears to be doing just fine delivering those types of programs?
From its beginnings, PBS has grappled with an existential conundrum — what it should be, and how it should distinguish itself. Thanks to its success, that quandary has become even thornier. More than ever, a thriving future for PBS will come down to how it manages an organization for the public good in a commercial environment, according to Marcia Smith, a documentary film producer (“The Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution”).
“Is there still an idea of the public good that we can agree on beyond ‘ Sesame Street’?” Smith asked.
How it came together. PBS is an odd entity to celebrate, really. It’s a “service,” not a “system,” and not a network like CBS or CNN. Officially, it distributes national programs that it does not produce, and it is charged with operating the satellite system to interconnect all local public television stations. PBS did not originate noncommercial, educational television; there were already more than 100 such stations when PBS debuted in October 1970. “The French Chef” was its first broadcast, but the program had been airing on some public stations for six years. “Sesame Street” had begun a year earlier.
But it’s an anniversary worth commemorating. PBS and public television are now widely considered synonymous, having met the goal envisioned by its founders: helping autonomous educational stations nationwide combine resources, amplifying the reach of high- quality programs and shepherding new ones worthy of the federal funds allotted under the 1967 Public Broadcasting Act. Those stations, while committing to a common purpose, ultimately retain control over what they air.
Call it upside down, or bottom up, as Paula Kerger, the president and chief executive of PBS, does.
“You have a lot of responsibility but not ultimate authority,” she said of PBS’ role. That leads to what she called “the beauty and the pain of trying to keep this whole system glued together.”
The 1967 act, which created the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, laid out a broad mandate for the programs that public television ( and radio) should foster. It sought media for “instructional, educational and cultural purposes,” promoting “diversity and excellence,” and addressing “the needs of unserved and underserved audiences, particularly children and minorities.”
Elmo goes to Washington. The political pressure — a constant in PBS’ history — didn’t take long to arrive. One month, to be exact.
In November 1970, PBS distributed “Banks and the Poor.” It chronicled how banks perpetuated substandard housing for lowincome Americans of color, ending with a scroll listing some 100 conflicted U. S. lawmakers.
Bill Moyers, who as a special assistant to President Lyndon B. Johnson had worked on the 1967
Public Broadcasting Act, remembered the reaction in 2006: “All hell broke loose. President Nixon and his director of communications, Patrick Buchanan, were so outraged that the president vetoed CPB’s reauthorization bill and wouldn’t sign another until the chairman, president and director of television for CPB resigned.”
After a few more years of political kerfuffles over programming, a deal was struck in the mid- 1970s that executives hoped would insulate PBS from administration meddling. The federal appropriation would now go largely to local stations, rather than directly to PBS. And those stations, more than 330 currently, would funnel the money — in part — back to PBS.
“Politically, it was the right thing to do to protect the system,” recalled Stuart Sucherman, who helped broker the deal. “But in hindsight that made an inefficient system more inefficient.”
It didn’t end the political posturing, either.
In 2005, an episode of the children’s program “Postcards From Buster” featuring lesbian parents set off conservative complaints. Last year, a samesex wedding on the cartoon “Arthur” prompted another round of criticism when Alabama Public Television declined to air the episode. And in 2012, Mitt Romney enlivened a 2012 presidential debate by declaring, “I love Big Bird,” but “I’m going to stop the subsidy to PBS.”
Barack Obama’s reelection prevented Romney from canceling Big Bird, but a different result in 2016 reignited the funding wars. The Trump administration argued in a budget proposal that “alternatives to PBS and NPR programming have grown substantially since CPB was first established in 1967, greatly reducing the need for publicly funded programming options.” But Congress restored the appropriation, which this year is
$ 445 million, of which roughly 70% goes to the stations, radio and television. ( PBS gets a small amount of direct money from the corporation; in the 2019 fiscal year, it was about $ 29 million.)
The most potent weapon in these battles over the years has been the activation of Big Bird, Elmo and characters from PBS’ other children’s shows. They often make the trek to Capitol Hill and have even testified at congressional hearings.
But even as PBS has fended off these funding threats, the culture wars and the push for political balance have taken their toll. PBS never did distribute that episode of “Buster,” and an ambitious series of films on America’s role in the post- Sept. 11 world was criticized for being both too conservative and too liberal.
A vibrant past, a future in question. Lynn Novick, a collaborator with Ken Burns on “The Vietnam War” and other films, and the director of “College Behind Bars,” said that no other outlet would allow a filmmaker to come up with an idea and spend 10 years getting it right. PBS, she said, is “creator driven, more than top down, not an executive saying we need a documentary on the Civil War.”
The past seven months have unexpectedly underscored another area where PBS remains unique: education.
In March, days before 600,000 Los Angeles Unified School students were sent home because of the pandemic, PBS’ Kerger received a call from Austin Beutner, the district’s superintendent. PBS and its area stations quickly mar
shalled educational resources for students with limited or no broadband access. Dozens of other public stations and school systems nationwide have followed suit.
Meanwhile, PBS LearningMean online educational platform for teachers and students, has seen its users more than double this school year, compared with the prepandemic average.
In June, as Black Lives Matter protests generated national conversations about racism, PBS dug into its back catalog so films like Firelight’s “Freedom Riders” could begin streaming again.
New programs about race include “The Power of We: A Sesame Street Special.”
“It is rather stunning to see how very relevant our original mission is today,” WETA’s Rockefeller said. “In the midst of this pandemic, public television is delivering free education content right into homes, connecting people with arts and perfordia, mances, giving context to our history and providing clear news and analysis.”
She added: “When other outlets are scrambling to create programming about the complex and troubled racial history in our country, we already have a rich library of programs and educational resources already at hand because examining our history and our culture has been a part of our mission all along.”
For Kerger, the last months have provided a “clarion call around service,” which, after all is built into PBS’ name. “This is a moment when the country was looking for us, and here we are,” she said.
The challenge for PBS going forward will be to sustain that focus.