PBS celebrates ‘Mister Rogers’
PASADENA, Calif. — Nostalgia for “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood” continues in this 50th anniversary year of the classic children’s program with the debut of the warmhearted PBS pledge special “Mister Rogers: It’s You I Like” (8 p.m. Tuesday, WQED-TV).
Actor and Pittsburgh native Michael Keaton, who worked on the floor crew of the “Neighborhood” in the early 1970s, hosts “It’s You I Like” in segments filmed in Los Angeles. He previously narrated 2003’s “Fred Rogers: America’s Favorite Neighbor,” produced by WQED’s RickSebak.
“It’s You I Like” revisits standout moments from the “Neighborhood,” including Mr. Rogers’ musicianship, curiosity about how things are made via factory tours, the Neighborhood of Make-Believe, his visit with Koko the gorilla, and sit-downs with musicians Yo-Yo Ma, Itzhak Perlman and Wynton Marsalis and 10-year-old Jeff Erlanger, a quadriplegic who visited the “Neighborhood” in his wheel chair.
Writer/producer JoAnn Young, a veteran of PBS pledge specials, began work on “It’s You I Like” in August, visiting Pittsburgh for a brainstorming session at The Fred Rogers Co.
“We sat in a conference room with many people who had worked many years [on the ‘Neighborhood’] and made careful notes about their favorites and fan favorites so we had a comprehensive list of what we needed to look at,” she said before a PBS press conference for “It’s You I Like” at January’s Television Critics Association winter 2018 press tour in Pasadena, Calif. “Then we decided on themes we needed to talk about and what programs represented those themes and philosophies.”
Not everything made the cut. Ms. Young was sorry not to include the “Neighborhood” operas, although opera singer Joyce DiDonato is still among the celebrities interviewed in “It’s You I Like.” And she purposely left out Mister Rogers’ late 1980s diplomatic exchange with the host of a Russian children’s show due to current events.
“It seems so political now. It didn’t seem like the right time to talk about Russia,” she said. “Sometimes you just don’t want to bring up a subject a lot of people are unhappy about.”
Making viewers happy is a key component to PBS pledge specials.
“Generally pledge programs are really positive,” she explained.
As a retrospective, “It’s You I Like” provides an entertaining trip down memory lane for fans of the “Neighborhood,” but it is a pledge special: The show itself is just an hour; with pledge breaks it runs 90 minutes.
As part of PBS’s pledge period when local stations solicit donations from viewers, “It’s You I Like” was designed more as a fundraiser than a deep dive into the “Neighborhood.” The show includes interviews with Pittsburghers who appeared on the program — David Newell (Mr. McFeely), Joe Negri, Joanne Rogers — and bold-faced names who did not but became fans (Whoopi Goldberg, John Lithgow, Sarah Silverman, Judd Apatow).
“It’s You I Like” hits all the high points, occasionally too hard. Why two segments on guest star Tony Bennett, who appeared in just two “Neighborhood” episodes in 1975? Maybe producers expected to interview him, too, but if that fell through it might have made sense to scale back his presence in the show and devote the time to some of the “Neighborhood” regulars — Betty Aberlin, Francois Clemmons, Chuck Aber — who are seen in clips but aren’t part of the show’s contemporary interviews.
Following this “Neighborhood” retrospective, there are more Mister Rogers memories to come in 2018 with a documentary feature film about Fred Rogers (“Won’t You Be My Neighbor?” on June 8) and a biography (Maxwell King’s “The Good Neighbor: The Life and Works of Fred Rogers,” to be published Sept. 11).