TV Worth Blogging
by David Thiel, Program Director for WILL-TV
An insider's view of public television programming and the issues that help determine what and how you watch
WILL-TV Viewers to Witness Historic Performance
The New York Philharmonic’s unprecedented trip to North Korea has been making headlines this week, but Central Illinois doesn’t just have to read about it: they will have the opportunity to watch the performance itself, a mere two days after the live concert. The producers of Great Performances have been working feverishly to prepare the program for broadcast Thursday. (WILL-TV will air it from 8:00 to 10:00 pm on February 28.)
In fact, the whole thing came together very quickly. Public TV stations were first informed about the program only three weeks ago, long after we'd published our February schedules. However, even though WILL-TV is in the middle of a very important fundraising drive, we put our previous plans on hold in order to bring you this historic event. I hope you'll tune in!
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WILL-TV Program Wins Oscar™
No, Illinois Gardener didn’t take home a trophy at Sunday night’s 80th annual Academy Awards ceremony. However, the winner for Best Animated Short, Sergei Prokofiev's Peter and the Wolf, will have its US broadcast premiere Wednesday, March 26 at 7:00 pm on WILL-TV. Great Performances is presenting the adaptation of the famous musical composition produced in stop-frame model animation and accompanied by the Philharmonia Orchestra under the direction of Mark Stephenson.
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Election Day Approaches!
The onset of March brings with it WILL-TV's own experiment with democracy, our annual Great Britcom Vote. (Saturday, March 1 at 7:00 pm.) This will be the ninth year for this spring tradition, during which we set aside one night of our fundraising drive to ask the audience's help in selecting a British comedy for our schedule. We will air sample episodes of five "candidates" and invite viewers to call in for the one they prefer. At the end of the evening, the show with the most votes will be purchased to air sometime during our next fiscal year.
The concept of the Great Britcom Vote sprung from a desire to make our British comedy pledge breaks more of an event. While other public TV stations had previously aired comedy marathons that asked viewers to choose a favorite, we took it a step further by empowering our loyal Britcom audience to have a direct impact on the lineup.
I love the idea for a number of reasons. In addition to its success as a fundraiser, it also provides a testing lab for new programs I'm considering for the schedule. Murder Most Horrid, Father Ted, Coupling, My Hero and Next of Kin were all introduced during previous Britcom Votes and eventually made it into the weekly lineup.
Another plus is that it demonstrates, in the most obvious manner, the difference between a commercial network or cable channel and a locally-owned and operated station such as WILL-TV. We can directly communicate with people right here in Central Illinois, gather their immediate feedback and use it to influence our program offerings. While there have been promotions on other networks in which viewers have been invited to vote for a favorite episode to air, I've never heard of any other broadcast or cable outlet allowing its audience to select an entire series.
This year's focus is on old favorites, though there's one new-to-WILL show in the mix. The candidates are:
7:00 pm Mulberry - I've made it a tradition to give last year's runner-up another shot at the crown. This one, which won our second Britcom Vote back in 2001, is a short series starring Geraldine McEwan as Miss Farnaby, who hires an enigmatic, charming stranger named Mulberry to handle her domestic tasks.
7:40 pm My Hero - Another former Britcom Vote winner (2002), this series stars Ardal O'Hanlon as sweet-natured George Sunday, who is secretly the superhero Thermoman. However, the focus isn't on heroics but rather on his quirky relationship with earthbound nurse Janet Dawkins.
8:20 pm Open All Hours - Never before aired on WILL-TV, it stars Ronnie Barker as the mercenary owner of Arkwright's Emporium, a traditional British corner store. Arkwright constantly fights a losing battle to transform his lackadaisical nephew Granville into a worthy heir to his commercial empire.
9:00 pm Are You Being Served? - Long-time viewers will remember this perennial about the misadventures of the sales staff in charge of men's and women's garments at Grace Brothers' department store. It was so wildly popular with our audience that we were afraid to take it off. It left our schedule in December 2001, but not before we aired the entire run more than 25 times. Is it time for it to return?
9:45 pm To the Manor Born - The winner of the very first Britcom Vote in March 2000, it features the indomitable Penelope Keith as the snobbish Lady fforbes-Hamilton, who is forced to auction off her estate. Should this one win, we'll also have the opportunity to purchase the brand-new 2007 Christmas special which reunites original cast members Keith, Peter Bowles, Angela Thorne and Gerald Sim.
I hope that you'll tune in on Saturday, March 1 at 7:00 pm to join in the fun! Watch some comedy favorites, preview a potential new Britcom, and cast your vote! And don't forget to make your pledge of financial support; it's the only way we can continue to afford to bring you the British comedies you enjoy six nights a week on WILL!
Image: Mollie Sugden as Mrs. Slocombe from Are You Being Served, ©1981 BBC
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Sense and Censorship
Over the past several weeks, WILL received several impassioned e-mail messages urging us not to air a certain television series. That's not unprecedented, but what was unusual was that the show in question was Dexter, a Showtime production that had its broadcast premiere last Sunday on CBS. It was obvious that these e-mails were robo-spam. How could I tell?
1) The writing style was too formal; they read more like press releases than correspondence. They cited very specific information about audience demographics and FCC rulings that suggested an "insider" perspective rather than that of a typical, interested viewer.
2) They were writing to a PBS station about a CBS show.
3) They were all identical.
They were likely products of the watchdog group known as the Parents Television Council, which is currently waging a public campaign against CBS over the airing of Dexter, a crime drama about a forensics specialist. What makes this one different is that the main character is himself a serial killer, one whose twisted moral code allows him to murder only other serial killers.
I had never seen Dexter, and I suspect that most of the people taking advantage of the PTC's robo-spam generator hadn't either. I wound up recording it to see what the fuss was about. It's not my place to praise or condemn other networks' fare, so I'll forgo any comments here except to say that the edited-down, broadcast version seemed very much like a CBS offering. Last week, the network gave early fall renewals to 11 series, seven of which are crime procedurals decorated with artistically-rendered close-ups of forensic evidence.
Time TV critic James Poniewozik's essay on the controversy makes a case that the PTC's concern "is with Dexter's ideas, not its gore." He finds that disturbing, yet refreshingly honest.
Over the years, there have many occasions when viewers have demanded that we not air a given program. Usually, but not always, they are prompted to do so by a watchdog group. In most cases, they object solely to the expression of views contrary to their own. In virtually all cases, they have not themselves seen the show, but are reacting to someone else's description of its content. Such attempts at prior restraint come from both the political right and left, and the inevitable assumption is that WILL is biased against their own side. (For the record, WILL takes no political positions, and a core tenet of our programming philosophy is an open exchange of differing ideas.)
In the nearly 19 years I've had the honor of working for WILL-TV, I'm proud to say that we have never withdrawn a program from our schedule due to ideological objections or pressure tactics. We respect that the viewers of our evening documentaries and dramas are responsible adults capable of choosing for themselves the content they invite into their homes, and that they have plenty of options, not the least of which is the "off" button. We know that any given person will at times strongly disagree with opinions expressed by participants in our program lineup; if not, we wouldn't be doing our jobs.
That said, we also know that it's our responsibility to provide tools that help our audience make informed decisions. These include program descriptions, ratings icons, and--where appropriate--viewer advisories immediately prior to broadcast. I hope that you'll take advantage of these tips and make your own choices. If you have questions about upcoming programs, please write or call the TV Programming department.
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Word Up!
When I was growing up, Saturday mornings were magic time. For a few hours each week, all three commercial networks desperately competed for my attention with a phantasmagoria of animated and live-action adventures: superheroes, dinosaurs, ghost-hunting kids and globe-trotting musicians. It was kid nirvana, even though many of the offerings weren't really all that good.
As I got older, the children's shows I came to appreciate the most were the ones that worked on multiple levels. Rocky and Bullwinkle was the classic example: kids could laugh at the moose's thickheadedness, but you had to be a little older to realize that "the Ruby Yacht of Omar Khayyam" was a truly horrible pun.
Which brings me to a recent favorite: PBS' WordGirl, airing Fridays at 6:00 am and 4:00 pm on WILL-TV. It's the story of "mild-mannered fifth grader" Becky Botsford, who is secretly an alien superhero from the planet Lexicon. Blessed with super strength, the power of flight and an astounding vocabulary, she faces an array of absurd villains with the aid of her monkey Bob, aka Captain Huggy Face.
The ostensible purpose of WordGirl is to introduce young viewers to new words such as "deceive" and "coincidence." Each story focuses on two vocabulary-builders, each of which is used repeatedly and in a variety of circumstances. Not even the dastardly deeds of the Butcher--whose powers over deli meats are matched only by his ability to butcher the English language--can stop Becky from taking a moment to politely explain that "exaggerate" means "to make something seem bigger, better, more important than it really is."
WordGirl's educational mission is solid, but that's not all it has to offer; it's also laugh-out-loud funny. Becky's adventures are laced with self-aware humor that plays with the conventions of superhero stories and even the show's own internal logic. When Chuck the Evil Sandwich-Making Guy goes on a robbery spree, his victims are confused: why isn't he committing sandwich-based crimes? Frustrated, Chuck attempts to knock over a grocery store, but is disappointed when he goes to jail over sixteen dollars' worth of bread.
My favorite example of this is when Dr. Two-Brains--a villainous scientist whose grafted-on mouse brain compels him to steal cheese--begins to grab gold instead. WordGirl learns that he is experimenting with a ray that transforms gold into cheese. Unfortunately, it only succeeds in making potato salad, so Dr. Two-Brains builds a second machine that turns potato salad into cheese. While his henchmen suggest that it might be a good idea to let them have some of the gold before it becomes potato salad--after all, the rent on their lair is due--Becky calls the whole plot into question. Why not steal potato salad instead of gold? Why not use the gold to buy potato salad? Neither of the doctor's brains has a satisfactory answer.
And did I tell you that WordGirl has a monkey sidekick? Named Captain Huggy Face? Hmm...I guess I did, but did I mention that he concludes each episode with a special dance?
Words are cool. Monkeys are funny. And crime doesn't pay, when you "Word Up!" with WordGirl!
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The Few, The Proud
Program directors are something of a dying breed in the American TV industry. Commercial stations may have someone with that title, but most of the choice regarding what goes on the air and when is taken out of their hands. Even those programs which are distributed via syndicator rather than national network (Oprah, for one) negotiate the time slots in which they appear when their contracts are signed.
Public TV, however, is wonderfully backward in this regard. Most PTV stations still have someone on the payroll whose job includes crafting a program schedule. We enjoy a level of autonomy little seen in a day in which few locally-owned, truly independent broadcasters still exist. That's because the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) is not a traditional network.
In the commercial network model, local affiliates give up control over much of their airtime to run nationally-scheduled programming. The networks sell most of the advertising inventory within those hours and pocket the money. Affiliates are allowed to sell a limited number of spots, presumably at a higher rate than they would get if they couldn't boast first-run episodes of Lost or American Idol.
The relationship between PBS and its member stations is considerably different. Rather than getting our "network" shows for free, we pay hefty annual dues for the right to broadcast Nature, Sesame Street and Antiques Roadshow. Furthermore, we retain control over our schedules, and can slide, delay or preempt programs as needed. That's the reason many news articles about PBS programs include the phrase "check your local listings."
That freedom can bring disadvantages. The lack of a consistent national schedule presents additional challenge for PBS' publicity department. It can also result in confusion for viewers if, for example, they read a New York Times article about a show which is said to premiere Tuesday, but which WILL-TV isn't airing until Friday. (This problem is complicated by the many public TV programs which don't even come from PBS, but that's a blog post for another day.)
Over the years, there have been attempts to balance the needs of both PBS and its members. It's understood that individual PTV broadcasters will air certain, higher-profile series and specials on the evening--if not necessarily the exact hour--of the national satellite feed. There are exemptions to that rule to allow programmers flexibility enough to clear the way for a locally-produced show or something else which may be of interest to the specific communities they serve. It's a quirky system, but it generally works. And to give it up would be to turn public television into just another group of "repeater stations."
The upside is that when you call or write WILL-TV, you can communicate directly with me or another member of our programming department. While we may not be able to act on your suggestions or complaints, we do listen to what you say and it helps inform future scheduling decisions. The end result is better customer service and more local accountability, two things we hope you'll agree are important for a community resource.
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