The Public Season

By Richard Burgheim

In trumpeting the start of its new season last week, television's educational network, now known as the Public Broadcasting Service, found a way for the first time to reach a significant national audience in prime evening hours: it bought $650,000 worth of promotion spots on the three commercial networks. As a part of its nouveau big-league image, PBS grandiloquently billed itself as the "New Face of Television" and commissioned an expensive-looking logo with an anthropomorphic P--a sort of CBS eye with a brain.

The PBS premieres last week did not quite deliver on the promise of an "exciting new world of television." They did, however, amply demonstrate both the exhilarating possibilities and exasperating problems of public television. HOLLYWOOD TELEVISION THEATER, an occasional PBS special in the past, emerges this fall as a weekly feature. It capitalizes on first-rank actors who are between movies. Last week's premiere featured Anne Jackson and Eli Wallach in Murray Schisgal's The Typists, a talky tragicomedy about two white-collar mediocrities spilling out the empty cup of their lives. The high night of the season should come next month with Jack MacGowran's readings from Beckett; instead of remounting the show on the stark set designed for its off-Broadway run last year, PBS is spectacularly but improbably staging the work in the Mojave Desert.

SPECIAL OF THE WEEK, PBS's Monday-night alternative to pro football and Laugh-In, opened with a documentary by Fred Wiseman, the most accomplished director of the cinema verite genre (Titicut Follies, Hospital). This time, in Basic Training, he focused on the rigors and the ridiculousness of boot camp in the summer of 1970 at Fort Knox, but he neglected to report the substantial reforms that have swept over the Army since. The result is an engrossing film but failed journalism. This week the PBS Special is a revival of the 1965 off-Broadway work Hogan's Goat, which gave the world Faye Dunaway. Faye is back, and, while William Alfred's blank-verse melodrama about turn-of-the-century Irish-American politics may not be a stage classic, it is a rich adornment to the 19-in. screen. THIS WEEK aims to avoid the primarily headline news service of the commercial networks and to concentrate its entire half-hour on one story. The anchor man is Bill Moyers, previously Lyndon Johnson's press secretary and publisher of Long Island's Newsday. In his opening program, Moyers covered the South Vietnamese election by talking in person to far-flung individual voters and wound up with an unexceptionable yet totally predictable and unprovocative piece of journalism. MASQUERADE, an anthology of improvisations from children's fables, was the major embarrassment of the PBS premieres. The gentle whimsy and fantasy of the original tales withers in a broad, shrill production better suited to the Minsky circuit. Kids of all ages would call it a vulgar rip-off from the Story Theater (TIME, March 1), which has been far more sensitively translated to TV by Creator Paul Sills in a syndicated commercial series. CRITIC-AT-LARGE is a quarter-hour with Berkeley Associate Professor of Journalism David Littlejohn, 34, putting his bite, or perhaps overbite, on subjects ranging from Stravinsky to TV Guide, Disneyland to Solzhenitsyn. Like so much of public TV, Critic-at-Large is just a video version of a show just as well left to radio.

BLACK JOURNAL, heretofore a monthly hour, becomes a weekly half-hour for 1971-72. As Executive Producer Tony Brown declared in a prologue last week, the series is devoted to "black journalism, which, in its search for the truth, may frequently run counter to white journalism. One thing that black people need is education that will enable us to love our beautiful black selves." The premiere was an admiring look at black-run Guyana.

The rest of this fall's PBS lineup includes a reprise of Lord Kenneth Clark's Civilisation and a continuation of the BBC's Masterpiece Theater. The opening Masterpiece production is a felicitous, six-week serialization of Jude the Obscure, which, except for the gloom-struck overview of Thomas Hardy, is a sort of high-class Peyton Place. The Lucy of public TV, Julia Child, is also back in a new 26-part series on French cuisine, "designed," she says, "as a refresher course for experienced cooks and as a jet-assist take-off for beginners."

PBS's continuing public affairs series include The Advocates, a mock-trial show grappling with nettlesome subjects like last week's "Should the Government drop charges against Dr. Daniel Ellsberg?" Top-level advocates are always on the dock (the premiere about Ellsberg featured ex-Senator Ernest Gruening and Professor Noam Chomsky), but in the past the program has as often sensationalized or trivialized public debate as it has illuminated it.

The brightest of PBS's established series, The Great American Dream Machine, has been wisely cut from 90 minutes to a more manageable one hour this year. But opening night--which aired some particularly imaginative segments, notably two charming cartoons and a droll sketch of a Mississippi crop duster--abruptly ended after 45 minutes in a foofaraw symptomatic of public TV's major ailment in the U.S. Since PBS and its producers get much of their financing from the Federal Government, and since this funding is not insulated from querulous annual scrutiny, the network quakes at the least cavil from the Administration or Congress. Last week, after a complaining letter from J. Edgar Hoover, PBS timorously ordered the deletion of a Dream Machine segment that accused the FBI of hiring operatives to foment bombing in order to entrap left-wing coconspirators. The material was not daringly muckraking in that both NBC and the New York Times had months earlier published interviews with one of the men who made the accusation. Later in the week, public TV's newly enterprising New York City channel, WNET, produced a fascinating behind-the-news special which included the segment in question and a panel of the principals and outside journalists arguing the wisdom of the PBS decision; apparently chastened by all the discussion, PBS at the last minute transmitted the WNET special for other network stations interested in carrying it.

Most other major public networks in the free world are guaranteed their funding and are therefore more independent of their governments than PBS so far has been. If its bureaucratized and politicized management continues to bow meekly to pressure, as it did last week, PBS might as well give up its bold new logo and perhaps adopt something like a plucked version of the old NBC peacock. That is, a chicken.

--Richard Burgheim

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