Celebrating 50 Years of PBS (Made Possible By Viewers Like You)

The good-natured, big-hearted show that takes place "where the air is sweet" has been teaching children about the great wide world around them since 1969. The series was an instant ratings and critical smash, earning three Emmys and the prestigious Peabody Award after its first season on the air. It quickly became PBS’ signature series. After all, whenever grouchy D.C. legislators try to cut the network’s funding, they’re always accused of "wanting to kill Big Bird."

Most political panel shows nowadays play like competitive shouting matches, so it’s nice to still have “Washington Week” hosting civilized debate fifty years after its debut. Political journalist Paul Duke left NBC to host the show in 1974, and wound up moderating the spirited, but (mostly) polite discourse for twenty years. For younger viewers, “Washington Week” is best known as the former home of the late, great Gwen Ifill, who hosted the show from 1999 until 2016. The Washington Post’s Robert Costa is now at the helm.

“This Old House” was one of the first home improvement shows on television when it debuted in 1979, and it quickly became the most recognizable and trusted program of its type. It certainly didn’t hurt that its original host, Bob Vila, was personable, knowledgeable and, let’s be honest, kinda handsome! The show inspired a nation of armchair handymen to strap on a tool kit and do thousands of dollars of inadvertent property damage to their home.

The pride of Latrobe, Pennsylvania, Fred Rogers was without question the nicest man in the history of the world. The ordained Presbyterian minister got his start in broadcasting in 1954 as a puppeteer for Pittsburgh public television’s “The Children’s Corner.” The show that would become “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood” started out on the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation in the mid-1960s, but didn’t become must-watch children’s programming until it his PBS in 1968, where it taught kids to be decent human beings until 2001. 

This hugely beloved show was hosted by actor LaVar Burton from 1983 to 2006, and taught children of all colors and creeds the simple, yet immense pleasure of reading a book. Burton brought on famous guests like Madeline Kahn, James Earl Jones and Burton’s Starship Enterprise captain Patrick Stewart to read stories and share their love of reading. The show won Emmys and a Peabody award during its twenty-three years on PBS. 

It might be a little disingenuous to claim that “Evening at Pops” helped get a new generation of music fans into classical music, but when conductor John Williams took over the baton in 1979, the showcase for the Boston Pops Orchestra attracted more than a few young fans of the composer’s instant-classic scores for “Jaws,” “Star Wars” and “Superman.” The series began airing in 1970 with conductor Arthur Fiedler and ran for thirty-five years.

The brilliant and hugely influential sketch comedy series was just rapping up its four-season BBC run in 1974 when PBS stations across the United States began sharing memorable bits like “Dead Parrot,” “How Not to Be Seen” and “The Lumberjack Song” with teenagers and college students. The show caught on immediately. By the time “Monty Python and the Holy Grail” hit theaters in 1975, the Python lads were a comedy sensation.

The long-running British science-fiction series was already a decade into its BBC run when it began popping up on PBS in the 1970s. Long before Russell T. Davies and Steven Moffat transformed the show into a slickly produced mainstream hit in the 2000s, “Doctor Who” was a decidedly lo-fi affair. The adventures of the Time-Lord via his police box called the TARDIS, the show appealed to the nerd’s nerd, making cult heroes out of actors Jon Pertwee and Tom Baker.

“HEY, YOU GUYS!!!” For a criminally brief six seasons spanning 1971 to 1977, “The Electric Company” acted as the hip, older sibling of “Sesame Street”, teaching kids how to read and write with the help of “Easy Reader” (Morgan Freeman), Millie the Helper (Rita Moreno) and Fargo North, Decoder (Skip Hinnant). How cool was “The Electric Company?” It was created by Paul Dooley, who was practically a surrogate father to millions of Gen X-ers thanks to his iconic dad roles in “Breaking Away” and “Sixteen Candles.” 

Since 1971, the familiar strains of Mouret’s “Fanfare-Rondeau” have meant one of two things: someone’s getting married or PBS is serving up some high culture via “Masterpiece Theatre.” Hosted by Alistair Cooke until 1992, the series was frequently ridiculed for its tastefully stiff dramatizations of novels and biographies, but it was also the network’s delivery system for some of the finest (mostly British) television dramas of all time. It was through “Masterpiece Theatre” that Americans got to see “I, Claudius,” “Upstairs, Downstairs,” and “The Jewel in the Crown.”

Robert MacNeil and Jim Lehrer were brought together by PBS in 1973 to report on the United States Senate’s Watergate hearings, and they did such tremendously thorough work that the network gave them their own show in 1975 (initially titled “The MacNeil/Lehrer Report.”) The show generally aired at 7 PM following the networks’ nightly news broadcasts, and offered a more in-depth analysis of the day’s most important stories (which meant you had to go in the other room to watch “Entertainment Tonight.”) MacNeil retired in 1995, at which point it was retitled “The NewsHour With Jim Lehrer.” When Lehrer departed in 2009, it became simply the “PBS NewsHour” with co-hosts Gwen Ifill and Judy Woodruff.

PBS’s premiere showcase for the performing arts, “Great Performances” began airing in 1972, and continues to broadcast artistically significant plays, ballets, operas and select concerts to this day. The series is best known for airing the serialized 1981 ITV adaptation of “Brideshead Revisited” starring Jeremy Irons, Claire Bloom, John Gielgud and, in an Emmy-winning performance as Lord Marchmain, Sir Laurence Olivier.

The former White House Press Secretary for President Lyndon Johnson, Bill Moyers segued to public television in 1971 with “Bill Moyers Journal.” Moyers quickly became America’s Favorite Liberal, producing a number of award-winning series for PBS like “Joseph Campbell and the Power of Myth,” the Iran-Contra affair-inspired “The Secret Government: The Constitution in Crisis” and the high-minded interview series “A World of Ideas.” 

Like many of PBS’ best ideas, “Nova” was inspired by a popular BBC series – in this instance, the science program “Horizon.” The show was a co-production early on, but gradually became exclusive to WGBH in Boston. The show has won a multitude of Emmys for providing deep, yet accessible insight into the reproductive process (you might’ve watched “The Miracle of Life” in high school), string theory (“The Elegant Universe”) and manmade climate change (“The Climate Crisis” and, most recently, “Lethal Seas”).

Issue One: Did "The McLaughlin Group" pave the way for our cursed modern age of shouty political punditry? Yes! Issue Two: Would the state of broadcast news be in better shape had it never existed? Most likely. Issue Three: Are we glad it existed if only for the amazing "Saturday Night Live" sketches featuring Dana Carvey as the abrasive moderator? On a scale of one to ten, one being "Hell no," ten being a full-throated "Jack Germond?" Let's say it together: "JACK GERMOND!"

Since its series premiere in 1974, “Austin City Limits” has cemented the titular Texas city as the “Live Music Capital of the World.” The show kicked off in 1975 with a taped performance by Willie Nelson, and it’s been broadcasting an eclectic mix of American popular music for forty-two years. It seems like every genre has been showcased on this long-running series: country, rock, folk, soul, bluegrass… even industrial acts like Nine Inch Nails have been beamed into American homes under the ACL banner.

This limited series from the great astrophysicist Carl Sagan ran a scant thirteen episodes, and for many still stands as one of the finest works of science non-fiction ever broadcast. Sagan’s “personal voyage” started by pondering the imponderable vastness of the universe and its “billions and billions” of stars, and then ended with the sobering question, “Who speaks for Earth?” The series was edifying, challenging and, ultimately, hopeful that humankind could come together in a shared love for life.

PBS is often written off as a network for eggheads, but for the last sixteen years it’s also catered to gearheads with “MotorWeek.” It’s a far cry from BBC’s rowdy “Top Gear;” on “MotorWeek,” you get fairly meat-and-potatoes reviews of new cars, some helpful maintenance advice from Pat Goss and general news on the automotive industry. You won’t get to see Michael Gambon nearly flip a Suzuki Liana, but, by god, you’ll find out how this year’s Ford Escorts handle when driven at a reasonable speed in a residential neighborhood!

Now in its thirty-fifth season, “Nature” gets lost in the shuffle thanks to the never-ending deluge of animal shows on all the animal networks. It was a lot easier to stand out when your only real competition was Merlin Perkins trying to get poor Jim Fowler mauled by a lion on “Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom.” But the show is still valuable. While other nature programs play up predator/prey drama or unbearably cute animal shtick, this pillar of the PBS schedule takes a necessarily serious approach to endangered species and conservation efforts. 

When “Frontline” hit the airwaves in 1983, it was intended to be a showcase for the journalistic talents of rising network news star Jessica Savitch. Alas, Savitch perished in a car wreck later that year, leaving the hosting duties to Judy Woodruff, who introduced deep-dive investigations that played like mini-documentaries. Eventually, the show dedicated the entirety of its runtime to a single topic, and it quickly became one of PBS’ most provocative shows. “Frontline” was one of the first news shows to take al Qaeda seriously with its 1999 documentary “Hunting bin Laden.”

This biographical study of great American artists (“native-born and adopted”) is delightfully unpredictable when it comes to its selection of subjects. Most of the major artists, authors and musicians have been examined since the show’s debut in 1986, but they’ve also made room for less-well-known talents such as folkie Phil Ochs, photographer André Kertész and acting teacher Sanford Meisner. “American Masters” also knows the value of a good laugh, hence their predilection for comic masterminds like Mel Brooks.

In which people show up with an old family heirloom or piece of furniture, and hope to hell it’s worth several thousand dollars more than they could’ve ever imagined. The show started on the BBC in 1979, and eventually got its own U.S. spinoff for PBS in 1997. It’s hard to say what’s more entertaining: someone finding out a random painting is worth six figures, or some overconfident doofus finding out grandma’s tea set is barely worth the price of the trash bag they should throw it in.

The toxic “Barney & Friends” began teaching kids that life is free of sadness and conflict in 1992, and we’ve been dealing with the repercussions ever since. The big purple dinosaur comes off as Bullwinkle J. Moose minus the subversive sense of humor, but it’s his dopey “I love you, you love me…” mantra that renders him truly loathsome. Remember how “Sesame Street” dealt so sensitively with the death of Mr. Hooper? If Baby Bop up and died, Barney would just emit that godforsaken dim-witted chuckle and tell the kids how much fun she’s having as a crude commodity.

No network has done more for documentary filmmaking than PBS, and, since 1988, “P.O.V.” has been an essential showcase for the very best the genre has to offer. The series offers a well-balanced mix of popular docs (e.g. “Roger & Me” and “Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmakers Apocalypse”) and lesser-known gems (like the teenage boxing film “In My Corner” or Kazuhiro Soda’s “Campaign”, a fascinating study of Japanese politics). 

Before they were quarreling in syndication, Chicago-based film critics Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert developed and perfected the art of televised movie-buff bickering on “Sneak Previews” While the invective was certainly part of the fun, the show was most valuable when Gene and Roger used their nationally broadcast platform to champion barely-released indies like “The Return of the Secaucus Seven,” “Gates of Heaven” and the British gangster flick “The Long Good Friday.” We give “Sneak Previews” two enthusiastic thumbs up! 

Over forty million people watched Ken Burns’s “The Civil War” when it aired over the last week of September 1991. It’s still the most-watched show in PBS history, and, given today’s viewing habits, probably always will be. The plaintive instrumental “Ashokan Farewell” sets the somber tone for this historical tour de force that recounts the nation’s bloodiest chapter via correspondence, letters, speeches and music. It is an essential work of American art, and quite possibly PBS’ defining achievement.