KCET Gets Its Biggest Grant Ever for Series

Launching its 25th anniversary year, public-television station KCET Channel 28 said Thursday that it has received an unprecedented $5.3-million grant from the W. M. Keck Foundation to produce a six-part series about astronomy.

“The Astronomers,” which the station said will present “the scientists and technologies that are revolutionizing our current knowledge of the universe,” is scheduled for national airing on PBS during the 1990-91 TV season.

“To the best of our knowledge,” said William H. Kobin, KCET’s president and chief executive officer, “this is the largest program grant in (KCET’s) 25 years and the largest in public-television history given by a foundation to a single series.”

With a marked celebrity atmosphere, the announcement was jointly made in KCET’s auditorium by the station executives and Keck Foundation officials.

Howard B. Keck, chairman of the foundation, said he views the grant “as a natural extention of the foundation’s commitment to scientific education. We hope this series will encourage more young people to enter into the study of science. . . .”

David Thomas, chairman of Keck’s Southern California program committee, said the series is “intended to benefit scientific education nationally through the use of television.” He emphasized that the fact that KCET was concentrating heavily on developing educational materials to complement the series was a key reason Keck decided to fund the project.

The subject of the astronomy series immediately invited comparison with KCET’s 13-part series “Cosmos” in 1980. That series, which presented Carl Sagan’s ruminations on the history and nature of the universe, cost about $8 million and brought the station both critical praise and financial grief.

The problem was that KCET launched “Cosmos” before it had lined up sufficient funding and wound up having to put up about $1 million of its own money, which, coupled with other difficulties, eventually helped propel the station to the brink of bankruptcy in 1982.

Kobin, who was hired in 1983 as a result of the management shakeup that the financial crisis engendered and who has led KCET back into the black, was asked whether he was certain the Keck grant could cover the projected cost of “The Astronomers.”

“Absolutely yes,” he responded with confidence. “How do we assume we do not have a budgetary problem? (Because) this budget was developed very, very carefully over a very long period of time.”

Kobin said that the budgetary planning for the series has taken 18 months and includes a carefully worked-out “timetable” for receipt of the money, “so we know we have what we need when we need it.”

Asked further whether there were any plans to go back to Keck for more money or to seek other funders should the need occur, Kobin said: “First of all, the situation will not arise.” But later he did allow that KCET, which took four years to get out of the red, now has a “substantial” reserve fund. He declined to specify how much.

Actual development and production costs on “The Astronomers” will be about $4.6 million. Phyllis Geller, KCET’s vice president for national productions, said that about $300,000 of the Keck grant will go toward the educational support materials. Another $400,000 is earmarked for advertising and promotion.

Blaine Baggett, KCET’s director of national public affairs and producer of its “Secret Intelligence” series now airing on PBS, will serve as executive producer of “The Astronomers.” Production will begin this summer with coverage of the Voyager encounter with the planet Neptune.

The Keck Foundation awarded $70 million to the California Institute of Technology in 1985 to build the world’s most powerful telescope in Hawaii. Its technology will be used in the preparation of the series, Baggett said,

A key adviser for the series will be Edward C. Stone, professor of physics and vice president for astronomical facilities at Caltech. He is also project scientist for the Voyager mission and chairman of the California Assn. for Research in Astronomy, which is building the Keck Observatory.

Baggett, who conceived the idea for the project, said he is “particularly interested in the process of discovery and the struggle of discovery--the struggle of particular human beings. . . . I hope to make it a very human story.”