28 at 25 : With its financial crisis tamed, KCET public TV faces the thorny task of programming for an expanding multicultural audience

As scientists at Pasadena’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory tracked Voyager 2 streaking toward Neptune, 2.8 billion miles from Earth, KCET was tracking the astronomers.

The footage of this unprecedented achievement will become part of “The Astronomers,” a six-part series to be broacast on PBS in early 1991. It is being funded with a $5.3-million grant from the W. M. Keck Foundation--the largest grant from a foundation to a single series in the history of public TV.

Not since the $8-million-plus, 13-hour series “Cosmos”--also about astronomy, plus the environment, nuclear issues and the universe--has KCET reached so high. That 1980 series, narrated and co-produced by astronomer Carl Sagan, still ranks as one of the most watched programs on public television. Yet coupled with the fiscal mismanagement of a previous regime, it helped propel KCET to the brink of financial ruin.

But those days now seem far behind, as the Los Angeles station, celebrating its 25th anniversary on Thursday, extends its reach in many directions--literally from the stars to the bowels of County-USC Medical Center. There producer Claudia Bryant, whose crackerjack personality mirrors Holly Hunter’s character in the movie “Broadcast News,” recently taped interviews for “In Poor Health,” an installment of KCET’s sole, locally produced weekly series, “By the Year 2000.” The issue-oriented series is KCET’s newest entry in the public-affairs arena.

Hospital officials, citing patient privacy, denied Bryant permission to film or interview anywhere in the hospital except inside offices or out in the street. Still, KCET got undercover footage inside the hospital. (The documentary, about health-care delivery to the poor, aired last Wednesday).

Bryant reported that David Langness, vice president of the Hospital Council of Southern California, claimed there are preventable deaths at County-USC. “It happens quietly because people don’t like to talk about it, and it happens one by one so it never becomes a big crisis. It’s not like an airplane disaster or a massive car pileup, although many more people die as a result,” Langness said.

In the early ‘80s, “in poor health” would have described KCET. Wracked by a $5.5-million debt in 1982, the station work force was reduced by one-third, local programming became a token presence and national programming was virtually wiped out. Since then, Channel 28 has struggled to re-establish itself as a programming force for Southern California viewers and with the national PBS network.

Facing increasing competition from cable TV and besieged by a multitude of community voices insisting that it cover everything from astronomy to health-care issues, KCET has persevered. Channel 28’s annual budget still lags far behind its counterparts in New York and Boston, but it is higher than the nation’s other 327 public-TV stations.

“You forget about history, but there is history, and history is important,” says William H. Kobin, KCET’s president and chief executive officer, 60. “For several years, KCET and WGBH (in Boston) and WNET (in New York) were really going along parallel tracks. And then KCET hit a stone wall and the others kept on going. We were on the mat. We had to get up from the mat.”

Anniversaries may be celebrations, but they also spark critical reviews. In the case of KCET--the CET stands for Community Educational Television--the anniversary has invited re-examination of the past, posed critical questions about the present and raised concerns about the future.

In 6 1/2 years under Kobin--a former news producer at CBS and ABC and a longtime public-television executive--KCET’s budget has nearly tripled, from $15 million to $44.4 million. Those gross revenues--from subscribers, corporate and foundation underwriters and government agencies--will top the $38.5 million of WETA in Washington and trail only WNET ($104 million) and WGBH ($97 million).

Meanwhile, viewership has jumped from an average of 1.5 million households watching the station for at least 15 minutes every week to 2.6 million households during the Kobin years. Subscribers (those viewers who now contribute $40 or more a year) have increased from 200,000 to 325,000. Moreover, KCET has been debt-free for three years.

So with all this good news, some critics ask, why don’t local viewers have more to see for it? With the Southern California population overflowing, the freeways clogging, the pollution rising, the technology becoming ever more sophisticated, the ethnic makeup transforming, is KCET providing enough community programming? Is “By the Year 2000” enough?

Why is local news limited to two minutes of headlines following “The MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour,” asks Jeffrey Kaye, a senior producer at KCET and a correspondent for “MacNeil/Lehrer.”

“The stealth bomber controversy in L.A., drug babies, AIDS in the local prison--we’ve done (those stories) for ‘MacNeil/Lehrer,’ ” Kaye says. “(But) they should have been part and parcel of ongoing and comprehensive coverage of (KCET’s) community. What I did was boil them down for (a 3 1/2-minute segment on the now-defunct) ‘7:30.’ We don’t have any news coverage, and that’s a shame. There used to be ’28 Tonight,’ a week-nightly half hour, then ‘Newsbeat.’ ”

Whatever happened to the programming targeted to Los Angeles’ multiethnic populations, asks Esther Renteria, a member of the steering committee of the National Hispanic Media Coalition. She says that, during the course of two meetings with KCET’s top executives in recent months, she told Kobin that “people in our community refer to KCET as ‘BBC West.’ ” (See accompanying article on Page 82.)

Is KCET making sufficient use of the pool of available Hollywood talent, asks Norman Lloyd, who was executive producer of KCET’s acclaimed “Hollywood Television Theatre” during the 1970s. At an event honoring the station in July, he said, “So hats off to the management of KCET for having delivered that miracle of (fiscal) stability. And if KCET had been saved . . . might not this purpose be to carry on in the tradition of ‘Hollywood Television Theatre,’ ‘Visions’? . . . Here in Los Angeles is a rich pool of talent waiting to go to work.”

In the broadest sense, some question whether KCET possesses vision.

As independent producer Jon Wilkman, who did the six-part series “Turning Points”for KCET four years ago and the first four “Los Angeles History Project” programs last year, put it: “There’s so much emphasis just put on being fiscally sound that there’s very little energy left to think about programming. . . . There is a great deal of caution, reticence or hesitation about not doing anything that’s controversial or expensive. . . . They have wonderful management skills, and no vision. Maybe they have it, and haven’t said it yet.”

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KCET, of course, doesn’t see it that way. Indeed, Kobin has an official “mission” statement that says the station should “be a leader in the broadcast, production and distribution of bold, original programs which inspire viewers, enrich their lives and make KCET an essential and trusted resource.”

Under Kobin and the senior programming vice presidents--Stephen Kulczycki for local programming, Phylis Geller for national--KCET has made considerable gains in original production. Local productions have won 40 Emmys, and have ranged from hard-hitting “KCET Journal” documentaries to “Eleanor: In Her Own Words” (starring Lee Remick and based on the writings and speeches of Eleanor Roosevelt) to “The El Salvador Debates” between government and guerrilla leaders to the magic of “Penn and Teller Go Public.” Meanwhile, the station has gone from producing 3 1/2 hours of programming for distribution on PBS in the 1983 season to more than 21 hours this past season, including the four-hour “Secret Intelligence,” detailing the history of the CIA and the FBI; “The Meeting,” a one-act play about an imaginary encounter between Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr.; a new mounting of the drama “Raisin in the Sun,” and the movie “Stand and Deliver.”

Enhancing the station’s position as a major national player is its membership in public TV’s major production consortia: “American Playhouse,” the system’s 7-year-old dramatic series; “Wonderworks,” the nearly 5-year-old family series; the more recent Pacific Rim Co-Production Assn. and “P.O.V,” begun last summer as a vehicle to showcase the work of independent producers.

KCET says it will spend $9.7 million on national programming and staff this year. Nearly all of that--including more than $3 million of “Astronomers” money--comes from the funders of specific projects. With the rarest of exceptions, KCET has vowed not to use community-generated money for national programming.

Geller says KCET wants an “eclectic” mix in its national productions, from humor to public affairs. Believing that what was missing in public TV was humor--not the sitcom variety but a kind of dark-tinged comedy dealing with survival chronicles of modern life, Geller helped launch “Trying Times” in 1987 with creator/producer Jon S. Denny. The first batch of six shows were written by such playwrights as Beth Henley, Christopher Durang and Wendy Wasserstein-- “before she won the Pulitzer,” notes Geller. Six more will begin airing Oct. 15--without corporate underwriting. “Comedy being quirky, ‘Trying Times’ being particularly quirky, it’s not what you would expect (the) private sector” to fund, she told reporters in July.

To boost its public-affairs presence, KCET in 1985 hired Blaine Baggett, who had just produced the PBS series “Spaceflight.” “I hope before too long,” says Baggett, executive producer of “The Astronomers,” “Secret Intelligence” and “The U.S. and the Philippines,” “the guys in Washington say, ‘Wouldn’t it really be nice to have a major public-affairs resource somewhere other than the East Coast?’ ”

Still, KCET has no regular weekly presence on PBS. “I’d love a serial drama; that’s one of my dreams,” says Geller.

On the local front, KCET offers one hour of station-produced programming a week.

It consists of 30 minutes on Wednesdays of “By the Year 2000,” 10 minutes of nightly “Newsline” headlines and 20 minutes of “Take Five”--five-minute programs at 7:30 p.m. dealing with arts and culture (Monday), science and society (Tuesday), “talk-back” or viewer response to station programming (Thursday) and Huell Howser’s breezy “Videolog” (Friday).

The weekly schedule is augmented by specials. “By the Year 2000” expands to 90 minutes quarterly; the first of these longer editions, “Healing the Sick,” airs Wednesday. Arts and science features expand to an hour twice a year. In addition, KCET has produced four new half-hour “L.A. History Project” programs. Its second season begins next month with “Valor,” on Mexican-American veterans of World War II. And there will be two “KCET Journals,” one on AIDS and one yet to be determined. KCET’s most consistent local broadcast arrives Dec. 24 with its live airing of the annual Christmas program from the Music Center.

Kobin seems proudest of “By the Year 2000” because it treats “the incredibly complex and absolutely critical problems that must be dealt with by the turn of the century.”

He knows that may strike some people as dull. “ Look , that’s the dilemma and fascination of public television. How do you take political, economic, social problems, difficult subject matter, and present it in a way that isn’t dull? . . . But how can you not try ?”

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Altogether, the station now spends $3.2 million of the $25.8 million it has in discretionary funds--money that did not come in earmarked for a specific program or other use--on local programming. That figure includes production staff salaries. (Another $2.4 million it has won in grants for specific programs boosts local programming to $5.6 million.)

Is one hour a week and $3.2 million of its own money good enough, Kobin was asked? “No,” he said.

Why not more? “Money,” he replied. ‘

But the station is doing so well? “We have tried to figure out, the old cliche, how to get the biggest bang for the buck. We have not tried to figure out how to get the largest number of TV programs on the air every week. . . . If that (volume count) was the goal, we could throw a helluva lot of hours on the air. . . .”

Not counting special programming, WNET in New York says it airs six hours of local production a week; WGBH in Boston does 3 1/2 hours on its main channel and broadcasts the proceedings of the Massachusetts Legislature on the second channel; WQED in Pittsburgh has an hour and a half on its main channel and 16 1/2 hours more on its second channel; WTTW in Chicago does about four hours a week, and WETA in Washington and KQED in San Francisco each program an hour a week.

Meanwhile, WTTW in Chicago, WNET in New York and WGBH in Boston do a half-hour of local news each weeknight. Chicago and Boston each say the news costs $2 million a year. Kobin insists it would cost too much here. “It would take every dime we’ve got . . . to do a show every night and have the budget to do it sufficiently well to compete on that screen with all the other channels covering news in this town.”

According to KCET, 56% of its $44.1-million expense budget goes to production and broadcasting, including buying programs from PBS and other sources and the making of educational programs; last year the figure was 52%. Of the other 44% of the budget, KCET says, 17% is for fund raising and marketing; 12% is administrative; 8% is for building support and 7% is for promotion and advertising. Salaries in each area are included in these numbers. Broken out separately by the station, the 281 staff members plus an assortment of temporary and per diem personnel account for about a third of the budget.

Kobin said he didn’t know how those numbers compare to the other major public stations. “I haven’t got the slightest idea. I really don’t follow the breakdowns of other stations to this degree. . . . It seems to me that the basic point is that our production and broadcasting percentage is going up. Obviously, as we do that, the other percentages will go down.”

Asked why the station can’t spend more than 56% of its budget on programming, Kobin replied: “We have a total station to run, and we have limited discretionary money. We have a finance department, a legal department with growing fixed costs like the FCC (Federal Communications Commission), union negotiations, etc. We have growing office space needs. Because our productions are increasing, we have to go out and rent space for production units.

“We have increased development department costs; it costs more to raise money,” Kobin said. “We have increased public information costs because we’ve got to promote the programs. We have incredible increases in things like insurance--medical insurance is unbelievable--we’re trying to figure out how to replace a failing air conditioning system which drove us out of our minds all year. . . .”

Perhaps because local programming expenditures have not climbed as significantly as national--in large part because the national projects tend to generate more funding from other stations, corporations and foundations--KCET has often introduced new programs at the expense of old. Its highly regarded “KCET Journals,” for example, have dropped from a high of seven to two.

“In order to do something new,” Kobin insists, “we can’t continue doing the same volume plus new programming. . . . I think one of the things we are here for is to try new things. I really believe we should have something big and new ever year (even) if that means dropping some things.”

Kulczycki notes that “KCET Journal” cost about $250,000 for each segment and rarely was it underwritten.

“One of the aspects of keeping our programming efforts moving into the future,” he explains, “was to have some success in fund-raising forums. Not the sole, not the first--but it’s one of the criteria of success. . . . We’re constantly going back and forth between doing what we believe ought to be done . . . and trying to figure out a way to keep from going broke.”

Some critics question whether the station, like public television at large, tends to favor safer, even-handed, less controversial programming so it can get corporate underwriting. KCET officials flatly deny this contention. Yet the perception persists.

“My impression is that Kobin and Kulczycki, as part of their financial responsibility, want to have funding as much as possible in advance,” said a KCET producer who did not wish to be named. “If by wanting to have everything funded, what are they not going to be programming? There may be a self-censorship involved.”

Jim Kennedy, an administrator at UCLA Extension and former executive producer of “California Stories,” noted that “corporations in particular don’t normally like to give money to investigative and public-affairs journalism. . . . You can’t ask hard questions with your mouth and then have your hand in someone’s wallet.”

Peter Graumann, a former KCET producer who now works for public station KQED in San Francisco, said that while KCET gave him a chance to do some of the best work he’s ever done, including the 1986 “Crimes of Neglect,” about Los Angeles’ homeless, “public TV tends to act too much like a bureaucracy. There is too much concern with not rocking the boat.”

“It drives me up a wall--cause and effect,” Kobin responds. “Because some corporations, even most corporations, are not interested in most controversial programs, it does not follow that we are not interested in making them. . . . ‘What controversial program have you done lately?’ is the question,” he added, “and I just never think of programs that way. I just think of what we ought to do, and we do ‘em. Some are controversial and some are not. . . . “

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Viewers look at their public TV station “through their own lenses,” says Stephen Kulczycki, and everyone complains. That, notes Kobin, is because it’s public television. “Public TV belongs to the publics. And everybody’s got a piece of us. Many, many constituencies justifiably feel we have an obligation to focus on their needs and interests.”

Meanwhile, he follows his own vision. He sees the station doubling its budget within five years, and to accomplish that he’s putting a full-time employee in New York to compete for corporate funding. He recently launched a five-year, $50-million campaign to construct a new broadcast center and bolster production.

And if to some KCET might seem a bit schizophrenic--relatively consistent in its airing of PBS national programming such as “Frontline” and “Great Performances” and yet inconsistent in its local productions, trying out one series, then tossing it out for another--that’s because Kobin is ever searching for new programs, new series, new formats.

“The riskiest thing you can do in TV,” says Kobin, “is to try new formats and news series. Everybody’s out there waiting to shoot you down. People get used to watching what they’ve been watching and don’t want to see something new. And people who like doing what they’ve been doing don’t want to stop.

“I love ballet. I used to go, when I was very young, to a series at the YMHA in New York on Sunday afternoons. And I remember Walter Terry, dance critic for the Herald-Tribune, asking (George) Balanchine what his favorite ballet was of all those he ever choreographed. Balanchine stopped for a minute and said: ‘Ballets are like butterflies. Butterflies are very beautiful. But who wants to look at last year’s butterfly?’ ”