KCET Plugs Into Local Programming : Television: ‘Life & Times’ is the first five-day-a-week public affairs program the station has produced in 10 years.

Using what KCET Station Manager Stephen Kulczycki calls “a microscopic amount of money,” the public television station plans to launch its first five-day-a-week public affairs program in more than a decade on Monday.

Called “Life & Times” and produced at KCET Channel 28 for $2 million a year, the 7:30 p.m. series is unusual in that three different half-hour formats are being used.

On Mondays, the program will feature a taped studio broadcast with hosts discussing a public affairs issue. The first show, for example, will focus on whether elected officials in Los Angeles are managing the city’s money properly. On Fridays, “Life & Times” will offer a live, in-studio discussion of important events that took place in Southern California during the previous week.

The Monday and Friday shows will be hosted by Hugh Hewitt of KFI-AM radio, Los Angeles Times reporter Patt Morrison and John Ochoa, former director of the Greater Los Angeles Partnership for the Homeless. The segments will also include “video letters to the editor” submitted by viewers.

On Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays, the program will break from the talking-heads format to present documentary-style profiles of Southern Californians. Each program will consist of several segments of varying lengths and each will follow a theme.

This Tuesday, for example, the program will be called “Mariachi” and will feature profiles of East Los Angeles mariachi musicians.

“There’s a whole subculture right around Boyle Street where the mariachis from Mexico go when they first come up here,” said Val Zavala, senior producer in charge of the documentary portion of the series. “There’s a whole apartment building with nothing but single mariachi men living there.”

The concept for “Life & Times,” according to executive producer Jim Kennedy, who is also the station’s director of news and current affairs, is to create a flexible--and affordable--format, within which the station can provide long and short pieces, as well as discussions of current affairs.

“It’s an interesting combination of things we have been wanting to do for a while,” Kennedy said. “Some (subjects) need five minutes, some things need 20 minutes. Some need the studio.”

Kulczycki said that one reason for the eclectic design was to make the program attractive to “zappers,” people who flip through channels with their remote controls, looking for something interesting to watch.

“Hopefully, it will be very browser-friendly,” Kulczycki said. “If you tune in for a minute or a few minutes and it’s not for you, hopefully you will be able to come back to it in a few minutes and find something interesting.”

“Life & Times” is the first local series KCET has produced since its “By the Year 2000” ceased production last July.

Of the $2 million budgeted for this year’s shows, $375,000 will come from a grant from the Irvine Foundation and the rest from its $5.1-million local-programming budget. (KCET’s total operating budget this year is $40 million.) At current funding levels, Kulczycki said, the station plans to produce the in-studio segments throughout the year, but can only afford to produce 48 half-hour episodes of the documentary segments. It will take 16 weeks to air those segments and then they will repeat.

The station has been working since last summer on the documentary portion of “Life & Times,” banking material for future shows, according to Kennedy.

“We started shooting in July, with real limited resources,” Zavala said. “We only have one or two camera crews at any time, so we needed to get an enormous head start.”

Now, she said, there are 28 to 30 documentary episodes in progress. She said that the programs will be meaningful even though they were shot ahead of time.

“These are purely profiles, something along the line of ’60 Minutes’ profiles,” Zavala said. “They can be run year after year and have the same basic appeal.”

Besides airing the profiles at KCET, the station hopes to distribute them to other stations in California and on the West Coast.

Kennedy is glad that “Life & Times” is finally going on the air, ending a six-month period during which the station did not have a local programming presence.

“I’ve had a taste of both the time when we were in our salad days, with ‘California Stories’ and ‘The L.A. History Project,’ and some of the leaner times,” Kennedy said. “Certainly this last year hasn’t been any trip . . . that I want to remember too much.”

Kulczycki said that in addition to “Life & Times,” KCET has plans for a new local children’s series called “Storytime.” The 20-part series, which is fully underwritten, will consist of half-hour programs aimed at encouraging parents to read to their children.

The station is also trying to raise funds for a series about L.A.’s arts community and a special based on “By the Year 2000,” Kulczycki said.