KCET Chief Leads Station Into Expansion Era

Eighteen months after taking the helm at KCET-TV Channel 28, Al Jerome says without a moment’s hesitation that what he’s most proud of is putting plans into place to air live broadcasts of “Life & Times,” the station’s half-hour public-affairs series, five nights a week.

The live broadcasts, which will also include news reports, begin in January. And Jerome--who became president and chief executive officer of Southern California’s flagship public television station after a career spent mostly in commercial broadcasting, mainly at NBC--predicts that “within nine months to a year after that, we’ll go to an hour.”

That had been his original intent. “We did not raise enough money to do an hour--yet,” he said.

Still, those live half-hours will mark the first time in 20 years that the station has had any live presence on weeknights. As the Emmy-winning series goes into its seventh season in September, it will also be the first time that “Life & Times” is fully funded by corporations and foundations, without KCET having to dip into subscriber dollars.

Jerome calls the series “the cornerstone of our effort” to reflect the region’s diversity.

“When I first came here,” Jerome said in an interview at the station on Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood, “I said that what we really wanted to do was to develop distinctive programs that reflected this community. We felt that KCET in some respects had gotten its inspiration from the traditional public stations that were in the East.”

A product of the East who grew up in New York and worked there as president of NBC’s station division from 1982 to 1991, Jerome added: “We wanted to reflect this community’s multiculturalism--and the fact that it was the center of the Hollywood entertainment community.”

Which brings Jerome to his second key programming goal--”bringing original American drama back to public television.” He’s hardly there yet but he has begun “to build links” to Hollywood, which he hopes will result in a production sometime in the 1998-99 season.

As befits Jerome’s sunny, upbeat personality, he says he has no regrets thus far in his tenure at KCET. “It hardly seems like 18 months,” he said. “I told many people, ‘I have not had a bad day since I arrived.’ ”

On his office wall, amid an array of photographs and a welcome resolution from the Los Angeles City Council, is a large poster of the flag of Texas. Previously Jerome was president of SpectraVision in Dallas, providing interactive information and entertainment services to hotels.

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Interactivity and the new telecommunications technologies consume much of Jerome’s attention at KCET too. On Sept. 4, with an $11-million building fund in place, KCET breaks ground on its Educational Telecommunications Center--a project begun by his predecessor, William H. Kobin--which will enable KCET to go digital, and which will become the new home for its Interactive Media Center for teacher training in math and science, and for video-conferencing operations.

Such station activities, not readily apparent to the average viewer at home, will be reflected in a new KCET logo that will be unveiled next month. The logo involves the infinity symbol and the words “Infinitely More.”

“This is the image of the future,” Jerome says. “Our activities are not necessarily going to be confined to the traditional television fare.”

Nevertheless, he’s pushing for KCET to return to its dramatic roots. Once the home of “Hollywood Television Theatre” and “Visions,” the station more recently had been one of the four producing entities on “American Playhouse.” But original drama has been all but abandoned by KCET and PBS as too expensive.

Jerome hopes to find a way around that. On July 1, the station hired Mare Mazur, whose background is in TV movies, as director of drama to develop projects. “She’s reading scripts, looking at venues,” Jerome says, “and we’re having discussions with PBS assessing their interest and addressing funding issues.

“We don’t want to duplicate the work that’s being done in the commercial media,” he emphasized. “We want to do in essence some of the cutting-edge material.”

Such as? Well, they don’t quite know yet. “But we’re looking for those projects,” Jerome notes brightly, “[and] to engage major writers, major actors. If we have an actor who’s been primarily known for comedy roles, we’d love to have that person for a dramatic program. We’re looking to be the research and development arm for these wonderful individuals. . . . We can offer in public television significant creative freedom.”

KCET’s board now contains four Hollywood connections: lawyer Bruce Ramer, financial advisor Jerry Breslauer, former NBC Chairman Grant Tinker and producer Brad Grey. Said Jerome: “They helped us forge our drama initiative and are helpful in giving us some of the sensibilities [needed to] move forward.”

Meanwhile, KCET remains active in children’s programming. In the works are 10 more episodes of “The Puzzle Place,” 13 of “Adventures From the Book of Virtues” and, in association with Shari Lewis’ production company, 40 half-hour episodes over a two-year period of “The Charlie Horse Music Pizza,” a music appreciation series for children ages 2-9.

In performance programming, KCET is presenting nationally another 13 episodes of “On Tour,” an eclectic pop/rock/new age concert series that airs Saturdays at midnight. The station is also working on a local history of Mexican music and on a co-production about Ella Fitzgerald.

KCET’s premier in-house documentarian, Blaine Baggett, who is vice president of production at the station, is developing a series on aviation and one on Woodrow Wilson--as a sequel to “The Great War,” his eight-part series last fall that recently won a Peabody Award and is an Emmy nominee in informational programming.