A Network’s Mastery Has Gone to Pieces

It picked up a new series for teenagers, put up ads in the New York subway and even gave away promotional T-shirts at Florida spring break sites.

And how have viewers rewarded the Public Broadcasting Service for these efforts?

Well, in February, for example, they tuned in en masse--to watch “Antiques Roadshow” and a special chronicling Queen Elizabeth’s 50 years on the British throne.

The broadcasting service that a generation ago brought America such high-toned melodramas as “I, Claudius” and “Upstairs, Downstairs” is living through a tense drama of its own lately.

Its prime-time ratings have hit historic lows, the median age of its viewers is a demographically unappealing 55, and it is fighting for its place--some would say its life--in a television landscape full of better-funded cable copycats such as A&E; and Discovery. Even Britain’s BBC, while it still has close PBS ties, has launched its own U.S. channel. And a looming $1.8-billion conversion to digital transmission threatens to add complexity and confusion to the situation by turning each PBS outlet into as many as four channels.

In the middle of the fray is Pat Mitchell, the respected and well-connected producer hired from CNN Productions two years ago to tackle the problems.

She and her team have launched a host of initiatives. They bought a failed but acclaimed Fox series for teenagers, “American High,” and rescued “American Family,” one of the first dramas to feature a Latino family, when CBS dropped it. A new Friday night public affairs series, “Now With Bill Moyers,” is helping PBS respond quickly to the news and has forged a partnership with noncommercial National Public Radio. Signature series switched nights they had occupied for a decade or more, as PBS tried to be savvy about counterprogramming its competition.

With deep roots in Hollywood (she counts Robert Redford, Jane Fonda and Glenn Close as friends), Mitchell spent her first year actively embracing the PBS system, traveling nonstop to stations. She convened summits at Redford’s Sundance Institute, where stations and producers hammered out common goals and she pushed them to ban the word “dysfunctional,” a frequent adjective applied to public TV. At the June 2001 annual meeting in Philadelphia, she dramatically asked station executives to sign a “Declaration of Interdependence” set up on oversized boards.

Despite her quick and aggressive start in the job, prime-time ratings for 2001’s fourth quarter were the lowest in PBS history, attracting just 1.7% of the nation’s TV homes on average, and haven’t moved much since. The new shows haven’t drawn the large new audiences executives hoped, despite some of PBS’ biggest promotional campaigns ever, including the New York subway ads and the T-shirt giveaways. Worse, viewers tuned out schedule stalwarts such as “American Experience.” What viewers still seem to prefer is the old-style programming, preferably with a British accent.

Culture Clashes Occur Inside the Network

Mitchell herself has questioned whether their decline signals that PBS’ future is at stake.

“Not only are we not top of mind, we are dangerously close in our overall prime-time number to falling below the relevance quotient,” she told public TV programmers in a closed February meeting. “And if that happens, we will surely fall below any arguable need for government support, not to mention corporate or individual support. There is a level beyond which we cannot go and still claim to be a universal service.”

Mitchell has found many of her initiatives stymied by a deep internal culture clash, pitting those who would push PBS to adopt more real-world survival strategies against those who fear that core viewers are being driven away and that the system’s uniqueness and even noncommercial mission are under siege.

“Frankly, I had no idea how hard it was going to be,” Mitchell said in an interview from her office in Alexandria. “A lot of constituencies have a lot of investment in keeping things the way they are, and that builds in a resistance to change.”

PBS still has a role in the TV universe, particularly for the 20% of viewers who don’t have cable or satellite services, said Robert Thompson, a professor of media and pop culture at Syracuse University. But cable viewers have many other choices, he said, leaving Mitchell with the difficult task of remolding PBS while at the same time not alienating core viewers. And the brand itself is complicated.

“On one level PBS carries with it incredibly powerful images of ‘MacNeil/Lehrer,’ Big Bird, ‘Sesame Street’ and Bill Moyers.... There are some real icons. It can also mean pretentious, slow, stodgy, self-consciously educational,” Thompson said. Mitchell and her team, he added, “need to cash in on the brand value PBS has, and at the same time they have to try to break out of it. The two goals are contradictory.”

Financial Show Missteps Provide Object Lesson

A revamping of “Wall Street Week With Louis Rukeyser,” in the works for a year, should have been a relatively easy step, but it turned into a public relations fiasco and an object lesson in the inherent difficulties in the PBS system.

The program had languished largely unchanged for its 32 years, even as it slipped to being PBS’ lowest-rated prime-time series. Mitchell says it was one of the first programs she was asked by member stations to tackle.

PBS and Maryland Public Television, which produces the show, tried to work with Rukeyser, 69. He resisted, describing the efforts in one internal e-mail as a “wrongheaded crusade to depreciate us.” His lawyer, Richard Hofstetter, said producers were never specific about what changes they wanted.

The producers brought in Fortune magazine as a partner anyway. Rukeyser claimed he had been sandbagged, dramatically appealed on air to viewers and was promptly fired--wrongly, Hofstetter said. His ouster provoked an outpouring of complaints. Donors and local corporate underwriters pulled out.

“On any rational level it was probably about time to update that show,” said Thompson. But viewers rebelled, he said, because, “in the average American home, PBS has got this reputation of old-fashioned, stodgy stability.” Just as with the recent outcry over ABC’s possible cancellation of “Nightline,” he said, many viewers “want the comfort that they’re there, but they don’t want to actually watch them.”

Mitchell said she was “extremely disappointed in the lies and misrepresentations [Rukeyser] put forth.” But her disappointment extends to some of her own PBS stations, 119 of whom defied her appeals and are airing a new Rukeyser program--taking shows he is now doing for commercial cable’s CNBC and rebroadcasting them. “He defamed and devalued public television,” said Mitchell. “I was shocked and disappointed that public television stations chose to put him on the air given that he chose to do that.”

“We’re not out to get public television,” Hofstetter said. “If [Rukeyser] had his druthers, he’d still be doing the show.... It was they who decided to remove him.”

“I think the whole situation was really unfortunate for public television,” said Terrel Cass, president and general manager of New York station WLIW, which is distributing Rukeyser’s CNBC show. But stations “were interested in keeping the audiences that Rukeyser had built up over all those years and keeping the local underwriting. Our goal and purpose was certainly not to poke at Pat or PBS.” And with the multichannel digital era looming, he said, “there ought to be room for more than just the one stream” of programming.

At the core of the battle of wills is local control. Unlike a commercial network that contractually has the right to impose a schedule on affiliates, each of PBS’ 349 local stations is autonomous. With deep ties to their communities, many stations are unwilling to turn over decision-making to “Braddock Place,” as they refer to the PBS programmers’ home base outside Washington.

“You’re dealing with a fundamental tension in a system that is rooted in a local ethic and model unlike anything we have in American broadcasting,” said Willard “Wick” Rowland, president and general manager of Colorado Public Broadcasting. Over three decades, he says, “there has been a struggle to create some semblance of a network organization without many of the trappings of network structure, which include total control over the local schedule at a centralized base.”

‘We Are Essentially a Poor Network’

Producer Ken Burns, whose documentary “The Civil War” was public television’s highest-rated miniseries, calls PBS a “confederacy” that inevitably causes tension between the stations and PBS. Lack of money adds more tension, forcing PBS to shortchange marketing simply to get programs made. “We are essentially a poor network,” Burns said.

“We’ve become rather risk-averse and very slow to change,” said Rex Adams, a Duke University professor and chairman of PBS’ board. “We’re dependent on a small and fervently loyal membership base that ages along with us and declines as God sees fit.” Change unsettles that base, he said, and “when you live hand to mouth as every station in the system does, things tend to get spirited and contentious real quick.”

A financial breakdown from fiscal 1999, the latest available, shows that Congress, state and local governments provided 34.5% of public television revenue of $1.6 billion, colleges and universities an additional 7.9%; the rest came from corporate underwriting, viewers and foundations.

Mitchell, 59, is the first programmer to run PBS.

She came to PBS after a successful career producing acclaimed television documentaries for Ted Turner, forming along the way strong ties to a network of connected activist women and political figures such as former Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev.

Her push for change has taken on personal overtones, as Mitchell’s opponents in the system are becoming increasingly vocal, even as she retains the support of PBS’ board of managers and many influential station managers.

“Pat is changing the culture very effectively,” said Al Jerome, president and general manager of Los Angeles PBS station KCET. “It was necessary and it will be very positive.” Nonetheless, he says, “there’s a difference between the expectation of change and the actual pain.”

For her part, Mitchell concedes missteps. “American High” got Coca-Cola to underwrite a PBS show for the first time but alienated older viewers with its rough language and frank themes. PBS dropped a subsequent show for younger viewers. “We built an audience and then let them down,” Mitchell said. “If I had known that would happen, I would not do it again.”

Her vision now is to balance new material with some tried and true, to lower PBS’ median audience age to 50 or less, putting it closer to the broadcast networks than cable outlets such as A&E.;

Mitchell insists that ratings won’t define PBS, whose mission is to provide programming that commercial networks don’t.

But the ratings clearly are cause for concern. They took a steep dive after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks; PBS says some of the falloff was probably because of temporary changes in audiences’ tastes, as PBS’ older viewers flocked to cable news. Some of it was bad luck: PBS had been planning for more than a year to move many signature programs from long-held time slots, which happened in October, just when viewers were distracted. Ratings bounced back in January, then dropped to an even lower 1.6 in February, March and April (the high-rated “Frontier House,” which premiered April 29, will count in the May Nielsen ratings).

Localism Is Still an Important Tenet

The numbers panicked many at the stations.

“A lot of money, time, attention and promotion was gambled on a very few new properties,” said one influential and disgruntled station executive who declined to be named. “New initiatives haven’t taken us in the right direction and experimentation is noble, but decisions do have consequences. There is no margin for error.”

“It would have been better if the choices made by [Mitchell and her team] had been more successful,” but “there’s not an obvious answer” to fixing prime time, said Robert Coonrod, president of the Corp. for Public Broadcasting, which distributes the federal funding.

Mitchell isn’t arguing against localism, which, she says, will end up being an PBS asset. “As we move through these consolidations and mergers that are changing the media landscape so completely ... public television will be the last locally owned, managed and licensed media in town,” she said. But first, she said, PBS and stations must “just agree on a few things, where local autonomy could be subsumed for the good of all on some big key issues.”

She means the national schedule, arguing that PBS has to move quickly because of intense competition. She also wants stations to commit to running shows at the same time on the same night. Changes hurt PBS’ ability to promote shows nationally, leaving them to use the vague phrase “check local listings.”

PBS is restricted in another way: It doesn’t produce shows directly but must find a member station to “present” a program. Three stations dominate: Boston’s WGBH, New York’s WNET and Washington’s WETA, and some at those stations haven’t been happy at Mitchell’s attempts to bring in more producers, including commercial ones such as Redford, who is part of the team developing American stories for “Mystery!” Nor was everyone pleased about PBS’ plan to conduct focus groups through Los Angeles-based ASI Entertainment on nine of its major shows to see what viewers like and don’t like.

Some programmers have countered that Mitchell’s team has ignored the ongoing series for which PBS is known. So PBS is turning to audience favorites for new shows, including “Frontline/World,” a spinoff of the documentary series. In the fall it will rerun Burns’ landmark “The Civil War,” followed by a weekly program taken from his archive of work, much of it rarely rerun. The move, Burns said, “can be seen as conservative, safe, falling back on our strengths. I see it as: Here’s an opportunity just to see this material.”

Mitchell said she remains committed to taking risks on new shows, and there are some encouraging signs. Many stations reported healthy increases in donations during December and March pledge drives. KCET highlighted an “American Family” episode in March and drew $20,000 in donations, equal to the response during a Victor Borge retrospective.

“You can’t cling to the 75-year-old viewer with no hope for the future,” Mitchell said. “Holding onto the past is a formula for failure.”