get real TV / ‘REALITY’ PALES AS FX GOES TO WAR, A CULT KIDS’ SHOW MORPHS AND PUBLIC TV ENDURES. PBS and its grand ambitions

I have been watching PBS, experimentally. I do also watch it recreationally, and I have watched it educationally, but lately I’ve been watching it like a scientist -- a scientist with himself for a subject -- immersing myself in the airwaves of public broadcasting to take its measure at what, to read the papers or watch the news, is a time of crisis. Funding is being stripped and returned. Pundits are pontificating. Politicians are having their haymaking say. The chairman of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which funnels money to public television and helps its trains run on time and in the right direction, has been accused of partisanship and has made accusations of bias.

Much of this is hot air, and much of it is sincere knee-jerk reaction, and some of it is actual fear. The CPB needs money, as do the member stations who own and operate PBS -- a decentralized system as opposed to the increasingly consolidated conglomerates that run commercial television. And if this isn’t the best time to see what’s up with KCET -- public television, like its privately held cousins, takes it easy in the summer, bringing out reruns, Fourth of July fireworks (as if to demonstrate in this parlous time its good citizenship) and another heaping helping of Huell Howser every time you turn around -- even so, I could get a good sense of its flavor and of what sets it apart and how necessary it remains despite oft-heard claims that in the 500-channel televerse all its good work might be done elsewhere.

And in the middle of my experiment, the London transit bombings happened, and I got to see how the network handled that -- thoughtfully, informatively and without undue alarm. (They save all the raised voices for “The McLaughlin Group,” evidently.) It can seem a little staid, in fact; sometimes this is a matter of substance, but sometimes it is just a matter of professorial style. Its programs are not all to my taste, nor would I even say it’s all good. (It is the home of the terrifying Barney the Purple Dinosaur and his overacting little human friends -- who can seem like reason enough to revoke its charter.) And because they have to raise money from its viewers to function -- individual contributors account for the largest share of their funding -- PBS can be at times disappointingly crowd-pleasing.

But public broadcasting is ambitious in ways other networks rarely are: PBS is fundamentally the people’s network and dedicated to the welfare of its viewers, not of its stockholders (of which there are none). Which is why, paradoxically, it is held to standards of accountability that the big commercial broadcasters -- permanently squatting upon airwaves actually belonging to the public, barely paying for the privilege and giving back little in return -- are not.

Though often described by its critics as elitist -- a combined Google search of the terms “PBS” and “elitist” gets 33,500 hits -- quite the opposite is true: PBS is a generalist network. It tries, often to its peril, to provide something for everybody. (Which means there is something for everyone not to like.) If it’s defined merely by who can afford to subscribe, and who bothers to, that may in some tautological way be described as elitism. Its ongoing crush on things English probably doesn’t help its image in that regard.

Yet it’s the only major network to give you a sense that there’s more to the world than sex, money and criminology; that there are worlds across the ocean, outside the city limits, on the other side of the tracks. PBS shows often criticize the powerful and explore the destructive heedlessness of the crowd. But it’s also the only network that consistently betrays any sort of social optimism -- that shows people changing the world, or their little corners of it, and not merely their furniture, their hair or their job -- as in “The New Heroes” (which ran for the last four Tuesday nights on KCET), a series focusing on “social entrepreneurs” finding sustainable paths to good works, from freeing slaves to employing recovering addicts. Or “Roadtrip Nation” (Fridays at 9:30 p.m. and Sundays at 11:30 p.m. on KCET) in which young adults travel the country interviewing their inspiring elders to get a grasp on life’s possibilities.

The Public Broadcasting Act of 1967, which brought the Corporation for Public Broadcasting into existence, was essentially a rebuke to free-market television, which had failed in its 20 years of existence to become the force for good it had always promised to be: television that could make every family’s living room a concert hall, a museum, a university, a forum. This promise had proved not as interesting as Milton Berle or “Gunsmoke” or “The Beverly Hillbillies,” but what’s in the public interest is not necessarily what most interests the public.

Now, in the too-many-channel cable and satellite TV universe, in which a hundred niche networks bloom, other stations have taken over -- have defined themselves by -- many sorts of programs that were once the stock in trade of PBS so that the network sometimes looks uncannily like the Food Network, the Travel Channel, A&E; or HGTV, the History Channel. But there are differences: For one thing, you don’t need to pay a cable provider to watch it; it is a reminder that the airwaves are, in fact, yours. And for another, it has no commercials -- apart from those ever-expanding spots for the underwriters at a show’s beginning and end -- which means that the show is not constantly being interrupted, which means it does not have to sensationalize its material and presentation to get you to come back after the commercial. The tone is more serious, the shows can go deeper. On KCET, the nightly news (“The NewsHour With Jim Lehrer” a collaboration of WNET, WETA and KQED) lasts a leisurely hour, while a Gen-Y travel show like “Globe Trekker” -- which on MTV or the Travel Channel would be powered by relentless techno, quick cuts, amusing angles and staged situations -- gives you time to absorb the atmosphere of China or Rome, to get something of a real feel for travel and place, rather than merely the imposed hilarity of post-production. And if Our Own Huell Howser wants to spend half an hour in an unusual soda pop shop, well, that’s just how he is, bless him. Let him browse.

In addition, it is the last vestige (pace cable access) of local television. PBS is merely the affiliation of 350 or so local broadcasters, who craft and create programming to suit their viewers. More than NBC or ABC or HGTV or MTV or A&E; or the formerly local stations that have been absorbed by the WB and UPN and Fox, they represent and reflect their communities.

Tax dollars not at work

As to what’s on, this is where the charges of elitism usually get thrown, as if to be interested in science or opera or British detective shows were to put on airs. Many Americans are loath to let tax dollars pay for the arts, or schools, or hot lunches, or anything not involving police, firefighters or soldiers, and those for whom any material not Christian, heterosexual, capitalist or patriotic counts as “controversial.” And there is always some joker coming along to drop a crucifix in a bucket of urine to confirm them in their stance. Yet multiple surveys have shown that Americans not only overwhelmingly support public broadcasting, few detect the sort of political bias over which Washington is currently exercised, and that, according to a December 2003 report, nearly half the surveyed adults believe funding should be increased. (Only 10% thought current levels of support to be too high.)

Of the Public Broadcasting Act of 1967, President Lyndon B. Johnson (for whom that troublesome source of alleged liberal bias Bill Moyers used to write speeches), said, “It announces to the world that our nation wants more than just material wealth; our nation wants more than a ‘chicken in every pot.’ We in America have an appetite for excellence too.... At its best, public television would help make our nation a replica of the old Greek marketplace, where public affairs took place in view of all the citizens.” And so, said Johnson, “today we rededicate a part of the airwaves -- which belong to all the people -- and we dedicate them for the enlightenment of all the people.”

Public television, by the nature of its charter, mirrors an open society, and to be a member of a free country is to accept that not everything or everyone will be to your liking. We have lost a little of Johnson’s vision, the idea that a vigorous artistic culture is important to the daily health of the society. The real challenge for PBS, as for any other established cultural institution -- the art museum, the philharmonic, the ballet company and the opera house -- is to stay fresh, to encourage the new and challenging and not yet completely understood, even the not yet palatable. This is where the network sometimes fails; like its more obviously commercial counterparts, it must sell itself to stay afloat and give the people what they want, rather than what they need.

I’d say give the CPB twice as much money, to make public television twice as independent -- not only from the government, but (to a degree) from its viewers. You can call me an elitist if you like, but that’s how civilization moves ahead.

In the end, if I had to take one network to a desert isle, it would be PBS, as is. I could pick up a little practical science, for when the tigers came around or the volcano erupted. There’d be the odd mystery or adapted classic to keep me diverted, and the news of the day, to see how the rest of the world was getting on. “Sesame Street” for concepts of big and little, and numbers and letters (they’ll be useful, I’m sure). And Barney to have something to yell at.

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Robert Lloyd is a Times television critic. Contact him at Calendar.letters@latimes.com.