I started watching Mystery! one evening because I was bored and it looked cool. It rocked. British accents and all.
Last year I was deeply enamored with a show by the moniker of “Goodnight Sweetheart.” (Please tell me someone else knows this- guy from the present travels back to the WWII era. Has a wife Yvonne in the present and a mistress Pheobe in the past.) It got taken off the air and I was devastated.
Arthur is a great television show for kids and the like. I still try to catch it. (“D.W.!!!”)
Wishbone- it introduced me to great and not so great lit. Well sort of. And the dog was cute, the kids oh so geeky. Wonderful.
I was watching Keeping up Appearances last week…yes, with Mrs. Bucket. I commend those Brits, they have a great sense of humor.
Who else wants to admit that public television can rival FOX and NBC and the like?
Though I like most of the shows noted above, I think PBS is a dinosaur that needs to be cancelled. There was a time when there were only three channels out there and a government-sponsored “good for you” channel made sense. Today, with cable and satellites you can get the left-handed homosexual pig farmer channel or any other crazy thing. There are plenty of PBS-successors that outperform them. Discovery, History, Nickelodeon, on and on…
And every time I hear about this, someone says “if we close PBS, Sesame Street will be eliminated; we can’t kill Ernie & Bert!” Please. Ernie and Bert probably make more in merchandising for PBS than they get from government subsidies. Someone will pick up the good stuff and carry it elsewhere.
Rivals Fox, etc.? In general, outperforms them, hands down. I normally watch PBS for the Britcoms and dramas, and must agree that with satellites, etc., it is becoming possible to watch British shows in real time. I agree with Bill H., though–PBS may go the way of the dinosaur in a decade or so, but at the moment, it is my only option for the aforementioned programming, so don’t kill it just yet.
I love PBS. I know many people who don’t have cable and that’s the only decent channel to watch, many people just can’t afford cable (i’m spoiled with digital). I live pretty far away from a major city, so the choices of channels are pretty limited, without cable we still get only about 3 channels. Besides, it seems to me that many of the cable channels cater much more to sensationalism…I have seen too many UFO-type shows on the Discovery and Discovery Science channels lately, which aren’t very interesting after the first few. I’ll choose PBS over them any time.
I like PBS. Mostly because of the children’s programming (with the exception of the utterly freakish Teletubbies) but there’s some other really good stuff there, like Austin City Limits, the Mark Russell comedy shows, and some other very entertaining documentary stuff (I enjoy a good documentary).
Losing PBS would be a sad thing. I wouldn’t be surprised if it happened, but still, it would suck.
I love PBS. With the exception of watching ER once a week, PBS is the only channel I watch. True, I have a lot of snazzy Discovery and History channels, but I’m a traditionalist, I guess. I grew up with Sesame Street and Bob Ross; it wouldn’t be easy for me to switch to the new-fangled cable channels.
A PBS mind in an MTV world, n’est pas, Welfy? I have to say, though, PBS is much more imaginative, cool, creative, and fun to watch than MTV. But then I WOULD say that.
I’ve got to watch it again sometime. Maybe I’ll even watch a symphony of moderately talented [fill in name of instrument here] and get turned onto the classics. You never know!
Couldn’t let this one pass without mentioning that I am the A#1 Upstairs, Downstairs fan of all time. OK the people who create fan websites are probably the greatest fans. But I loved that show. I also dig I, Claudius.
Ditto on American Experience.
How about Frontline.
Elizabeth R and The Six Wives of Henry VIII are now on video; I remeber loving these mini-series at the time and would like to see if they hold up.
> There are plenty of PBS-successors that outperform them.
> Discovery, History, Nickelodeon, on and on…
The Discovery Channel and the History Channel do obvious, low-cost documentaries. The poverty of imagination at the History Channel is particularly annoying. They do endless cheap World War II documentaries using footage they get for free from government archives. Nickelodeon makes most of its money from rerunning old sitcoms in the evening and at night. There’s nothing cutting-edge about their children’s shows.
With all due respect to Fox’s sunday night line up, PBS’s monday and tuesday night programming are the best on TV. I have quite a few Nova/Frontline/American Experience compilation tapes which I watch pretty frequently. I think Frontline should be required viewing… I’m amazed that some of their episodes don’t attract more attention. I’ll admit that there are quite a few shows I don’t like, but that’s just par for the course.
From where I stand, the beauty of PBS is that it’s not something that can be cancelled mid-season like a bad sitcom. The fact that it’s one of the only non-commercial/non-profit venues left (along w/ NPR) is worth it’s weight in “uninterrupted B&W movies from the 40’s”.
I believe it would be a huge loss if it were to be shutdown – the kind of change in history that might be difficult to measure, but undeniablely felt in our collective “gut”.
PBS was founded on the basis that it would be a channel for the people and very often by the people. But the P in PBS no longer stands for “Public”. My friends have learned this the hard way. They composed what I would call one of the best documentaries of the year 2000, but our local PBS station would not run it because it was too “contriversial”. What was the topic of this very well made documentary? The Democratic National Convention Protests. We captured footage of blatant police brutality and racism, but this was not good enough to run on TV, supposedly. So I am not too fond about the lack of guts at PBS.
I have to agree with Wendell… while I like Discovery and History now and then, for the most part they don’t seem to consistently do quality stuff. (I agree, LOTS of WWII stuff on History. PBS, on the other hand, has a diverse and quality lineup time after time.
True, PBS doesn’t really do the most controversial programming, but then nobody will touch that stuff. Even as protected from commercial pressure as PBS is, it still doesn’t have the independence to totally buck its corporate sponsors. It’s just a little more able to defy them in modest ways than commercial stations are.
Well look. We at the Zoggie residence are plain and simple folk. We are lacking in what you dub “satellites.” We have only the most simple of cable channels. Indeed, while we own Nickelo- Nick- while we have VH1 and A&E and Comedy Central (yeah Ben Stein!) we are lacking in these other TV shows that are considered better.
Anyway. Anyone see the Simpsons episode that lampoons PBS?
Oh!!! Goodnight Sweetheart is BACK!! I was just flipping channels randomly and i put on 21 and it was on!! Just in time for Gary and Phoebe’s wedding!! :):p:):p:)
One happy camper am I.
I guess my ode to PBS worked. I feel like someone who has prayed to god and had their prayers answered. Yes, yes, yeah!!
