If I saw Mark Russell take a piledriver followed by a figure-4 leglock, I might consider donating to PBS.
Masterpiece Theater: RAW!
My local stations (yes, plural!) do that too. “You can buy a DVD of the program we’re showing right now for free!”
Nothing wrong with it. It’s Public Broadcasting, and if the public wants wrestling, give it wrestling. It might garner more financial support than yet another Masterpiece Theatre rerun or symphony concert would.
I mean, professional wrestling, at least, is a type of theater, soooo
Accurate. It’s sort of like watching a play, except that parts of it are improvised and there are more chairshots than in your typical Shakespeare production.
Back in the 90s and a bit into the 2000s my late wife and I went to local indy wrestling twice a month. Great fun and nearly free. Held in a 1900s era boxing gym.
The promotion there then apparently died around 2013. But the venue is still hosting wrestling under a different promo:
Maybe you’re not watching the right Shakespeare troupes.
He is heralding the return of erstwhile poster Dio, who is slumbering beneath the Strait of the Dope, awaiting the day of our darkest hour, when he will emerge to lead us to an eternal Golden Age.
Or that.
Or the suggestion that only idiots would want to watch this stuff is a bit of snobbery.
I don’t watch it myself, but there’s a surprisingly large segment of nerds who are fans of pro wrestling. It’s not just idiot rednecks.
Yes, this seems to me much less off-brand for PBS than showing real sports competitions would be.
PBS could do a real service in this post-truth era if they aired wrestling without actively conflating the theater with reality the way it is done elsewhere.
The public television stations in Connecticut broadcast UConn women’s basketball games from the mid-1990s and continuing for eighteen years, the start of the team’s amazing run.
I was at Villanova during that span, and in the pep band, so I saw a lot of good basketball… but the best basketball game I ever saw was Villanova vs. UConn women’s.
I was introduced to Dr Who, The Goodies, and Monty Python on PBS. Can’t get more highbrow than that.
And of course PBS aired Are You Being Served?, the Benny Hill Show and other classy, high-brow entertainments. It’s always featured all kinds of entertainment.
As I noted earlier, an English accent is all it takes to elevate a show to PBS standards.
Is PBS still airing content for schools during the day?
A lot of schools depends on that content to supplement what the teachers provide.
I used to see some of it if my tv was left on that channel.