"The History of Television:" The Lost Chapter

It has been several days now since Your Mayor first unveiled the fount of wisdom that is his prospective tome The History of Television: A History of Television, and still no word has come from PBS, which is creating a documentary miniseries on the same topic. I have long pondered why this might be, and came upon an egregious oversight in my overview of Television's celebrated past, one that I now hasten to rectify:

Supplemental Chapter: PBS: Television's Savior

On Monday, October 5, 1970, viewers across America were seized with an otherworldly delight when they turned on their televisions and discovered that a bold, innovative new broadcasting service had emerged to entertain and edify them: PBS, or the Partially Boring System.

PBS was a content provider like no other: Eschewing insipid comedies and plebian melodramas, it instead offered fascinating historical documentaries, jaw-droppingly incisive inquiries into the world of science, exquisite performances of balletic and orchestral genius of unsurpassable brilliance and sumptuously arid adaptations of British literary masterpieces - everything that Joesph Q. Sixpack, his lovely wife Janice and their two kids, Josh and Britney, hungered to ingest after a long, soul-drenching day laboring at the factory, tidying up around the house and memorizing nonlinear partial differential equations, respectively.

And because, unlike the other broadcast networks, which were beholden to income from commercial advertisers, PBS accepted no money from anyone, except "donor viewers" who phoned in offers of money if PBS would halt the practice of "pledge drives" as well as "corporate underwriters" who reached consumers via on-air messages that, despite all appearances, weren't commercials. This meant that, free of money that could taint the integrity of its content, PBS didn't have enough funds to expend on popular stars or eye-pleasing production values known to appeal to viewers.

PBS has been on the cutting-edge of children's programming, as well, with one of its crown jewels being the long-running series "Sesame Street," a powerful inner-city drama about the denizens of a welfare community unhealthily obsessed with consonants and vowels, conjunctions and prepositions, metaphors and STD's. Some of the beloved characters on "Sesame Street" were "Muppets," first seen on TV grousing about unfair stereotypes leveled against them in a popular series of auto-insurance commercials.

Unlike many other characters in children's programming exploited by opportunistic producers, the "Muppets," in keeping with PBS's doctrine of noncommerciality, were not exploited via sales of plush toys, books, musical recordings or board games.

Another favorite "Muppet"-like character looming large on PBS's landscape was "Ken Burns," a genial historian who related stirring, 15-hour-long tales of Americana employing nothing but banjo music, tintype photographs and voice-over narration inspired by "written correspondence," a form of 19th-century communication similar to today's text-messaging, only employing complete sentences, correctly spelled words and coherent thoughts.

Unidentified Old-Timey Guy Talking Head (speaking over banjo music from "The Civil War"): "The story of Ken Burns is the story of America. Here's this hardscrabble kid escaping from the mean streets of Brooklyn, New York, who put down his switchblade and his snub-nose .22 to pull himself up by his bootstraps at a prestigious school, then eventually won three Emmys, two Oscar nominations and even delivered a commencement address at Georgetown University! What Ken Burns had to tell his countrymen goes to the very heart of what it means to be a well-compensated white man who has complete editorial control over his product in this nation."

In 2007, PBS announced plans for an ambitious, multi-part documentary series on "The History of Television," to be aired in 2009. This project promised to be the finest, most exhilarating and likely most important production in the history of the service, if - and only if - its editorial board manages to locate the most insightful and galvanizing talking-head experts to provide context, heft and critical acumen to Television's complex and celebrated narrative history. America can only hope and pray that PBS finds the wherewithal to select the appropriate memoirists capable of bringing Television's glorious narrative to vivid, evanescent life.