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Ever since its creation in 1969, the Public Broadcasting Service has been an unwieldy, multiheaded beast. Most PBS series are initiated and produced under the auspices of individual stations, funded by a patchwork of public and corporate sources and scheduled (in many cases) according to the whims of local program directors. That worked well enough in the days when PBS was essentially the only alternative to the three commercial networks. But cable has made life more complicated. Such channels as the Arts & Entertainment Network and Superstation TBS have appropriated the kind of programming that was once unique to PBS, from...
Last week public-TV officials took a decisive step toward reversing that trend, as the PBS board of directors gave final approval to a major revamping of the network's organizational structure. In the new setup, the crucial decisions about which programs will receive PBS funding -- previously made by a majority vote of the local stations -- will be in the hands of one executive. The plan, first unveiled last summer, has drawn objections from officials at several large PBS stations. Says William Baker, president of New York's WNET: "The whole world, even the Soviet Union, is going from...
...even the most vocal critics of the new plan have been assuaged by the person who will put it into practice. This new "programming czar" has more power than any predecessor but also a daunting task: maneuvering through the byzantine PBS bureaucracy. "What we wanted was a Solomon," says PBS president Bruce Christensen. "Someone with extraordinary political skills as well as program judgment. And someone who was willing to take the heat...
...about a Ms. Solomon? Jennifer Lawson, the former film professor and civil rights worker who was named to the job last November, has thus far been getting more huzzahs than heat. She basked in the glory of PBS's huge success of September, The Civil War. (The program was set in motion long before she arrived, but Lawson approved its unusual weeklong scheduling.) She has won praise for boosting PBS's profile with such ploys as running ads on the commercial networks. Most of all, she has tamed the ornery PBS bureaucracy with a mix of calm decisiveness and careful...
...that Lawson, 44, doesn't have some fairly radical programming ideas of her own. Among the shows she is developing for PBS are a children's game show and a sitcom about a Soviet family adapting to perestroika. She wants to showcase more pop music and is looking for a dramatic series that would "explore the mood in the country, relationships between people in our cities and rural areas...