\nPBS, the American national broadcaster, seems to have channel drifted to specialize in British shows
pbs has been showing doctor who, masterpiece (theatre), benny hill, monty python, and I’m sure tons more since at least the 70s.
Well BBC imports at least had the “Anglophone public broadcasting” angle, but I don’t know if this new stuff comes from them. It seems to have respectable production budgets, for one.
I mean, that is literally how channel drift works: you have a theme, but develop an audience on the basis of something tangent to that, and eventually shift to serve that audience. Like how The History Channel airs Ice Road Truckers cause it’s a show for the kind of guy who watches The History Channel.
Aren’t you supposed to be in your forties and a Cornell grad, dude? PBS has always been propaganda. It’s great propaganda, but it has an agenda and a slant just like the Beeb, and everyone been knew. “Open and neutral media” isn’t self-evident to most people, and even if the values are sincere it’s hard to do well. In the end I think their legacy will be children’s programming. McNeil/Lehrer wass probably better than CBS/NBC/ABC/CNN equivalents by a little, but not really all that much. It was kind of pissing in the wind. Grownup PBS is for people who want to work in Jed Bartlett’s State Department and has always been like that, they were rich or educated draft dodgers in the 70s, fake “I’m moving to Canada” types in Dubya I, OWS in Dubya II, and were #Resistance members in the Trump era.
Seems all of a piece to me.
Well how do you account for the “Murder She Wrote but with Agatha Christie” and Call The Midwife and Downtown Abbey stuff, then?
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