Last year the United States government took a sledgehammer to non-commercial TV and film through the shuttering of the Corporation For Public Broadcasting and the defunding of NPR and PBS. The move was a morally devastating one. It felt like another clear sign of the complete and total corporatization of U.S. media. But it also reminded me that PBS, and especially the PBS streaming app, rules.
The government didn’t target PBS because it was crushing commercial enterprises like Amazon and Netflix, but because some elements of a political party simply didn’t feel represented enough and others felt YouTube and an array of free streaming offerings like Tubi was enough. Like there was no longer a need for non-commercial TV and film in a world where anyone with a phone, a dream, and a Canva subscription can make something interesting to watch.The strength of the PBS app is in its curation. From news to documentaries to TV shows from across the pond, the PBS app can feel like a one-stop shop for understanding the world we live in.
When the Corporation For Public Broadcasting closed last year, News Hour, PBS’s nightly news program, had to cancel its weekend news show. Both weekend anchors lost their jobs. Yet despite the massive setbacks to funding, News Hour continues to be the absolute best TV news show available. There are no jokes or softball interviews. Instead it is setting the gold standard for explaining the impact of online extremism in our world today and actually highlights and explores the absurdities of our current political climate. All while avoiding common pitfalls of modern broadcast journalism like chasing the entertaining stories instead of the important ones. I feel informed after watching an episode of News Hour. I cannot say the same when watching a lot of other broadcast journalism.
The clear-eyed curation of the PBS app might best be exemplified by watching a single News Hour broadcast, but when it’s in the DNA of something like PBS it’s everywhere else too. Take its documentary output versus the other guys. Have you ever tried to watch a smaller documentary on Netflix? Unless it’s a huge one snapped up at a festival, Netflix documentaries will always veer into cringey Unsolved Mysteries-style re-enactments, usually of major historical events they do not have the budget to do well. As for the other streamers? I once clicked on a pre-Ellison Paramount+ documentary only to realize it was a conspiracy film about the assassination of JFK. YouTube is better, but there is no one to tell you which documentary will be good and which will be a guy breathing in a mic like he’s doing AMSR and reading from a script written by ChatGPT.
On PBS I’ve had much better luck. Two of my favorite documentaries of the last year can now be found on the PBS app. One was the Sarah Jessica Parker-produced The Librarians, about the rise of book bans in the last decade in conservative American towns. I had to drive an hour away to see a limited engagement of it last year and worried it would never find a proper outlet besides the film festival circuit. But PBS had it on its app. Next to it was a documentary that hadn’t even been on my radar, Natchez, about the tourism industry of the Mississippi city reckoning with its reliance on antebellum history. It had its premiere at Tribeca last year, where it also won the “Best Documentary Feature” award. It was just as terrific as its pedigree suggested.
So are all the Ken Burns documentaries that PBS regularly uses to explain why you should pay $5 a month to subscribe. The PBS app is how I watched Burns’ take on the American Revolution late last year and found myself with a new sense of patriotism and a better understanding of just how fallible and human literally everyone involved was. It almost feels like a bonus that The Civil War, Baseball, and a whole host of other Ken Burns deep dives are also available. I felt a little like you do when you discover a new Youtuber and see there are years of episodes to watch.
That’s also how I felt when I realized the PBS app is basically BritBox too. It includes the new Count Of Monte Cristo and The Forsytes, and two stables in any home with a fondness for the cozy, All Creatures Great And Small and Downton Abbey. When you toss in shows like Finding Your Roots, Antiques Roadshow, America’s Test Kitchen, Nature, and This Old House, you start to realize just how good PBS is at balancing having a little bit of everything with quality.
Which was always the point of PBS. And NPR. And the Corporation For Public Broadcasting. The whole enterprise was created as an answer to a deeply politicized media ecosystem financially incentivized to keep people talking, and just a little angry. As technology has dragged us further and further into that ecosystem, PBS can feel like a bright point of something good. A place where money supports the arts and doesn’t just control them.
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