How Teletubbies Killed PBS

Seth M. Siegel is co-chairman of The Beanstalk Group, N.Y., a licensing agency whose clients include Coca-Cola, Harley-Davidson, Hummer and The Vatican.

It's too soon to know if one- and two-year olds will be tuning in Teletubbies in droves, but it's safe to say that Newt Gingrich, Jesse Helms and other conservative foes of federal funding of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting will be closely watching this merchandising vehicle for its educational content and royalty flow.

In the beginning, PBS wrote checks to production companies like Children's Television Workshop and no one much minded if CTW's Sesame Street brought in millions in toy, book and pajama royalties for CTW without a penny for PBS. Sesame Street and other CTW shows were considered the only healthy choices in a wasteland of kids TV programming, and we all knew that, like the taxpayer-supported PBS, the not-for-profit CTW was acting in the best interests of society and our children.

Then came Barney the (Cloyingly Sweet and Purple) Dinosaur. Although Barney and his show were (and still are) filled with ethical goodness, PBS felt snookered when the private, for-profit company producing Barney walked away with a huge haul of licensed product royalties, even though PBS had funded the production and provided the airtime which led to Barney's fame and fortune.

To salvage its wounded pride, and to offset some of the funding cuts Congress was making, PBS changed the rules of the game: henceforth, PBS would be a profit participant with each show's producer. But, in transforming itself from disinterested arbiter of good programming for children into an entity with a stake in the show's commercial viability, PBS stepped onto a slippery slope waiting for an inevitable conflict of interest. Enter Teletubbies.

Teletubbies is a smash British show aimed at very young preschoolers. It features four characters, each a different color, which look as if they were inspired by plush crib toys. The "controversy" about them is that they speak in baby-talk, which some educators feel may, somehow, interfere with language acquisition skills.

As a licensing professional, I can only admire the extraordinary job done by Kenn Viselman in launching this new Fab Four from Britain. Well before the show debuted, he orchestrated a public relations campaign which both drove the best manufacturers into his offices seeking to become licensees and built up retailer concerns that they not be caught without adequate Teletubbies product at Christmas. In what was an otherwise flawless launch, my friend Kenn made himself-rather than one of the show's creators or, better yet, an educator-the U.S. spokesman for Teletubbies. The subliminal message in his appearances on Today, in The New York Times and many other places was that this enterprise is first about merchandising dollars and only secondarily about the young innocents put in front of their TVs by loving adults.

While all of this may be very good for Kenn and his couldn't-be-happier licensees, I predict it is the beginning of the end of PBS. Liberal or conservative, if you believe public broadcasting has any role, it can't be to give us programming which can be had on commercial stations. Even those of us who grew up with and loved public broadcasting have to wonder if it still has a raison d'etre in a world of 500-channel cable, the Internet and video-on-demand-especially when PBS utilizes criteria in selecting shows much the same as its unsubsidized competitors.

As if its Teletubbies misstep wasn't bad enough, PBS now has its first serious TV rival, and one which needn't go to an increasingly hostile Congress for funding. Nickelodeon (a division of the very much for-profit Viacom), which reaches kids better than anyone and which has a large preschool audience with its wholesome and fresh Blues Clues, has joined with the best brand name in children's educational programming, the still resolutely not-for-profit CTW, to form Noggin, an all-educational children's cable network. Call that delicious irony or biting the hand that feeds you, but either way, lawmakers will be watching Noggin's success and wondering why educational TV need be the exclusive preserve of PBS.

And, if Nickelodeon and CTW succeed in both market penetration and quality programming, you can be sure that Disney, Fox and others will also take the high road in electronically educating our kids. In that environment, PBS can only succeed, if at all, by going back to its commercial-free and, more importantly, commerce-free origins.

COPYRIGHT 1998 BPI Communications, Inc.
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