Love him or hate him (and we mostly love him around here), one can’t deny the lasting influence and importance of Woody Allen — or his astonishing productivity, knocking out a film a year as writer/director (and sometimes star) for the past, oh, forty years. The sheer volume of his output makes it less than surprising that American Masters’ new profile of the venerable filmmaker, Woody Allen: A Documentary, is a bit of an epic affair: it totals three-and-a-half hours and is running in two parts on PBS. Check out the preview and some surprising clips after the jump. Read More »
The 70th annual Peabody Awards were announced this morning. Celebrating “the best in electronic media for the year 2010,” the University of Georgia Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication is celebrating a whopping 39 honorees this year. The pool ranges from critically acclaimed TV shows (Justified, The Good Wife, Men of a Certain Age) and great radio programming (including one of our favorites, The Moth Radio Hour) to CNN’s coverage of the Gulf oil spill, outstanding local news series, and a generous number of HBO and PBS specials. See the whole list of Peabody recipients after the jump, read more about them here (PDF), and resolve to watch (or listen to) something smart for a change.
Celebrated for a body of work that confronts injustice, William Kentridge addresses South Africa’s brutal apartheid past and ongoing transformation through metaphoric imagery.
Working in a variety of media, Kentridge makes socially engaging art, while exploring the absurd. His films are constructed by continually drawing, erasing, and drawing again on the same piece of paper; in a recent production of Shostokovich’s opera The Nose for The Metropolitan Opera, Kentridge incorporated many of these animated shorts to potently convey the story of a runaway nose and the owner’s attempt to find it.
If you ever wore a felt-tip pen around your neck, wished the letter magnets on your refrigerator would rearrange themselves, or longed to bust the corner bodega for selling bogus videotapes, then surely you were a fan of PBS’s early ’90s series Ghostwriter. For those who missed out, Ghostwriter was an educational TV show about a group of multicultural middle school kids who solved mysteries with the aid of a friendly ghost (who had a penchant for words), set against the vaguely gritty backdrop of Fort Greene, Brooklyn. What wasn’t so obvious to us back then was the impressive array of celebrity cameos peppered throughout the series — such as a Samuel L. Jackson playing Ghostwriter Team member Jamal Jenkins’ father. Word! Check out the surprising array of stars featured in Ghostwriter episodes below.
PBS’ Frontline series pretty much wrote the book on public-affairs documentaries; now you can watch full episodes of the Peabody and Pulitzer award-winning show online, with more opportunities for in-depth investigating and interaction.
Frontline has been exploring the weightiest of topics since 1983. On the series’ website, you can watch 88 entire episodes, covering everything from Mormons to the meth epidemic, Abu Ghraib to the Madoff affair. Go “Behind Taliban Lines,” or learn the secrets credit-card companies don’t want you to know. Look for online extras, too: for the recent “Flying Cheap” show, about Buffalo Flight 3407, you can read responses from the producer and key figures in the story, learn safety info by airport, and join the discussion yourself.
PBS-produced online video series New York on the Clock reveals the making of a metropolis, one worker at a time.
In each of the documentary on-the-job interviews posted bi-weekly on Thirteen.org, one of the city’s eight million people — from a film location scout to a tugboat captain — illuminates his or her professional experience. This week, New York on the Clock profiles a renowned Brooklyn mohel to coincide with the beginning of Hanukkah; just before Christmas we’ll hear from the Saks Fifth Avenue window dresser.
Reading Rainbow, the book-centric PBS children’s series, has reached the end of its 26-year run, NPR reports. We remember it best as the show various babysitters parked us in front of during our formative years, but we do love to read, so maybe its message sank in. We weep for host LeVar Burton and his legion of fans, even though we have to admit that we didn’t know the show was still on the air. Blame it on the recession…oh yeah, and George W. Bush’s education policy. Because the show stresses why kids should love reading rather than how to read, it’s not in line with the Bush administration’s focus on phonics and spelling. So basically, George W. Bush killed Reading Rainbow. After the jump, a guided tour through some timeless Reading Rainbow clips. Read More »
After reading a review of Kathleen Collins’ new book Watching What We Eat: The Evolution of Television Cooking Shows, we started to think about food programs. The info in the review pretty much matched our expectations — public television crafted smart, instructive programs in the early days and the Food Network turned the genre into a semi-pornographic celebration of gluttony. Read More »
Sometimes the design gods just give you a good little chuck on the chin to remind you there are delicious lessens of pretty to be learned from your tiny hotel TV. While it would have been easy for us to take the train to bummer town when the faulty satellite of our boob tube prevented us from enjoying NBC’s Thursday night lineup, the tambourine-loving deities sent us to the welcoming arms of PBS for a documentary on the Mamas and the Papas called California Dreamin’: The Songs of ‘The Mamas & the Papas.’ Clever.
