PBS promoted an array of upcoming programming at the Television Critics Association on January 8th and 9th, 2011.
Made in Spain is a weekly series hosted by chef José Andrés, who creates dishes from his homeland through products found here in the U.S. and prepares them in his Washington, D.C. kitchen.
Masterpiece is entering its 40th season. The series runs throughout the year and is divided into three sub-series. Masterpiece Classic shows period dramas in the winter and spring. This April, Upstairs, Downstairs returns with a new season after a 35-year hiatus on April 10th. Masterpiece Mystery! airs mysteries in the summer and Michael Dibdin's Detective Aurelio Zen (Rufus Sewell) is featured in three cases. And Masterpiece Contemporary presents modern-day dramas in the fall.
Nature: Bears of the Last Frontier follows bear biologist Chris Morgan as he takes a yearlong trip through Alaska to study the creatures in five of the state's different ecosystems. The first episode airs May 8th.
The Best of Laugh-In debuts March 5 and an hour doesn’t seem enough time to do this landmark comedy series justice, which forever changed television. When Gil Scott-Heron recited "The Revolution Will Not Be Televised," he must not have seen Laugh-In.
Forgiveness: A Time To Love And A Time To Hate sounds like a powerful story as filmmaker Helen Whitney examines stories of forgiveness that range from a global to a personal level in this four-hour documentary. The first part airs April 17th.
Three of the four films airing on the anthology series Independent Lens look at three different artists. They are: Jean-Michel Basquiat: The Radiant Child (April 5th), Waste Land (April 19th) and Marwencol (April 26th).
The long-running Great Performances allows tenor Placido Domingo to reflect on his career in Placido Domingo: My Favorite Roles and puts the spotlight on singer Harry Connick, Jr in Concert, and a producer, Hitman Returns: David Foster & Friends featuring Donna Summer.
Black in Latin America finds Professor Harry Gates, Jr. examining Latin America's African roots in a four-part series that debuts April 19th.
Nova is PBS' long-running science series and on February 9th the program looks at artificial intelligence and more specifically "Watson," the IBM supercomputer that is competing against Jeopardy! Champions to demonstrate how it can copy the human thought process.
American Experience tells the story of The United States through documentaries. On May 16, Stanley Nelson's Freedom Riders presents the courageous college students who risked their lives fighting against segregation by riding a bus.
Frontline is a public-affairs program and on January 18th Washington Post reporter Dana Priest investigates the terrorism-industrial complex that spawned as a result of the 9/11 attacks in Are We Safer?
POV has previously hosted Academy Award-nominated documentaries Food, Inc. and The Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers. Two upcoming highlights are Heather Courtney’s Where Soldiers Come From, a four-year look at friends who went from being Michigan teenagers to U.S. soldiers fighting in Afghanistan, and the second season of StoryCorps, which finds the Rauch Brothers animating conversations by "Americans of all backgrounds and beliefs" and "preserve the stories of our lives."
PBS offers viewers a wide selection of informative and entertaining programming through support of its viewers and this is only a portion of it. While some airdates are listed above, check local listings for showtimes in your area.
With so much programming to sift through these days it's great to see PBS continuing to produce such a vibrant batch of shows this year.
Was just mentioning recently too that I fondly recall watching Laugh-in reruns as a kid, which was oddly packaged with the original Battlestar Gallactica on a local station in New York. Even though I couldn't pick up on some of the cultural/political references as a kid I still found it to be very entertaining, original, and funny.
There are a few shows like Laugh-In and The Carol Burnett Show that I can't believe no one is running in syndication
We get exactly four stations here in west TN. Three of them are PBS stations (the other is an ABC affiliate.) The wife and I now pretty much live on PBS (ok so we hulu and netflix too) there is tons of great show. She loves all the cooking and creative shows. I love the mysteries, news and my god Nova is simply astonishing.
Don't know if you heard, but LA's biggest PBS affliate went independent, so it will be intersting to see how the other PBS channels respond with programming. There's one in Orange County and another that's associated with the LA School District
I think I did hear something about that, but I'm not sure what it means.
PBS here has gone the whole digital antennae route where they now have three stations. One is the normal local station with all the regular national shows (newshour, Nova, etc) the others are more niche - one is Create with food, craft and travel shows, the other is World which obviously does more international programming.
Ugh, just read my previous comment. Full of bad grammar and mispellings. That's what I get for writing fast and late at night.