PBS Cuts Mister Rogers Again25 Jul
When PBS first announced that they were cutting back on airings of Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood last year, it prompted us to start this grassroots campaign to urge them to keep the program on their syndicated feed five days a week. And while some PBS stations were able to keep the program in their M-F schedule, many children were robbed of Fred Rogers’ weekday expressions of care. Now, we’ve learned that PBS stations everywhere will be forced to drop the program, save for one show per week.
Our neighbors at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette have more:
PBS has told member stations that “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood” will only be available to air one episode weekly beginning in the fall. This past season, stations that wanted to air the “Neighborhood” daily had that option. Not anymore.
“PBS is operating under very tight budget constraints and it already has a full program lineup to support Monday through Friday,” said Kevin Morrison, chief operating officer for Rogers’ Oakland-based Family Communications Inc. “If it was offering ‘Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood’ on a daily basis it would only be as an option to the existing full lineup of programs, and that option is an expensive option for them and the financial situation prevents them from making that an option.”
While we can certainly empathize with PBS’ financial situation, surely, someone there must realize that nothing on their current schedule comes even remotely close to MRN in terms of affective development. But then they have to compete with popular cable programs like Yo Gabba Gabba — a creatively brilliant (if nonsensical) show, but one that is essentially crack for the toddler attention span.
Where does that leave today’s parents who are hoping to continue to expose their children to the Neighborhood? Without much hope, we’re afraid. In fact, the best option at this point is likely to encourage Family Communications to make MRN available on DVD in its entirety. We’re not aware of the production company’s current plans, but they’d surely be happy to do such a release — the issue would likely come down to finding a willing and able distributor. Surely there are enough potential buyers to make it worth any distributor’s while. Maybe we can convince them of this. Stay tuned…
A minor consolation: PBS has recently expanded the Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood area of their website to include more videos from the classic program. Good stuff, but our children need more than just a collection of disparate interactive tidbits.
THANK YOU for this website! I am writing, writing, writing. Surely someone has to see that canceling Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood is so very wrong. Our children need him more than ever…
Is there a way that I can encourage our local library to get involved? I’m thinking that if individual parents contact Family Communications re: dvds, maybe libraries requesting them too would also help. I’m just not sure if libraries would have the same pull as people and am wondering what you think.
I am very sad that MRN is being removed from the Weekday Schedule, it kind of sucks. Well QED is now airing it’s beloved show on Saturdays only. I hope the show may be released on DVD as a three week themed set for each volume, a DVD complication with all the operas avaliable. Well by 2010 or 2011, it may go back to the weekday schedule, I want children to have Mister Rogers in his/her childhood. He is our television neighbor, you know.
Thank you so much for putting up this site! I wish the circumstances under which I found it were different. Up until two weeks ago (?) our local PBS station was one of the ones that was still airing MRN daily. We would record it on our dvr, and my daughter would watch once or twice a day. My daughter will be 4 in November, and MRN is the ONLY show she likes! Who could blame her, right? It’s not her fault that she has good taste in programming. However, we are down to 5 episodes on our DVR, and I don’t know how I’m going to explain to her that Mr. Rogers has gone off the tv (I used to worry about the day when she would find out that he had died before she was born, but this abrupt cancellation is worse!) Believe me, I will write to PBS as well as our local stations (MRN was removed from one earlier, but the other one still had it). Before my daughter was born, I would never have imagined writing a post like this, but I have come to appreciate Mr. Rogers more now than I did when I was a child. Sometimes it really does feel like he’s our neighbor, and is an important part of the village that is helping to raise my child.
Please, let’s do everything we can to get full dvd box-sets of the entire series! I don’t know if people even realize that each week was on a specific topic, and that there is a definite story arc that plays out over 5 half-hour episodes! The dvd’s that I’ve seen only have 2 episodes??
Also, how can it be cheaper for PBS to air decades of re-runs than to produce new, inferior, shows?? Since so many people have vcrs and dvrs (thank you, Mr. Rogers for going to Washington so that we can tape what we want!!) maybe PBS would be willing to air it in the middle of the night? It’s not the best solution, as many parents will just turn on whatever happens to be on, but those of us who are already committed to the show would make the effort to record it! How do we get PBS to run a telethon to bring back MRN, lol? Seriously, though, I would absolutely contribute more to PBS if the put it back on (and I’m not happy with them for taking it off the air…).
I’m going to Twitter about this… anyone with a blog, Twitter, YouTube account, etc. – let’s get the word out!! How about #MRNH for a hash tag? (If you have a Twiter account, you can highlight keywords by using the “#” symbol before the word – in this way not only can like-minded people find each other, but the topics themselves rise up on the list of popular topics… see Twitter for a better explanation!)
Ok, I’m going to go pound some clay or some dough… (or find some friends for a game of tag and see how fast I go!!)
Our children of today need a real television program which deals with real-life situations and feelings. They need to replace these garbage shows of today with MRN.