Photo: Open Mind.
Alexander Heffner.
I’m surprised I never heard of this 70-year old tv show. It sounds like the kind of thing my parents would have loved, and we had an early tv they could have watched it on. (My father was writing about the Dumont company for Fortune, so we got a Dumont in 1948. )
The Open Mind, now celebrating its 70th year “defies all the odds — by keeping its conversation serious, civil and gloriously egg-headed.”
So says Benjamin Svetkey at the Hollywood Reporter.
“Sesame Street got rezoned for pay TV a decade ago. Reading Rainbow relocated to YouTube last year. Even American Experience — winner of 30 Emmys over its 37-year history — was recently swept into the dustbin of history (or at least suspended production for nine months).
“These are, to be sure, dark, dark days for PBS, with the Corporation for Public Broadcasting dissolving itself in January — after Congress shut off its funding — sending devastating budget cuts rippling through the entire public broadcasting network, forcing some stations, like New Jersey’s WNJN, to shut down entirely.
“And yet, despite it all, one modest little cathode-tube relic that’s been beaming into households since the dawn of educational TV — Richard Heffner’s The Open Mind, the gleefully eggheaded talk show on which Martin Luther King Jr gave his first sit-down televised interview — continues to soldier on. …
“ ‘My grandfather wanted to bring intellectual firepower to discussions of public policy,’ notes Alexander Heffner, who took over as host after Richard’s death in 2013. ‘He wanted there to be a platform on early television that offered something other than bandits and robbers.’
“The elder Heffner, a history professor at Rutgers University, began his no-drama interview show on radio in 1953 (his first guest was Eleanor Roosevelt). But in 1956, as Heffner watched television assert a growing dominance over the culture, he began broadcasting from a local NBC affiliate, doing his 30-minute talk show on live TV. A decade later, in 1966, he’d moved The Open Mind to Channel 13, a New York public TV station he’d helped to launch five years earlier, which by 1970 would become a flagship for the newly launched National Educational Television network, precursor to PBS.
“Wherever he was broadcasting it from, though, the vibe was always the same — aggressively intellectual. Every week guests like Thurgood Marshall, Malcolm X, Jonas Salk, Elie Wiesel, Henry Kissinger, Norman Mailer and Margaret Mead, among many others, would settle into the austere round-table set and engage in the sort of esoteric, deep-dive political and sociological conversations that seemed, even back in TV’s early days, defiantly antithetical to the medium.
” ‘There was no answer that was too complex or too long,’ says Alexander. ‘He always gave his guests time.’
“Amazingly, Heffner’s reputation for dispassionate civil discourse got him noticed in, of all places, Hollywood. In the mid 1970s, MPAA president Jack Valenti, looking for a way to add some cerebral heft to his organization, convinced Heffner to join and chair its ratings board. It was not a perfect fit. [But] he was responsible for giving 1983’s Scarface its initial X rating (for violence) and, later, in 1990, for launching the MPAA’s NC-17 rating.
“Still, his TV show, as well as his teaching, was always his main focus, and he continued to conduct his low-key highbrow interviews until his death — indeed, even after his death. ‘He always had episodes in the can, notes his grandson, ‘so there were episodes that aired posthumously.’
“Alexander, who had some experience himself with broadcasting — during college, at Harvard, he covered the 2008 presidential elections as one of CNN’s ‘youth correspondents’— took over The Open Mind in 2014. And he’s been very much following in his grandfather’s footsteps ever since. To celebrate the show’s 70th anniversary this year, for instance, he’s assembled a series of resolutely un-viral interviews with city mayors from around the world (currently airing on PBS’ World Channel).”
Stream via pbs.org or the PBS app. More at the Hollywood Reporter, here.
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