The One PBS Show That Trump Hasn’t (Yet) Killed

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.

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. Indeed, the program just passed its 70th anniversary, making it the longest-running PBS show in history.

“My grandfather wanted to bring intellectual firepower to discussions of public policy,” notes Alexander Heffner, who took over as host after Richard Heffner’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 Richard 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 Heffner. “He always gave his guests time.”

Amazingly, Richard 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 the elder Heffner to join and chair its ratings board. It was not a perfect fit. “My mother didn’t raise me to count nipples,” Richard Heffner famously complained. But he spent the next 20 years counting something — 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 Heffner, 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).

“Whether it’s by biology or osmosis or a combination, I have followed in his path,” Alexander Heffner says of his grandfather. “He imbued a sense of civic responsibility in me, which was what The Open Mind was all about from the beginning.”