by When I was sixteen, I had a television show called Kidding Around on KOLN/KGIN-TV in Lincoln, Nebraska. It was 1981. I was a teenager hosting a teenager-aimed program on a commercial CBS affiliate, three blocks of which I have no doubt were paid for by advertising for Pepsi and Levi’s and the Lincoln car dealerships that kept American local television alive in the early Reagan years. The format was loose. The show featured kid interviews, viewer letters read on air, and unscripted segments of the kind that the FCC’s mandates for “ascertainment of community needs” were supposed to encourage and that the FCC’s 1981 decision to deregulate radio, followed by the parallel television deregulation of 1984, was designed to kill. Kidding Around did not survive into the late 1980s. It was a casualty of a specific federal policy decision documented in the book I published earlier this year, Selling Saturday Morning.
Selling Saturday Morning came out of the position of a sixteen-year-old who had a television show and then did not have one. That book is the institutional history of the commercial side of American television in the years when its regulatory floor was removed.
Today I am publishing the companion book.
Underwritten: The American Experiment in Public Broadcasting, 1967 to 2026 is the institutional history of the other American television. The non-commercial federation. The system that operated under a different statute, a different funding mechanism, a different mission, and a different relationship to its audience than the commercial system I worked inside as a teenager. Underwritten is the third volume in the Institutional Autopsy sequence after Carceral Nation and The Claimed Body. It is also, taken alongside Selling Saturday Morning, the second half of a diptych on the institutional history of American television in my lifetime.
I want to tell you something about Lincoln.
The Station Across Town
In 1981, while I was hosting Kidding Around at KOLN-TV in Lincoln, Nebraska, the University of Nebraska’s public broadcasting network, Nebraska Educational Television (NETV), was operating less than two miles from the commercial studio where I worked. NETV had been on the air since November 1, 1954, founded by Jack McBride. Under Ron Hull’s longtime production leadership, NETV produced programs that ran nationally on PBS across decades: the poetry anthology series Anyone for Tennyson?, directed by Marshall Jamison and aired in 1976, along with contributions to Great Performances and later to American Experience after that series premiered in 1988. The Nebraska press wrote about NETV regularly. State university officials cited it in legislative testimony. Few state-network production operations in the country were as ambitious.
I did not watch it. At sixteen, with my own commercial show in production, the public station’s programming felt to me, in 1981, like programming for adults who had patience I did not yet have.
I did not understand, at sixteen, what the public station across town actually was. The station was federated to a thousand other stations across the country through the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and the Public Broadcasting Service. That poetry anthology I would have rolled my eyes at if I had bothered to watch it was being shipped from Lincoln to a national distribution network and aired in Boston and Los Angeles and San Antonio. An entire architecture, from my Saturday morning show on the commercial channel to the Anyone for Tennyson? segments at NETV, was built by federal statute. And the architecture was about to be taken apart.
I have been writing my way back to that understanding for forty-five years. Selling Saturday Morning worked one half of the architecture. Underwritten works the other half. Both books are, in different registers, about how American television was a federally structured artifact of the period from the 1934 Communications Act through the deregulation cycles of the 1980s and the federal-funding rescissions of 2025. On the commercial side, the system was deregulated and reshaped around advertising sales to children. On the public side, the system was federated and protected and starved across five political campaigns before the sixth ended it on January 30 of this year, when the Corporation for Public Broadcasting filed its Articles of Dissolution with the District of Columbia.
What Underwritten Documents
The book runs fifteen chapters. It opens with the four-second PBS logo sequence and the sensory event that anchors institutional memory of public broadcasting for everyone who watched it. It traces the November 7, 1967 signing of the Public Broadcasting Act in the East Room of the Johnson White House and the political coalition Lyndon Johnson built to pass it. Middle chapters examine the federation’s architecture across the coastal flagships at WGBH and WNET, the regional and state networks (Nebraska ETV included as a dedicated case-study chapter titled “The Heartland Node”), the independent producers at Florentine Films and ITVS and Sesame Workshop, the canonical programs that defined American cultural memory, and the five political campaigns from Nixon through the second Trump term that tested the federation’s resilience. Later chapters work through the dissolution itself: the Rescissions Act of 2025, the dissolution vote, the post-dissolution landscape of archive preservation at WGBH and the Library of Congress, the rural and tribal communities whose emergency broadcasting went dark with the federation’s coordination, and what survives.
Underwritten is dedicated to my wife, Janna Sweenie, a Deaf ASL performer and educator and my collaborator across the publishing constellation. This book is one of many she has watched come together at our kitchen table in New York.
Where to Read It
Underwritten is available now in Kindle ebook on Amazon, in paperback on Amazon, and as a free PDF download from BolesBooks.com. Kindle edition pricing is $9.99 with the paperback at $19.99 (509 pages, 1.273-inch spine, cream paper). A free web-download PDF carries the same content with full color typography matching the cover.
Underwritten joins Carceral Nation and The Claimed Body in the Institutional Autopsy sequence, and it sits beside Selling Saturday Morning as the second half of the television diptych.
Coda
The federation that produced the four seconds I did not watch when I was sixteen is gone. Across town from KOLN sat a station I could have walked to in twenty minutes, the station that had originated Anyone for Tennyson? for national distribution five years before I arrived at the commercial channel and was still producing for PBS while I was hosting Kidding Around. It is now operating under post-dissolution funding arrangements that may or may not sustain it for another decade. The federation that made the broadcasting possible is not coming back.
The station across town is where the book always lived. I just did not know it.
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