Screwed By The Network / PBS

Incidents involving the commercial-free TV station PBS and its children's programming block PBS Kids.

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General

• Because each local PBS station does its own scheduling, PBS itself should shoulder no blame for any kind of screwing outside of the odd occasions where Congress gets in the way. Are you mad that your favorite cooking show gets short shrift because of your station enjoying The Lawrence Welk Show and Gaither concert reruns too much? That's between them and you, not PBS, or the show's distributor, as seen below.
• PBS loves Invisible Advertising. Shows such as Arthur, Nature Cat, Wild Kratts, Ready Jet Go!, and Peg + Cat all have been subject to this trope occasionally whenever they have a week of new episodes. Nobody ever knows about the episodes unless they check their local PBS station's website or the show's social media promotes the episode. This is because of monthly tentpole events that take place — for example, new episodes, a new special, or a series premiere. PBS will devote all its monthly advertisement to that one event, and any poor schmucks that also air new episodes during that month will get ignored.

PBS Kids

• In June 2020, some PBS Kids 24/7 affiliates dropped all programming that was not running currently-airing episodes such as Caillou, Sid the Science Kid and older episodes of Clifford the Big Red Dog and put them in the dead hours on weekends.
• The Arthur episode "Flea To Be You and Me/Kiss and Tell" had a difficult premiere date of Christmas Day of 2003. Because of this, many PBS stations didn't air the episode, airing "Arthur's Perfect Christmas" or other holiday programming instead. Airing any new episode of a show on Christmas morning means it's pretty much dead in the water ratings-wise, since most people are busy opening presents and spending time with their families instead of watching TV. No new episode of a PBS Kids show has ever aired on Christmas since this.
• Barney & Friends, despite no problems ratings-wise, got canceled by PBS in 2009. Why? It ended up in the commercial hands of HiT Entertainment, which has shown more interest in merchandising every cent out of their properties than the quality of the series that gave them the merchandise in the first place. Sister property Thomas & Friends, after being changed from models to CGI animation, was raking in more money than Barney for the first time since the peak of its popularity in the '90s, so they canned Barney to focus more on their really useful engine, and thus marked the end of one of PBS Kids' Long-Runners. A handful of PBS stations did keep rerunning the show until PBS let their broadcasting rights lapse in November 2015. In 2018, it was acquired by Universal Kids (formerly PBS Kids Sprout, then simply Sprout).
  • During those last few years, New York City-based WNET (the show's then-new originating station) aired the show at 6:30AM starting in 2006 in order to make room for the Ms. Lori and Hooper block, staying there until it was pulled from the schedule. In the last few months they had the rights, the show aired on Kids Thirteen, their digital subchannel, once a day at 3:30AM.
• Reruns of the first four seasons of Between the Lions got dropped by most PBS stations in 2009 for unknown reasons.
• Despite getting heavy promotion when it was about to launch, the reboot of Clifford the Big Red Dog got this treatment a few weeks after premiering, when reruns were pulled in favor of Daniel Tiger's Neighborhood on all days except for Fridays, and then promoting Xavier Riddle and the Secret Museum in its place. This probably has something to do with the show also being an Amazon Studios original series, with PBS utilizing this strategy to try to get more viewers to use the service to see new episodes on a different service before they premiere on PBS. Although, even Amazon themselves do not treat the franchise nicely to begin with, it is only available to several country-specific Prime Video feeds and is not available on Prime Video Global. In September the next year, PBS started airing the Clifford reboot every weekday.
• Similarly with what happened to Arthur and its 12th through 15th seasons, Clifford's Puppy Days was originally produced in 16:9 widescreen HD. For whatever reason though, PBS aired an SD center cropped 4:3 version of the show instead, even on every HD PBS feed. Even on the rare reruns it gets on the PBS Kids subchannel, it is still shown this way, even though said channel only exists in widescreen, leading to many completely unaware that the show was formatted this way to begin with. Mercifully, the digital VOD versions of the show have its original HD format preserved, including when it was available on Netflix and when watching with Prime Video. Schedule-wise, the show typically only aired once a week and was pulled from reruns nationwide in 2014 apart from special occasions.
• Dragon Tales went on a three-year-long hiatus due to the 9/11 attacks, which also caused the second season's last few episodes to be withheld until 2002. It also was removed unceremoniously from all PBS affiliates and PBS Kids Sprout's schedules after August 31st, 2010, when they lost the rights to the show.
  • In Louisiana, Dragon Tales was briefly removed from the schedule in 2006 to make room for It’s a Big Big World.
• Even though PBS Kids adored Elliot Moose at first, they would remove it from the lineup quickly after only 5-10 weeks.
• Hero Elementary gained praise for its' worldbuilding and characters, but it wasn't as popular as other shows from the block. After season 1 ended, the show was put on hiatus, and the only updates from its' official social media pages are for giveaways. Since there's no news of a Season 2, it's safe to assume it is cancelled.
• It's a Big Big World got dropped by most PBS affiliates a year after its debut, with its place in the PBS Kids Preschool Block usually being preempted by affiliates for repeats of other shows like Caillou and Dragon Tales.
• KUAT in Tucson had a bad case of this, as several PBS Kids programs took a year or even a few years to appear on their block. For example, Caillou didn't air on this station until 2003, while it took until late 2001 for them to get Clifford the Big Red Dog. Both aforementioned shows premiered in 2000 on most other stations.
• Let's Go Luna!: The bomb of episodes from November 4 to November 7, 2019, received no advertising whatsoever, not even on the show's social media. Despite the show being popular, it was canceled after two seasons and ended in 2022.
• Liberty's Kids, like It’s a Big Big World, also got dropped by most PBS stations a year after its debut.
• Lomax, the Hound of Music was screwed directly from the get-go; it received little to no promotion, was only funded by the Bingham Trust and the National Endownment for the Arts, and was then burned off in just two months with zero reruns. After 13 episodes, it was canceled and PBS lost the rights to the show. As such, hardly anyone is aware of the show's existence.
• Mister Rogers' Neighborhood, despite being one of the most well-known and celebrated shows in all of PBS' history, has completely dumped all of its reruns into a once-a-week time slot that member stations can choose to air (starting in 2008, and mostly during early Saturday mornings), but no option to air it five days a week, despite the show running on a format that was specifically designed to be watched over the course of a week. In addition, the rerun schedule only consists of 52 episodes for each week of the year, which is only a small fraction of the 300 episodes from the show's second run that they could pull from^note if you don't count the "Conflict" week that hasn't been seen since the mid-90s. Some member stations used to run daily reruns on their own schedule, but this has become rarer and rarer, with one of the only surviving member stations still doing this being WETA in Washington, DC. They haven't even put any daily reruns on the national PBS Kids channel either, even though the schedule is filled to the brim with duplicate airings of the same shows. Can also be considered a subversion due to the show at least getting the Twitch 24-hour marathon treatment, but the show has largely been ignored in the realm of reruns since 2008. The show did return to the 24/7 channel following the success of Donkey Hodie in October 2022, but on weekends only.
• Odd Squad started out strong, having the most full-length material that PBS Kids has ever released prior to a show's premiere, showing that in spite of their push to make the show animated and not live-action, they were banking a hefty bit into it so it could be a success. However, it began to suffer from lengthy hiatuses and even got involved in controversy regarding Fred Rogers Productions' improper grant distribution, which contributed to its slow downfall. Needless to say, this show has never really been PBS Kids' favorite after its premiere.
• According to Levar Burton, Reading Rainbow was forced to cease production in 2006 because of No Child Left Behind, which was basically a government policy during the George W. Bush administration that pretty much mandated that children had to learn how to read. In other words, while children were taught the rudiments, it came without fostering a love for reading. As an end result, NCLB ate into the funding for Reading Rainbow. Prior to this, Dragon Tales, Sesame Street, and Maya & Miguel were funded by No Child Left Behind.
• Ready Jet Go! was constantly subject to this trope throughout its run. At first, it was Adored by the Network, being given tons of promotion, several online games, and a second season renewal before it was even a year old. However, it ended up getting screwed in many ways, including long hiatuses, Invisible Advertising, and severe lack of attention on social media. It was canceled after its second season ended.
• Sagwa, the Chinese Siamese Cat was launched in a blaze of publicity with high ratings, only for those ratings to drop when the 9/11 attacks happened thanks to PBS not being able to compete with bucket-tons of news coverage. The show was quietly canceled in 2002. Some PBS stations still showed the series as late as February 2009, with PBS Kids Sprout unceremoniously removing it from the schedule that March.
• Sesame Street: In August 2015, Sesame Workshop announced a partnership with HBO; older and newer episodes were aired on HBO, while newer episodes premiered on PBS months after their HBO airings. As Sesame Street isn't a time-sensitive program that has to be watched right away, this was a somewhat flawed but acceptable solution to keep the show airing.
  • The show's run on Sprout began at Season 30 and stopped at Season 42, not every season was complete, and Seasons 36 and 38 were skipped.
• Splash and Bubbles was hyped a lot when it premiered in November 2016. Afterward, it quietly faded into the background and was canceled after Pole to Pole aired.
• According to Toni DiBuono (Pat Tuesday) and Joe Howard (George Frankly), Children's Television Workshop abruptly canceled Square One TV despite high viewership because they wanted to free up funds for Ghostwriter.
• WordWorld was canceled after season three despite being fairly popular. What makes it worse is that the third season only lasted five episodes. Before the show was removed from the 24/7 channel, it only aired on the weekends in the wee hours of the morning.
• Xavier Riddle and the Secret Museum is a repeat victim of invisible advertising. It never really gets any TV promos for new episodes except for the series premiere and "I Am Madam President." It still gets general series promos, though. It also gets put on hiatuses so lengthy that it took 2 years and 2 months for Season 1 to finish.
• ZOOM is a weird example. The show continued airing until 2007, but older seasons had been progressively removed from the network for several years. Season 1 hadn't aired since early 2003, and even then it was only to air 12 of the season's original 41 episodes (the remaining 29 were last seen during the first half of 2002).

PBS Kids Go!

• Owing to Arthur being a Long Runner, it has become very, very rare to see episodes from the first eight seasons in reruns on PBS stations. Beginning in Summer 2014, many PBS stations began airing a double run of Arthur, the second run mostly consisting of earlier episodes, Seasons 2-4 in-particular. Some PBS stations air Arthur in an early morning slot to devote time to newer shows. For instance, WNET airs it at 6:30AM, the slot that, a decade prior, was used to burn off the last few seasons of Barney & Friends.
  • The show itself saw a decline in the amount of episodes per season beginning in 2016, and by the end of the decade had been Quietly Cancelled (although the episodes were held over for two years, as well as the announcement that season 25 would be the last). Although the show did get a proper finale episode (unusual for a PBS Kids program), it was a standard-length episode that left out a number of regular characters, and was paired with a story that played out like a normal episode. It’s likely that the only reason the show received a proper finale at all was because of how long it had run for.
• After season 8 ended in 2010 and the show was put on a hiatus, Cyberchase got screwed over. PBS continued to renew the show for new seasons, but rarely featured it in promos, and most PBS stations (including WNET, which produces the show) tend to only air the show at awkward time slots on the weekends. The 24/7 channel only tends to show episodes that are considered to be the show's Seasonal Rot.
• The Electric Company (2009) was canceled after 3 seasons while the 4th was in planning, presumably due to low ratings.
• Despite still being popular, Martha Speaks was quietly canceled after season 6. It wasn't even airing on the 24/7 channel, at least until late November 2018. There are rumors going around about how the author of the book the show was based on sued WGBH Boston (which produced the show) resulting in the show's cancellation.
• A combination of the controversy surrounding "Sugartime!" and poor ratings led to Postcards from Buster being pulled from most PBS stations in the fall of 2007 and being replaced by FETCH! with Ruff Ruffman, leading to only a handful of PBS stations airing the final five episodes.
• Wild Kratts: Everyone that got the SCETV stations 29.1 and 49.1 at the time was screwed out of seeing the first airing of "Ker-Honk" after the Riverbanks Zoo obtained the 5:00PM time slot to show an episode of Riverbanks Round-Up. What's even more ironic is that the zoo, when the show first started, had rented that slot every last Friday of the month, then dropped it for a while. This was the first time in at least 4 months that Riverbanks Round-Up had been shown. The episode "Ker-Honk" was not shown until 2:00PM the following Sunday.
  • The Other Wiki says they did it again with another episode- same station, same shows, same day of the week.
• While WordGirl was a very popular series, PBS decided to cancel it after season 8 and quietly dumped the last episodes on their website and video app. Although one particular reason as to why the series was canceled was most likely because the show's production company, Soup2Nuts, was shuttered in 2015.

Imports and acquired programming

• Angelina Ballerina and its spin-off The Next Steps could only be seen on the weekends on most stations. The original show was eventually taken off the air in 2006/07 when the rights to said show and HiT's other programs that were on PBS Kids were handed over from Connecticut Public Television to WNET.
  • This has also applied to many other acquired shows such as Anne of Green Gables: The Animated Series, which also only aired on early weekend mornings.
• The 2015 reboot of Bob the Builder was initially adored, getting many uploads on the PBS Kids' YouTube channel. However, many PBS stations didn't even air the show, while some only aired it at awkward time-slots. When 2018 came around, the show's sole time-slot on the 24/7 channel was wiped (this may be due to a rights tangle with Mattel, who also owns Thomas & Friends). It was eventually taken off the air completely, as PBS had lost the rights, and it was also removed from the website. Luckily, in 2019, Universal Kids started airing Ready, Steady, Build! from the original show, and Qubo started airing the reboot.
• Esme & Roy was supposed to premiere nationwide on both the PBS Kids block and channel, with both channels having daily reruns. However, it actually wound up only airing on weekends on the digital channel. This is probably being used as a strategy to get viewers to gauge interest in HBO GO (and by extension, HBO Now and later HBO Max) which also has this show. The show was later canceled after two seasons.
• Make Way For Noddy was promised to be given a weekday slot and air nationwide. Only a handful of stations aired the show, and the majority of those stations only aired it in an early weekend morning slot.
• The Canadian comedy series The Red Green Show was once a PBS classic in the States and its reruns aired a lot on PBS stations up until Spring 2016 when they seemingly lost the rights to the show. Not even Iowa Public Television (who really loved the show) was safe from the whole "losing the rights'' thing. In September 2018, Heartland began rerunning the series.
• Teletubbies was once a network favorite for PBS, but eventually fell prey to this. By 2001, the show had ended in its native United Kingdom; this meant that there was very little new material to be used for the show's American run, despite said run not ending until 2005. In 2008, most stations lost the rights to the show, but several stopped airing it already in 2007.
• The stand-alone version of Thomas & Friends was treated terribly by PBS. For starters, a lot of PBS stations (with the exception of Rhode Island PBS, who aired the model episodes as late as 2012) outright refused to show the model episodes once the switch to CGI happened for the series ^note  PBS gave the model era better treatment in the 90's, but as part of Shining Time Station and its short-lived spinoff Mr. Conductor's Thomas Tales. and only showed the widely-reviled Sharon Miller CGI episodes (seasons 1-7 were staples on PBS Kids Sprout before they, too, switched to showing nothing but the Miller episodes). They rarely, if ever, advertised new episodes unless a movie was premiering. Some stations, such as WTVI PBS Charlotte, either only aired the show on weekends at awkward time slots, or never even aired it at all. And then there's the Executive Meddling: in order to fit PBS' uptight standards, HiT revamped the show from season 8 to season 16 to make it more educational. Even after the show improved with the arrival of Andrew Brenner in season 17, PBS would show episodes from the Audience-Alienating Era more often than the newer ones. In December 2017, PBS announced that their broadcast rights to Thomas had expired and would not be renewed, resulting in a lot of soccer moms complaining to the network and Mattel on Facebook. The show then moved to Nick Jr., which gave it even worse treatment and then was made a Netflix original series in the United States.
• Tots TV got this treatment from most PBS stations. Most of them only aired the show once a week on Sunday, instead using the weekday slot that was planned for the show to bring in the then-new Arthur, which premiered the same year.
• Wimzie's House was primed up to be the next big hit for the channel after Shining Time Station ended its run. However, the show got overshadowed by a number of new shows, including Teletubbies, The Noddy Shop, Zoboomafoo and Dragon Tales, causing most affiliates to either dump it after a year or only play it in an early morning time slot. The show was last seen on August 31, 2001, and completely vanished off PBS' schedule a month later.