Behind the TV Curtain

Draft 4.7
April 24, 2026  (damned close) 

If you stick around long enough, you’ll get a TV show. At least, that’s how it seemed to me.

When I first walked through the doors of Idaho Public Television as a volunteer in 1981, there was only one home-grown TV show that mattered: Idaho Reports. As I explained in “Where’s My Hat?” it was the show I volunteered to assist, and it was the show that gave me entry into the PBS world.

The nightly half-hour public affairs program was the station’s flagship: steady, respected, and, to my inexperienced eyes, untouchable. It was hosted by Marc Johnson, who could carry a thoughtful conversation for thirty minutes on topics most people would struggle to pronounce, let alone understand. Later, he would go on to serve Governor Cecil Andrus, first as press secretary and then as chief of staff. Marc is now a political historian. He is one capable dude.

Behind the scenes were Jean McNeil, Gary Richardson, and Peter Morrill creating segments, and Ricardo Ochoa shooting and directing—quietly shaping what went to air. Together, they made Idaho Reports the crown jewel of Idaho Public Television, a program that racked up awards and, more important, trust.

For three months every year, beginning in January, Idaho Reports’ entire production system migrated to the basement of the Capitol. Cameras, cables, lights, video production gear, desks, typewriters, even the three-copy script paper—one copy to the host, one to the TV director, and one to that night’s line producer. At the same time, reporters from around the state converged on the capitol building: print reporters, TV veterans, and radio voices. We were convinced we were doing important work. Idaho was a different place then, with much of the population hundreds of miles from the marble halls of the state capital. And Idaho’s movers and shakers were on the floor right above us. It was our job to get the stories that the rest of the state cared about.  

One day during lunch, we all gathered on the Capitol steps for a photo: twenty reporters strong, representing every corner of the state. Looking back, it’s fair to call the late ’80s and early ’90s a golden age of statehouse coverage. There was a sense that what we were doing mattered, and that we were doing it together.

 

Idaho Reports’ makeshift studio was on the fourth floor. To call it a studio is being generous. We took over one small corner in the rotunda. . It was so tight that one of the camera people had to literally sit in the windowsill to get the shot of the guests on the set. Cables were everywhere. One wrong step could knock the signal off the air. The engineers worked miracles, bouncing that signal from the Statehouse to Bogus Basin and back to the station on the Boise State campus where graphics were added live and the recording for later playback took place. From there it was sent east to our Twin Falls and Pocatello transmitters and north to our Moscow and Coeur d’Alene systems. It felt technologically fragile, because it was.  Everything analog, blasting through some of the lower 48’s most demanding environs.

Associated Press reporter Bob Fick had a name for the early weeks of the session: GMA—General Milling Around. He was right. Filling a daily half-hour program in those weeks could feel like stretching taffy. Interviews fell through, as lawmakers got pulled into lobbyists’ dinners. I still remember a painfully long segment on the pros and cons of asphalt, with the chairman of the House Transportation Committee. Necessity may be the mother of invention, but in television it can also be the mother of boredom.

 

For me, still a rookie in this television business, it was a crash course in state government. I could see why seasoned reporters called it the “puzzle palace.” During the day, the Republicans would often meet in caucus—behind closed doors—and usually before a key vote. The Democrats would caucus when the Republicans did. Few of us knew why exactly. That smell of sausage frying was coming from down the hall, in the other caucus room.

During the three months of the legislative session, the favorite after-hours hangout was the Interlude bar, half a block from the Capitol. It was second home to many legislators, lobbyists, judges, regular Joes and some reporters. No doubt a lot of state business was on the table for discussion, and sometimes even a sandwich known as the “drunken chicken,” a fillet marinated in vodka and seared to perfection.

By mid-March, the puzzle palace started to wear on you, and every interview eventually got around to the same question: Why haven’t you adjourned yet?  Veteran reporters knew the answer. It depended on the weather. This was a citizen legislature, made up of a lot of farmers. As the days grew warmer, the urge to plant crops was too strong to fight. It was time to sine die and a time to return home.

 

Still, I was exactly where I wanted to be. Learning. Watching. Becoming useful. But Idaho Reports couldn’t carry everything forever. Ratings softened; they were always modest in the first place. Costs mounted, and funding to support a five-night-a-week program with six full-time people sadly declined. And maybe, the better the program covered important stories, the less welcome it became in certain circles. As state funding declined, the Idaho Reports program became a weekly show, airing only on Friday evening.

Meanwhile, the culture of the legislature had its own… traditions. In years past, on adjournment day—sine die—the Revenue and Taxation Committee table looked less like a workspace and more like a well-stocked bar. Bourbon, scotch, vodka—everything within reach and completely covering the table. At the time, my beat for the legislative session was each morning’s Revenue and Taxation committee. With 15 committee members seated around the table, you can bet that old table could hold a lot of booze! I will say, those days are gone. Today there are no public displays of alcohol anywhere in the Statehouse. Period.

One thing that apparently hasn’t changed through the decades is the lip service given to the concept of local control by members of the Idaho Legislature. State lawmakers don’t seem to trust counties and some cities when they pass local statutes. Given the state’s conservative inclination, legislators are typically wary of issues like the flying of LGBT pride flags and access to abortion.

This was certainly true in 1990, when one piece of legislation—House Bill 625—defined that year’s session.

The most restrictive abortion measure in the nation sparked nightly candlelight vigils and divided the state in ways that felt new, even for Idaho politics. The debate was sharp, often personal. But the bill passed both chambers and landed on Governor Andrus’s desk.

It was the only time I ever won a bet with reporter Bob Fick, who figured Andrus would have to sign the proposed legislation.  I wagered that he had to go home every night and face his wife and three daughters, and they would have some influence over his ultimate decision. Who knows, they probably helped him write his veto speech.

Andrus called the bill in question “without compassion, further harming an Idaho woman who may find herself in the horrible, unthinkable position of confronting a pregnancy that resulted from rape or incest.”

What surprised nearly everyone—including the governor—was that the veto didn’t hurt him at all, even in a red state. He won reelection with 70 percent of the vote. And for one moment, Idaho politics balanced on a knife’s edge, with a 21–21 split in the State Senate. That would prove to be the high-water mark for Democrats in Idaho.

After a decade of covering legislative news, I was ready for something different.  When Outdoor Idaho offered me an off-ramp, I took it. Less time in the Capitol, more time in the Idaho outdoors, with stories that didn’t require a vote count, except, I would have to carry the show, with little money and not much support to get the job done.

After a few years, Outdoor Idaho eventually got graded up from a monthly show to a twice-a-week time slot, Thursday and Sunday evenings. This major change—from monthly to weekly—gave Outdoor Idaho the chance to grow the audience. Yes, we leaned heavily on repeats. We had no choice. We had a three-person staff with mostly old equipment. But I took a certain pride in hearing from someone that watching an Outdoor Idaho episode a second time “wasn’t so bad.”

People could see we weren’t just phoning it in. They could see we were on the road, hauling unreliable gear up mountains and often bouncing cameras and decks around on the back of a packhorse until they stopped working.

One disastrous trip into the White Clouds required two 100-mile trips back and forth from Boise to the east side of the White Clouds, first to replace batteries that weren’t holding a charge, and then back to Boise to fix a microphone that had somehow developed a buzz. When we finally got back to the White Clouds, the outfitter assisting us had left, no doubt thinking we were a two-bit shoestring operation. We also began wondering just how serious we were. Maybe we had taken on more than we could handle.

Still, we were taking people to places they’d likely never see, talking to people who rarely got asked their story. In fact, we made it a point to stay away from Boise and away from politicians whenever possible. The landscapes of Idaho made that easy. When your ingredients are as fresh and beautiful as Idaho’s, it’s hard for even a lousy chef to fail.

Even now, I’ll stumble across an old episode I haven’t seen in decades and catch myself saying “You know, that wasn’t so bad.”

Not all feedback was so flattering. One mother told me she used an Outdoor Idaho DVD when her young twins refused to go to bed. It took only a few minutes into a show, she told me, before they were out cold. I chose to take that as a compliment, about pacing, and a calming voice.

Like Idaho Reports before it, Outdoor Idaho became a training ground, where eager young people learned to make long-form television. Producers, shooters, editors, writers—there are so many individuals to thank for their contributions over a 40-year span. Television is never a solo act. Never.

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No mistake about it, we had a whole department of racehorses on staff; producers and shooters, and they wanted to run.

It wasn’t the purse that attracted these talented, driven, occasionally difficult individuals; they already knew no one got rich working for public television. I believe it was the opportunity to make long-form television. That chance rarely existed in the Idaho commercial TV market, where two minutes constituted a long video segment.

But ask any rancher what happens when you put racehorses together in a pasture. There’s gonna be a fight. Their high energy and competitive nature can lead to an occasional dust-up: kicking, charging, and biting. Even after establishing a hierarchy—a pecking order—the fighting can still continue. Smart ranchers know to prevent resource guarding by keeping plenty of hay in multiple locations.

But for the longest time resources were in short supply at IdahoPTV. A TV camera could cost $30,000. That’s not counting tripod and batteries and video cassettes. It wasn’t just equipment that was lacking. Videographers also had to be “checked out” and scheduled. They were an essential asset when one producer wanted to conduct an interview in eastern Idaho and another producer needed one in the panhandle. And the only other videographer was not available because he or she was editing an upcoming program that had an approaching deadline.

Just trying to make it all work was a logistical nightmare, and vehicle shortages only added to the difficulties. Much effort went into developing software that reduced the bottlenecks, but nothing ever solved all the problems.

It took expert grant writing and generous contributions from the Laura Moore Cunningham Foundation and other generous Idaho supporters before the shortages became a workable problem.

I often felt like an air traffic controller, and sometimes like a referee. Keep the peace. Adjust the pairings so that producers, videographers, editors were all pulling in the same direction. I honestly don’t believe the final product suffered, because everyone wanted to produce great television. But sometimes kicking up one’s heels could make life less fun behind the curtain.

And sometimes human racehorses just refuse to work together. It could be over questions of style or sometimes over something like shooting several dozen videotapes and then never having them used.

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 Occasionally, someone would ask where Outdoor Idaho gets its ideas. They are surprised when I tell them: from butcher paper. In what passed for our annual production Christmas party, we’d gather at the home of director of content services Jeff Tucker and wife Karan. There we would talk about the upcoming year’s programs. All ideas—some suggested by viewers and some from producers and shooters themselves—made it onto large 3x5-foot paper. Even questionable ones were considered, like “Dogs and Pickup Trucks.” The staffer who suggested it was convinced it would make a fun show.

I had no idea that Jeff had squirreled away all those lists until one day he brought them to the station. We taped them to the hallway walls between our basement offices. It was like being in a Wayback machine. Everyone marveled at how many program ideas we could check off from those lists. Still, even after 20 years, the one show left hanging involved a dog in the back of someone’s pickup truck.

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There does seem to be a PBS “type.” Thoughtful and curious. The kind of person you just know will stick around for a decade or two. Hang around long enough, and chances are good you’ll get your own TV show.

I could see that right away with Joan Cartan-Hansen and Marcia Franklin. Like everyone on staff, they had served time on Idaho Reports.

In 1994 a series with two hosts debuted: Dialogue, a live call-in program, that put viewers directly into the conversation. Joan and Marcia co-hosted, with Ricardo Ochoa and Al Hagenlock steering from the control room. It worked because they worked—driven, competitive, and committed to making the show matter.

In 1999 Joan stepped away to focus on a program that brought science into classrooms across the state. Science Trek wasn’t just television; it became a resource, with lesson plans, real scientists, and kids asking real questions. It filled a gap no one else had thought to fill; and with the internet gaining traction, the show’s content and lesson plans were used across the U.S. and even overseas.

Marcia took the occasion to reshape Dialogue, broadening it beyond politics into conversations with writers, historians, filmmakers—people who carried ideas rather than legislation. She also used the annual Sun Valley Writers’ Conference to interview world-famous authors.

It might seem that Outdoor Idaho has been a male-dominated series, but I would argue that’s only partly true, considering the significant contributions of Marcia and Joan, and—before them, Victoria Osborn.

Marcia’s full-length OI programs that still re-air include “Writers at Harriman,” “Camp Rainbow Gold,” “Cycling Idaho,” and “Idaho Tribes and the Environment.” Several of Joan’s OI programs still airing include “Trip to the Moon,” “Pushing Boundaries,” “Health of our Lakes,” and “The Foothills.”  

Their perspectives were different and kept the series evolving. It was Vicky Osborn who convinced me that the show could benefit by occasionally tackling environmentally sensitive issues, if handled it properly.

We also relied upon part-time producers like Kris Millgate from Idaho Falls. She gave us an eastern Idaho perspective, with programs like “Helping Henry’s” and “Caribbean of the Rockies.”

In 2018 a new series entered the mix. Idaho Experience modeled itself after American Experience, exploring key events and individuals shaping Idaho’s history. Everyone on our production staff takes turns on this one.

Producers on this series had more freedom. There were no visible hosts, and the narrators varied from show to show, which meant there was no on-air host willing to exert ultimate control over the words he was expected to utter, even if that meant additional rewrites in the audio booth.

With Idaho Experience, the topics immediately expanded beyond the outdoors, to include stories on women’s suffrage, the New Plymouth Utopia, Harmon Killebrew, Ligertown, and Idaho’s nuclear navy.

The pressure was now on to make Outdoor Idaho’s stories interesting enough to entice production staff to want to spend time on OI. Luckily, the new kids on the block—Lauren Melink, Forrest Burger, and Seth Ogilvie—met the challenge with programs like “Urban Wildlife,” “Women Who Hunt,” “Barns of Idaho,” and “Hops and Barley.”

In 2022 along came a different kind of program: Createid was only available on-line; it featured artists moved by the beauty of the state: it was shorter than half an hour: and it was unfunded. In other words, it was a program that broke a lot of rules.

It was expertly led by Marcia, with a talented team that changed over time, relying primarily on shooters and editors and directors Troy Shreve and Andy Lawless, with major assistance from Jennie Sue Weltner, Morgan McCollum, Logan Finney, and Jenessa Carson. The segments have been consistent winners, each year bringing home regional Emmys in the “Arts/Entertainment—Short Form Content” category.

 

But when President Trump and the Republican Congress eliminated funding for the Corporation of Public Broadcasting, the loss of two million dollars per year forced Idaho Public Television to make significant budget cuts in 2025/2026, and to put a pause to Createid.

Budget cuts also stalled Science Trek, leaving only three programs still standing: Idaho Reports, Outdoor Idaho, and Idaho Experience.

For several decades, what set Idaho Public Television apart from other PBS stations was simple: we kept making local programs, including outstanding documentaries, like Marcia’s special on teacher astronaut Barbara Morgan and “The Color of Conscience,” both of which aired nationally.  

 I didn’t realize how unusual Idaho’s PBS station was until I attended a few national meetings. Local programming is what binds viewers to a station. Viewers feel they matter, because they do. Speaking from nearly 40 years’ experience, I can say that the entire production staff feels truly grateful for the love and support it has received for 40 years.

So, here’s to another 40 years, with a mostly new staff of talented individuals. They might feel the old guard has left them, and we have. But they’ll be fine. And who knows what new shows will one day sprout up? Hopefully, a rejuvenated Outdoor Idaho will continue to be in that mix.

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