Behind the Curtain

Draft 6.4
August 9, 2026 

If you stick around long enough, you’ll get your own TV show. At least, that’s how it seemed to me over the years.

Idaho Reports, the nightly half-hour public affairs program, was the station’s flagship production: steady, respected, and, to my inexperienced eyes, untouchable. It was my entry into the world of television. The daily show was hosted by Marc Johnson, who could carry a thoughtful conversation for thirty minutes on any topic thrown at him. 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, and I was truly impressed.

Assisting him behind the scenes were Jean McNeil, Gary Richardson, and Peter Morrill creating segments, and Ricardo Ochoa (and Al Hagenlock??) 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 importantly, trust. The show also gave this star-struck log-cabin dweller a glimpse into a different reality than one he was used to.

For three months each year, beginning in January, Idaho Reports’ entire production team migrated to the basement of the Capitol to cover the Idaho legislative session. 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 the line producer tracking the show’s time segments.

 

Reporters from around the state also converged on the Capitol. 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. {somewhere there is a photo of all of us on the capitol steps.} 

Idaho Reports’ makeshift studio was on the fourth floor. Legislators were on the third floor, so it was relatively easy to find someone to talk with for our daily programs, unless lobbyists were wining and dining them that evening, which often was the case.

To call our digs a studio was being generous. We took over one small corner on the fourth-floor rotunda. The studio was so tight that one of the camera people had to literally sit on the windowsill to get the shot of the guests on the set. Cables were strewn everywhere. One wrong step could knock the signal off the air. The engineers worked miracles, however, bouncing the signal from the Statehouse to Bogus Basin and then to the station, where graphics were added live and the recording for later playback took place. From there it was sent to our eastern and northern Idaho transmitters. Everything felt technologically fragile, because it was.  Everything was 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 the first weeks of the session with something exciting and important could feel like stretching taffy. 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.” Almost daily, Republicans met behind closed doors, usually before a key vote, and often for several hours. Democrats figured they should caucus also, even though they didn’t have the votes to make much of a difference when bills made it to the House or Senate floor. We were always impressed that Republicans seldom had defectors in their ranks when it came time to vote. I’m not sure any of us knew what threats were employed to ensure such loyalty.

During the three months of the legislative session, the favorite after-hours hangout was the Interlude Bar & Grill, half a block from the Capitol on 8^th street. 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, as well as a sandwich known as the “drunken chicken,” a fillet marinated in vodka and seared to perfection. The regulars back then remember the ‘Lude fondly: Tilted Tuesdays. Slam poetry nights. Idaho nachos. A Jagermeister chilling machine. Hardcore backgammon games. In January, February, and March it was the place to be.

By mid-March, the puzzle palace started to wear on everyone, and interviews 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, and lawmakers usually headed to their fields in late March.

Still, I was where I wanted to be, in a culture I was beginning to appreciate. Learning. Watching. Becoming useful. After the session was over and we had to return to the Idaho Public Television building and our own desks, there was always a decompression period for me. Life at the station seemed slow-paced, not as exciting. It was definitely time for me to get outside and back to the woods.

The culture of the legislature had some traditions that seemed to go unreported, especially in the 1980s. It was adjournment day for the session, and I had wandered up to the fourth floor of the Capitol, to the Revenue and Taxation committee room. I knew the room well, and each morning at 8 a.m. fifteen legislators would meet there to debate tax matters. Back then it was my “beat.”

On that particular morning, I was impressed to see the large table looking like a well-stocked bar, with bourbon, scotch, vodka, gin—all free and within reach and being appreciated by handfuls of lawmakers only too happy to escape the puzzle palace. I can’t say I was surprised; there were times during the session when I would head down to the third floor to beg legislators to join us on the Idaho Reports set, and I would catch the unmistakable scent of bourbon and coke. It was just a different atmosphere in those days.

I’m told that there are no longer public displays of alcohol anywhere in the Statehouse. The Interlude closed permanently in 2003. Several doors down the street from the famous bar is Dawson Taylor Coffee Roasters, apparently a suitable replacement for the good ole days.

In 1990 one piece of legislation—House Bill 625—defined that year’s session and seemed to affect me more than most. 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.

Reporters couldn’t agree what would happen next. Some, like Associated Press reporter Bob Fick figured Andrus had no choice but to sign the bill. I figured the governor 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. 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.

The next month I informed General Manager Jerry Garber that he might have to fire me, because I had served my time covering the Idaho Legislature, and I would not be going back. Soon afterwards, Idaho Public Television became the sole producer of Outdoor Idaho, and I found myself spending less time in the Capitol and more time in Idaho’s outdoors, producing stories that didn’t require a vote count. But I was told I would have to carry much of the show, with little money and not much support to get the job done. I happily accepted the challenge.

Further state and federal budget cuts led GM Garber to reduce the daily Idaho Reports program to a weekly presence. There were a few groans, but not many. Outdoor Idaho eventually got graded up from a monthly show to a weekly show, airing Thursday and repeating Sunday evenings. That major change gave Outdoor Idaho a chance to grow the audience. Yes, we leaned heavily on repeats. Very heavily. We had no choice. Outdoor Idaho 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 around on the back of a pack animal until they stopped working. The camera, that is.

One disastrous trip into the White Clouds required two 100-mile trips back and forth from Boise, first to replace the camera’s video tape recorder that only recorded “snow,” and then back to Boise to fix batteries that wouldn’t hold a charge for more than ten minutes.

Not surprisingly, the outfitter assisting us had left, no doubt thinking we were a two-bit, shoestring operation. We also began wondering if we had taken on more than we could handle. Maybe we should just stay in the studio, said my visibly angry colleagues Royce Williams and Jeff Tucker. Getting around the state had turned into a crap shoot.

Still, we were taking people to places they’d likely never see and talking to people who rarely got asked their story. Viewers could see we made 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 flash back to all the troubles we had with ailing camera equipment, flat tires, and gremlins in the edit bay. The show was better than I remember, I’d say to no one in particular.

Not all feedback was flattering, even when it was meant to be. 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’m sure she meant that as a compliment. After all, I had been told that my sonorous, nasal voice, coupled with extraordinary video, exceptional music, and comfortable pacing seemed to trigger a viewer’s parasympathetic nervous system, unlocking the auditory cortex, lowering the heart rate and reducing the stress hormones.

Who was I to question science?

                                                             ***

 

 

Years before television seduced me with its perceived power and ability to manipulate reality, I had read a syndicated newspaper columnist who answered people’s questions. I remember one question: “What does an EP—Executive Producer—do?” His answer was No one really knows.  Maybe it’s because there are so many answers to the question. In the movie business, an EP usually devotes time and energy to finding the money to pay for the dream.

 

In the TV world, EP usually describes the person who is the lead creative force, who gets the final say and handles the budget. He or she is the one who usually takes the hits when things go south. At IdahoPTV, things are a little different, because the GM—general manager—has to answer to the Idaho Legislature and the Idaho State Board of Education. If something really spirals out of control at the station, it’s the GM that lawmakers will haul before their budget committee to exact their pound of flesh.

 

I didn’t ask to be the executive producer of all the local productions for Idaho Public Television. I was quite content being another of the handful of producers on staff. But I had changed since those early days of just wanting to make television. I saw the importance of helping to create an atmosphere where good people could tell  Idaho's stories. Besides, I was becoming one of the old-timers at the station. It was time for me to step up and offer my services.

 

Over time I came to define the role of EP this way: trust your excellent producers, try to be helpful, and don’t interfere unless there’s a real need. Also, pay attention to what works and what doesn’t work, so we don’t repeat mistakes.

 

I was pretty sure my value to the agency was not to play traffic cop, but there were times when playing traffic cop was exactly what was needed. Sometimes an editor would tell me the producer couldn’t come into the edit bay while the show was being constructed. I realized that often an editor knows things that a producer doesn’t know, because the editor has battled with the video for hours and knows what works and what doesn’t work in the creation of a sequence. Some editors figured they didn’t need producers to tell them how to do their job.

 

Often, I’d tell the producer to give me a script to narrate, and in the margins list the cover footage to use. The editor and I would take it from there. Truth be told, there were all kinds of arrangements like that being made in our production department, just to keep things flowing smoothly. EP as WD40. There’s some truth to that.

 

Still, the work of a producer was always more impressive to me than that of an EP. Producers are the ones who develop a particular story idea and follow it through to completion. That involves arranging interviews, working with a videographer, writing the script, and working with an editor to make sense of it all. Sometimes, this could take a month or more. Often the placing of Executive Producer in the show credits was simply a nod to a TV hierarchy. It’s the names of the producer, editor, and videographer who do the heavy lifting. I was happiest when I was writing and producing OI shows, and I usually was working on more than one at a time, with another two or three in the docket. Deadlines kept the pressure on.

 

 

Being both the host and executive producer of Outdoor Idaho made me pay particular attention to public policy issues, because it’s easy to get tripped up. Luckily, I had people like BSU professors John Freemuth and Jim Weatherby to offer assistance before the show hit the air waves.

 

But there was one notable occasion when we decided to make adjustments after the show aired.  It’s not as easy as it sounds. It often involved adjusting music and closed captioning and making sure the program still came in at exactly 26:46.

 

We were producing a segment on U.S. Forest Service law enforcement. Two elderly loggers in an old truck with a trailer loaded with logs got pulled over near Lucky Peak, and we were there when the woman Forest Service officer stopped them. Our camera was rolling as she ticketed the men for hauling logs out of the forest without a permit.

 

I considered it serendipitous and good TV, and we worked it into the script. After it aired, I received a call from the wife of one of the men. She told me her husband had not been able to sleep since the         Outdoor Idaho show aired, and she didn’t know what to do. She said they were both suffering.

I figured we had no choice. We spent half a day re-editing the program so that the faces of the men were not obvious. The final product certainly wasn’t as exciting, but the wife was appreciative, and the segment still made its point: that you might wind up facing a fine if you take logs off public land without a permit.

                                               ***

 

 

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

No mistake about it, we had a department of racehorses on staff, 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. They had an opportunity to make quality long-form television, something that rarely happens in the Idaho commercial TV market, where three minutes constitutes a long video segment.

Ask any rancher what happens when you put racehorses together in a pasture. There’s gonna be a fight, sometimes even after a pecking order is established. Their high energy and competitive natures can lead to an occasional dust-up: charging, kicking, biting. Some horse people prevent resource-guarding by keeping plenty of hay in several locations.

But for the longest time Idaho Public Television’s resources were in short supply. A TV camera could cost $30,000. That’s not counting tripod and batteries and video cassettes. And 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 Idaho Falls, and another producer needed a shooter up north in Sandpoint on the same day. Sometimes the only other videographer was busy editing an hour show that had a deadline barreling down on him.

Just trying to make it all work was a logistical nightmare. We put effort into developing software to reduce the bottlenecks, but nothing ever really solved all the problems, especially when everything was a moving target, and vehicles that could survive lousy dirt roads were in short supply.

It took expert grant-writing and much-appreciated contributions from the Laura Moore Cunningham Foundation and other generous Idaho supporters before the shortage problem partially disappeared.

Occasionally, kicking up one’s heels could make life less fun behind the curtain. And sometimes human racehorses just refused to work together. It could be over questions of style or sometimes over something like shooting a dozen videotapes and then having the producer decide not to use any of them.

One could imagine how an air traffic controller feels. Keep the peace and adjust the pairings so that producers, videographers, and editors were all pulling in the same direction. I honestly don’t think the final product ever suffered. In our minds, the desire to create enduring television overruled everything else. Besides, one of the duties of colleague Aaron Kunz was to be the traffic cop, making sure the cameras worked, the batteries and microphones worked, and people had a rig when they needed one. He also produced television shows. Another of the one-man bands in our production department.

                                                          ***  

Occasionally, someone would ask where Outdoor Idaho gets its ideas. They were surprised when I told 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 butcher 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. Sorry, Peter.

                                                               *** 

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. It’s true, hang around long enough, and chances are good you’ll get your own TV show.

That occurred  with Joan Cartan-Hansen and Marcia Franklin. Like everyone on staff, they had served time on Idaho Reports.

In 1994 a series with the two of them as hosts debuted. Dialogue, a live call-in program, put viewers directly into the conversation. Joan Cartan-Hansen and Marcia Franklin 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 become the sole host of 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. With the internet gaining traction, the show’s content and lesson plans benefited students and teachers 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 and her crew also attended the annual Sun Valley Writers’ Conference to interview world-famous authors.

The program that had been my first love, Idaho Reports, has evolved more than most. In 2014 a new host of the TV program, Melissa Davlin, proved it’s possible to get a show without a long apprenticeship. She had been a sharp newspaper reporter from Twin Falls and effortlessly made the jump from print to television. Good journalism is good journalism. She has given the ole stalwart series—the longest running public affairs show in the West—a new look that still breaks stories and makes waves.

                                                  ***

It might seem that Outdoor Idaho has been a male-dominated series since its inception, and I can certainly see why many assumed that to be the case. We did have strong male producers over a period of several decades: Roger Fuhrman, Jeff Beaman, John Crancer, Greg Hahn all produced thoughtful programs, and not only for Outdoor Idaho. But that did begin to change, with significant contributions from Marcia and Joan, Sauni Symonds and Victoria Osborn.

Marcia’s full-length OI programs included “Camp Rainbow Gold,” “Cycling Idaho,” and “Idaho Tribes and the Environment.” Some of Joan’s OI programs included “A Trip to the Moon,” “Health of our Lakes,” and “The Foothills.” 

Their perspectives were often different from mine, and that kept the series evolving and improving. Thirty years ago it was producer Vicky Osborn who convinced me that the show could benefit by occasionally tackling environmentally sensitive issues, if handled correctly.

And Sauni Symonds, who spent years as an Outdoor Idaho producer and editor and videographer, has many shows that still air, like “Family Ranch Heritage,” “Wild Horses,” “Idaho Fairways,” and “Idaho’s Middle Earth.” Sauni was one of those special types who could do it all... and often had to.

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.”

Before I retired, Lauren Melink became lead producer of the show, shepherding programs like “Women Who Hunt,” “Spud Country,” “Urban Wildlife,” and “The Next Chapter.” After I retired, videographer/editor Mya Long joined producer Lauren Melink. For the first time in its 40-year history, Outdoor Idaho had become essentially an all-woman team.

It was perhaps inevitable that a new series would emerge one day. Outdoor Idaho couldn’t possibly cover all the stories that begged to be told in a state like Idaho.

 

But it was easily ten years in the making, involving two general managers, Peter Morrill and Ron Pisaneschi, before Idaho Experience made the scene in 2017. Prior to that, Governor Butch Otter had included it in his annual budget to the Legislature, but the legislative budget committee declined to fund a television program.

 

After several years of searching, Ron and his Development team finally found private funding from the Albertson Foundation, and Jeff Tucker and independent producer Jennie Sue Weltner took the helm and translated the concept into a real television series.

They modeled it after the PBS documentary series American Experience and began covering a wide range of topics, including Idaho’s role in securing women’s suffrage, Harmon Killebrew, Ligertown, Idaho’s Chinese Immigrants, the New Plymouth Utopia, Pioneers of the Air, and Idaho’s Mail-order Messiah.

One of the benefits of IdahoPTV is that our production team got to work on different series. Writers and producers tended to have more freedom with Idaho Experience. Narrators were chosen from outside the station and did not appear on-air. That meant, unlike Outdoor Idaho, there was no host happy to exert ultimate control over the words he was expected to utter.

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—Aaron Kunz, Forrest Burger, Melissa Davlin, Bill Manny, and Lauren—met the challenge with shows like “Sawtooths on My Mind,” “Barns of Idaho,” “Women Who Hunt,” “Salmon Reckoning,” “Idaho’s 12ers,” “Barns of Idaho,” and “Off the Beaten Path.” Some of them they co-produced with me, but usually they were happy to handle it all themselves, with a videographer and editor.

In 2022 along came a different kind of program: createid is only available on-line; it features artists moved by the beauty of the state. It is shorter than half an hour, and it is unfunded. In other words, it’s a program that broke a lot of rules in its inception.

It has been expertly led by Marcia, with a talented team that has changed over time, relying primarily on shooters and editors Troy Shreve and Andy Lawless, with assistance from Jennie Sue Weltner, Morgan McCollum, Logan Finney, and Jenessa Carson. The segments have been consistent winners, 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 for Public Broadcasting in 2025, that caused Idaho Public Television to put createid on hold. Science Trek is also on hold. It’s possible both programs will return when funding can be worked out. That means only three programs are still standing: Idaho Reports, Outdoor Idaho, and Idaho Experience.

For several decades, what set Idaho Public Television apart from other PBS stations was simple. When the going got tough, we continued to make local programs, including solid stand-alone documentaries like Capitol of Light; Trial of the Century; and the 90 minute concert documentary Rosalie Sorrels: Way Out in Idaho. A documentary on teacher astronaut Barbara Morgan and Color of Conscience both aired nationally. 

 Local programming is what binds viewers to a station. Viewers feel they matter, because they do. Speaking from 40 years’ experience, I can say that our production team always felt fortunate to have the love and support from Idahoans of all walks of life.

So, here’s to another bunch of 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.

Television changes. Equipment changes. People retire. But the privilege of telling Idaho's stories never really leaves you.

As King George III in Hamilton sings, “You’ll be back, soon, you’ll see. You’ll remember you belong to me.”  That’s certainly been my experience in retirement.

It’s kinda like the Eagles’ song “Hotel California”: You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave.

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