According to a press release issued from the PBS website last week, “Wishbone,” the wildly successful PBS children’s literacy program, is making a triumphant return to the network after a six-year hiatus, with a new cast and a new focus designed to shore up ratings for PBS in the face of season-on-season declines since the early 2000s.
The show, which ran from the mid-’90s until the 2001 television season, was a unique mix of dramatic re-enactments of scenes from famous literature and teenage suburban drama. The star of those dramatic re-enactments was a Jack Russell Terrier named Wishbone who drew inspiration for the stories from the everyday life of his owner. It received high marks from critics, including four Emmy awards.
The problem, PBS spokeswoman Jane Franks said, is that the audience the show originally catered to has grown up and changed to the point where “we can’t simply put a cute dog in a green outfit with a bow across his back and tell the story of Robin Hood. We’ve got to be edgier and tackle some darker material if we expect any kind of audience in today’s difficult broadcast market.”
The show’s producers are not holding back. The first episode of the new season, to be broadcast Dec. 3, depicts Edward Norton as Wishbone’s owner taking a riverboat up the Mississippi River to meet a friend in St. Louis. Wishbone is reminded of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, and in between scenes of life on the riverboat Wishbone plays the character of Barlow, the steamboat captain transporting ivory. The episode features Christopher Walken as Kurtz and was apparently filmed on location in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
In another episode later in the season, the show plans to plunge even deeper into controversy, when Wishbone cross-dresses as Justine from the Marquis de Sade novel of the same name. The terrier travels to France and encounters a series of tests of her morality, always choosing to remain virtuous but continuously punished in bizarre and often horrifying ways.
“We had to remove a lot of the really gruesome stuff from this episode, censor some things and it almost reached the point where we didn’t think the episode would be made,” said Don Robertson, a producer of the show. “Every time (PBS) threatened to pull it, we said ‘Hey, can you imagine the ratings and the share we’ll get?’ and they quieted down.”
Some things are too much even for the desperate network. A planned episode in which Ulysses by James Joyce was to be featured was canned — not for lewd content, but because the episode as scripted would have lasted 14 hours and did not allow for commercial breaks.
“They got us on that one,” Robertson said.
Other works set to round out the series’ first season include Bret Easton Ellis’ American Psycho, a collection of short stories by Charles Bukowski and a three-episode miniseries dedicated to the works of Chuck Palahniuk.
The show has screened its first couple of episodes before a select group of television and film critics across the country and so far the reaction has been positive. Roger Ebert gave the “Heart of Darkness” episode “two paws up,” and The New York Times’ television reviewer John Dalton wrote in a piece on Monday, “This is easily the most ambitious and interesting piece of television to emerge from PBS in ages — I can only imagine what lies in store for Wishbone in ‘Justine’…somebody’s apparently been a bad girl.”
The debut of the new “Wishbone” is scheduled next Tuesday at 7 p.m., directly following Lawrence Welk.