It was the ‘80s, and I was a kid who had trouble sleeping. In the wee small hours of the morning, there was one station that remained on the air: PBS.
Watching on my black-and-white TV with a screen no bigger than a deck of cards, I remember wondering who the hell “Doctor Who” was. I wasn’t sure I liked it. But there was nothing else on, so I watched anyway.
And then, at some point, in those cold mornings in my semi-attic upstairs room, I discovered Monty Python. It blew my mind wide open.
I grew up in Wichita Falls, Texas, the kid of two public school teachers who believed — deeply, stubbornly — that education didn’t stop when the last bell rang. Money was tight, geography was tighter, and the world beyond North Texas might as well have been on another planet. Cable was spotty. The internet didn’t exist yet. Bookstores were limited.
But there was KERA.
Channel 13, beaming in from Dallas, felt like a small miracle. It was our cultural wormhole. While Wichita Falls was doing its best, earnest job being Wichita Falls, KERA was quietly telling us that there was more out there: stranger ideas, different voices, accents that didn’t sound like ours, humor that didn’t explain itself or apologize.
For a lot of families, PBS was “Sesame Street” in the mornings and pledge drives at night. For us, it was oxygen. KERA brought in theater, science, documentaries, British comedies that felt like they’d been smuggled in past customs. Most famously, it was the station that introduced “Monty Python’s Flying Circus” to American audiences. For a kid in North Texas, Monty Python wasn’t just funny; it was proof that humor could be silly, intellectual, and a little dangerous all at once.
That mattered more than I understood at the time. When your parents are teachers, you absorb, by osmosis if nothing else, the idea that public institutions are supposed to expand your sense of possibility. KERA did that nightly. It was the sound of the wider world leaking into our living room, telling us that curiosity was normal and that being a little out of step with your surroundings wasn’t a flaw.
I wasn’t the only one.
Lawrence Sonntag grew up in Azle, watching the same public television station beam into his home. For him, PBS wasn’t just programming — it was survival.
“It was a cultural life vest,” Sonntag said. “It felt like looking at the world’s vibrance and beauty through a straw, but that made it the most important straw.”
Mitchell Clemons, who grew up in Allen, came to a similar realization later in life. “Thinking about it, I think I forgot how much PBS did mean to me,” he said.
His memories sound like a generational mixtape. “From ‘Barney’ (and my dad knowing the OG dinosaur in the costume) in tech school, to ‘Lamb Chop’ and the ‘Song That Never Ends,’ to ‘Mr. Rogers,’ to ‘Arthur’ in grade school and the library song that’s still instilled in my brain.”
But it didn’t stop with kids’ programming. PBS grew up with him — “Even stuff like Ken Burns for the history of baseball, which I still watch … and ‘Country Music’ and ‘The American Revolution.’”
That’s the quiet power of public media: it doesn’t just entertain you at one age. It walks alongside you. It evolves with you. It teaches you how to care about things you didn’t know existed yet.
That’s why the current moment for public media feels so personal, even decades later.
And PBS is still relevant. With all the awful headlines, people are still turning to public TV icons like Fred Rogers for solace.
But, of course, this is America under Donald Trump, which means we can’t have anything nice.
Last year, Congress cut $500 million from public broadcasting, pulling the rug out from under NPR and PBS stations across the country. Predictions were dire: dozens of radio and TV stations were expected to go dark. In Sitka, Alaska, the tiny station KCAW stared down what its general manager called a potential “doomsday” scenario after losing $187,500 from its budget. Across the system, experts warned that 78 public radio stations and 37 TV stations were at risk.
And yet, at least for now, the apocalypse has been postponed.
Six months after the cuts, few stations have actually closed. Donations surged. Emergency funds stepped in. Stations merged, tightened belts, and leaned hard on their communities.
Austin PBS is one example of what that looks like on the ground.
“In the wake of federal funding cuts, Austin PBS is now 100% community-funded,” said Sara Robertson, the station’s chief operating officer. “We’re fortunate to be in a market where the community strongly supports our mission and our programming — donations are up and membership continues to grow.”
That support hasn’t just come from viewers at home. Long-running cultural institutions like ‘Austin City Limits’ have helped rally artists as well. “Acclaimed series like ‘Austin City Limits’ have sparked an outpouring of goodwill from both viewers and artists,” Robertson said.
“Musicians including Billy Strings and Jason Isbell have recently supported Austin PBS through fundraising events, while longtime ACL artists such as Willie Nelson and Beck have spoken publicly about the importance of the series and public television as a whole.”
Public media’s audience hasn’t disappeared; if anything, it’s migrating. Thousands are cheering on PBS’s social media manager for simply reminding people it still exists, and some were ready to buy merch with a Jimmy Kimmel-approved slogan.
“The streaming success of Ken Burns’ ‘American Revolution’ underscores the viewer appetite for the kind of quality, in-depth programming public television uniquely provides,” Robertson said, pointing to the growing reach of the PBS App.
“Our focus is firmly on the future and on serving the community that supports us,” she said, noting that Austin PBS also plays a behind-the-scenes role as a presenting station — championing film and documentary projects, providing platforms for local and regional filmmakers, and hosting the kinds of community events that quietly build creative ecosystems.
Still, this isn’t a happy ending. The Corporation for Public Broadcasting is gone. Much of the replacement money is temporary — stopgaps, not solutions.
“We’re not out of the woods at all,” Tim Isgitt of Public Media Company, a nonprofit that has provided $30 million in emergency funding to public TV and radio stations, told The New York Times.
The system is intact, but fragile, held together by emergency funding, listener goodwill, and a lot of crossed fingers.
Which brings me back to Wichita Falls, and that flickering PBS signal from Dallas.
Public media doesn’t just fill airtime. In places far from cultural centers (sorry, Wichita Falls!), it fills gaps — geographic, economic, intellectual. It gives kids like me access to ideas our ZIP codes might not otherwise provide. It tells families without much disposable income that art, science, history, and yes, deeply weird British sketch comedy, belong to them, too.
When funding for public media is treated as expendable, what’s really being cut isn’t just programming. It’s a quiet promise: that no matter where you live, the wider world is still allowed to reach you.
KERA kept that promise for me. And for all the anxiety swirling around public broadcasting right now, that’s what’s worth fighting to preserve — not nostalgia, not sentimentality, but the simple, radical idea that culture should be public, and possibility shouldn’t depend on where you grow up.
And nowadays, as a part-time comic and full-time journalist, I realize that so much of what I became was informed by PBS.
A few weeks ago, I showed “Monty Python and the Holy Grail” to my 12-year-old daughter. We both loved it. Of course.