Neal Shapiro, president and CEO of THIRTEEN, spoke with Alan Alda backstage at the Television Critics Association press tour about facing the critics, Alda’s history as an actor, and his work as the host of The Human Spark.
Standing a mile-and-a-half long on Manhattan’s west side is the elevated railroad known as the High Line. Built for freight deliveries in 1934, the last train ran on the High Line in 1980. From then on, nature took over - quietly, like a secret.
Wind and wildlife dispersed seeds over the abandoned railroad and a lush garden grew amid the ballast and steel tracks. Closed to the public, the trestle’s primary visitors were wild - birds, insects, and the occasional adventurous human. For these explorers, finding one’s self alone in a city of 8 million, 30 feet above street level, with a view of the Hudson River whose winds made the Irises and Evening Primrose sway - was magical. Meanwhile, on the ground, property owners in the surrounding area lobbied to demolish the High Line. But in 2002, a group called Friends of the High Line won the city’s support to preserve the railroad and turn it into a public space. The first section of the park opened in June 2009.
Botany is a force of nature whose quiet yet critical role in our ecosystem is often neglected. Fortunately, this is not the case with the new High Line park. In this video I interview Patrick Cullina, Vice President of Horticulture at the High Line, to learn more about this unique garden in the sky. When shooting this video, I also had my mother in mind – her carefully tended yard, and frequent childhood visits to the Bronx Botanical Garden where she’d take innumerable photos of my siblings and I next to the flowers. As an adult, I appreciate such beauty even more.
– Irene Tejaratchi Hess
Producer, NATURE
For the past 3 years, Nature has produced a full-color comic book as a corollary to the on-air episodes, as an entertaining & educational tool…but we’d like to share them with all of you, at least in digital form. The paper copies of the comic were distributed to museums, schools, and nature centers. The series was edited by David Reisman, and we have all three issues as pdfs at the bottom of this post for you to download and read or print. The above image is from #2, a section of a really great set of panels by R. Kikuo Johnson, who creatively uses the honeycomb as the layout structure–and does some really nice color work. Read More …
from: Jared Lipworth, Executive Producer, Secrets of the Dead
Michelangelo Revealed premieres May 13 at 8pm on THIRTEEN.
First Robert Langdon had Da Vinci’s Code to deal with. Now, in his latest fictional adventure, he is off fighting for his life and tracking down a powerful underground brotherhood attempting to bring down the Catholic Church. Popes die, Cardinals are captured, and Robert teams up with a pretty Italian woman named Vittoria to decode secret messages carefully hidden in ancient symbols.
Sounds like a perfect summer blockbuster.
Also sounds eerily similar to our latest episode of Secrets of the Dead. Read More …
A few of the presentations at the upcoming NYC World Science Festival are closely related to upcoming on-air programs or series that will be presented on PBS by THIRTEEN. Tickets are on sale now (and last year most of the ticketed WSF events sold out ahead of time).
To Be Human
The discussion called “To Be Human” is related to our upcoming The Human Spark program (coming Fall 2009), with some of the same participants and a similar topic.
Though many animals display cooperative behavior, human cooperation is distinct. Alan Alda hosts E.O. Wilson, Sarah Hrdy and other leading evolutionary biologists, anthropologists and humanitarians as they examine the origins and evolution of human cooperative behavior. Read More …
from: Robin Edgerton, editor, Thirteen.org
We wanted to do special for Earth Day here at THIRTEEN, so we looked for the biggest fish we could find: the first environmental tv series, Our Vanishing Wilderness which was produced for THIRTEEN back when we were NET, National Educational Television. We’ve also started a new mini-site, Green Thirteen, where we’ll be putting environmental content both new and old, both print and video.
It starts with a book. Husband and wife team the Grossmans (Shelly was a nature photographer, Mary Louise a nature writer) published it in 1969. It has the air of a textbook, a coffee table book, and a natural history all in one. Also titled Our Vanishing Wilderness, it examined some of the threats to the natural environment, particularly in the US. (It must have been fairly popular, because used copies are common). In transferring to television, the production team made the material more political and particularly topical, yet still beautifully filmed. Read More …
from: Jared Lipworth, Executive Producer, Secrets of the Dead, on Blackbeard’s Lost Ship
There’s been a lot of talk about pirates these last few months, and other than brave action by an American captain and a remarkable effort by three elite Navy snipers, little of it has been good. It amazes me that in this day and age, with all our high-tech monitoring, weaponry and vessels, the world’s shipping infrastructure can be held hostage by a bunch of terrorists in tiny boats.
What’s even more strange is that we look at today’s pirates as evil, lawless villains, yet we’ve somehow come to glorify and mythologize the pirates of the past, even calling their heyday the “golden age” of piracy. Read More …
Thirteen is airing programs spotlighting the environment throughout April. Through series such as NOVA and Nature, learn about the current state of the environment and the factors and issues surrounding it. And also catch Planet Forward, a new interactive show about our energy future, which premieres April 15. Read More …
