KCET Looks at Region’s Future With ‘Year 2000’

KCET Channel 28 will produce a new half-hour documentary series examining major issues affecting Southern California and their implications for the region by the year 2000, officials at the public-television station said Tuesday.

The series, debuting July 12 at 7:30 p.m. and airing on subsequent Wednesday nights, will be called “By the Year 2000.” It will tackle such issues as pollution, transportation, aging, demographics, housing prices and the use of crack. The first program explores how the global “greenhouse effect” can change Southern California.

To focus its energy on the new series, the public-television station said, it is dropping the 17-month-old “California Stories,” another documentary series that dealt primarily with arts and science issues.

Those subjects will now be dealt with in “Take Five,” a five-minute program at 7:30 p.m. four nights a week that is replacing “7:30,” the station’s nightly five-minute news program.

KCET will continue its Emmy-winning “KCET Journal” documentaries and its “Los Angeles History Project” series. “KCET Journal” will report on an AIDS hospice in August or September, and the “History Project” plans four programs for the coming season.

“We’re very proud of this effort,” Stephen Kulczycki, vice president of programming at KCET, said of the scheduling changes. “We’re hitting a stride of what public television can do.”

He estimated that the local programming budget would grow from its present $7 million level to $9 million for the fiscal year that begins July 1--including a grant of $750,000 from the James Irvine Foundation for “By the Year 2000.”

“By the Year 2000” will be co-hosted by Eric Burns and Valerie Zavala, and produced by Celeste Durant. The series will repeat Saturdays at 5 p.m. and Sundays at 9:30 a.m.

Durant said that among the topics the show will tackle are euthanasia, which “most experts say will probably be legal by the year 2000”; the explosion of crack on Los Angeles County streets, with estimates that there could be 250,000 addicts by 2000, and the explosion in housing prices from the current average home cost of $217,000 to an estimated $476,000 by 2000.

She said she hopes the programs will deal not only with problems but also with possible solutions to them.

“Take Five,” five-minute reports and features, will have a different focus each night. Monday will be arts and culture. Tuesday is devoted to science issues--everything from the nuclear winter to a look at why cats purr. Thursday is talk-back night, a sort of weekly “letters to the editor” segment about KCET and its program schedule. Friday will offer new segments of “Videolog,” the station’s six-year-old series of “short vignettes which celebrate the unique people and places of Southern California.”

Meanwhile, beginning June 19, the local news report that has been part of “7:30” will be broadcast weeknights at 7:28 p.m., immediately following “The MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour.”

In addition to their normal broadcasts, “By the Year 2000” will occasionally air 90-minute specials, and “Take Five” will have quarterly half-hour specials in arts and culture, science and “Videolog.”

To inaugurate the changes, KCET is offering “premiere weeks” in June with half-hour specials on Monday nights in a particular field. The week of June 19 will be devoted to arts and culture; the week of June 26 will deal with science issues, and the week of July 3 will offer “Videolog.”

Once the premieres are done, the series “Wild, Wild World of Animals” will air in its old time slot at 7:35 p.m. following “Take Five” on Monday, Tuesday, Thursday and Friday.