PBS Responds to Critics With a Mr. Rogers Remix

PITTSBURGH, Pa.  The growing backlash against the self-esteem movement has found its whipping boy in Fred Rogers, long-time host of the acclaimed children's television show Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood.  Sparked by an article in the Wall Street Journal last week that singled out Rogers as the cause of an excessive sense of entitlement among young people, a growing chorus of educators and employers is lending their voices to the complaint that today's twenty-something students and job applicants aren't quite as "special" as Rogers told them they were.

Rogers:  "I think you're special, but I could be wrong."

"I gave a woman a straight A in organic chemistry," says Oren Daily, Jr., a professor at Florida International University.  "She came in to complain that she should have gotten an A++."

"For a pledge of $25 you get a tote bag.  For a pledge of $50 you get another tote bag."

At stake are the residual royalties that a PBS program can bring in for years after it is first filmed.  "Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood can be a goose that lays golden eggs for decades," says station manager Clifton Coombs of WQED, the Pittsburgh PBS outlet where Rogers got his start.  "If we screw it up, it means that many more tote bags we have to hock." 

An edgier approach.

So PBS producers have gone back into the studio to create a "Mr. Rogers Remix" in an attempt to deflect criticism of the iconic program by sharpening the dialogue for audiences accustomed to the biting repartee of Seinfeld and Friends.

"I've got a little surprise for our friend Daniel the Striped Tiger today!"

"Kids don't benefit from being told they're special if they're not," says State University of New York-Buffalo psychologist Zachary Rosenfield.  "If Tommy car-jacks Susie's Barbie Dream Car today, he'll go after your Lexus twenty years down the road if you tell him 'Don't worry--you're still special!'"

King Friday XIII:  "Would it kill you to wash your freaking sneakers every so often?"

Staff writers plan to introduce more mature themes to the show's bland dialogue, with Daniel the Striped Tiger and Henrietta Pussycat serving as acerbic foils to Mr. Rogers' relentlessly congenial tone. 

Henrietta Pussycat:  "Get your hand out of my dress!"

"I see myself as George Costanza to Fred's Jerry," says Daniel, whose career has spiraled downward since Rogers' death as two sit-coms he has starred in were cancelled for low ratings.  "If they had given me a couple of snappy comebacks every episode, maybe I wouldn't be scrounging around for voiceover work and used car commercials now."

Copyright 2007, Con Chapman