Great Performances' executive producer, Jae Venza, started his career as a theater designer in New York City in the 1940s. In the 1950s he moved into designing for television at CBS, eventually producing and directing, too. In 1964 Venza left CBS to work for the Ford Foundation-funded alternative to commercial television known as National Educational Television (NET), becoming the broadcasting system's executive in charge of drama and dance. After the passage of the Public Broadcasting Act of 1967 and the creation of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB)-and then PBS-NET became WNET, a giant among local public television stations and a major producer of programs for PBS. Through the late 1970s, WNET provided more than half of the programming for public television in the United States.

As WNET's executive producer of cultural programs, Venza was in a position to define the role of the arts on public television. Whereas the old educational television approach would have been to interview an artist about his or her work, Venza was determined to show the work itself, to broadcast theater, opera, dance, and concerts in performance. He insisted that television's cultural offerings could be entertaining as well as educational. Through Great Performances, viewers across America would see the best of performance from New York City and around the world, and regional American companies would reach a broader audience.

Highlights over the years have included: The Rimers of Eldritch (1972), a play by Lanford Wilson starring Rue McClanahan, Susan Sarandon, and Frances Stern­ hagen, initiating a tradition of showcasing American plays for public television; Dance in America: Choreography by Balanchine, Parts lll and IV (1978), fea­turing Mikhail Baryshnikov; Brideshead Revisited (1982), an I I-part adaptation of Evelyn Waugh's novel; Koyaanisqatsi (1985), a performance of Philip Glass's avant-garde film score; Tosca from Rome (1993), with Placido Domingo and Catherine Malfitano; and Chuck Jones: Extremes and In-Betweens, A Life in Animation (2000), a celebration of the legendary Warner Brothers cartoonist, to name just a few. Great Performances had its beginnings in the Great Society idealism of the 1960s, a moment when American culture-high as well as popular--captivated the world, and the government professed a renewed sense of responsibility for funding a variety of social initiatives, including public television and the arts. And the series has evolved over the years along with public television's changing circumstances. Great Performances is an expensive series to produce; it is also one of PBS's most popular. From the beginning, public television has not received enough federal and state funds to support even a fraction of its programming, and corporate sponsors have been an important funding source and an influential factor in the development of individual programs. Great Performances has relied on several different corporate sponsors over the years. For their part, these sponsors have tended to see Great Performances as an ideal vehicle for their ultimate purpose in supporting public broadcasting: to access an elite, affluent audience they might not reach through advertising on commercial television. Venza has always asserted that attention to quality, not ratings, should determine what sorts of arts programs are produced for television. In a sense, this attitude jibes perfectly with that of corporate sponsors, who, at least from the 1980s onward, have been less interested in reaching the widest possible audience than they have been in reaching a smaller, "quality" audience-one understood to gravitate to opera, classical music, the­ater, and literature-with greater spending power.

With such a great portion of its funding coming from corporate sponsors, Great Performances' fate has been forever dependent, to a degree, on the whims of the market and the prejudices of corporate executives. In 1986 Exxon, which had been a major sponsor since the series' inception, announced that it would begin phasing out its support for Great Performances due to a decline in oil industry profits. In 1992 another sponsor, Texaco, ended its corporate underwriting, citing the series' move away from traditional classical programming and toward more contemporary music and drama. At the time, some speculated that this decision was based at least in part on Great Performances' decision to broadcast an adaptation of David Leavitt's The Lost Language of Cranes, a novel with a homosexual theme. Though Texaco executives and Great Performances' producers denied the latter explanation, it was nevertheless clear that Great Performances' funding did rely, to an extent, on its sponsors' approval of the program's content.

Another important source of funding for Great Per­formances has been individual viewers, to whom public television stations reach out during pledge drives. The average donor is understood to be cautious and conservative, with middlebrow tastes. Over the years, some of Great Performances' programs have been criticized as pandering to this profile. Thus, on one side, critics charge that the program is elitist, attending to the highbrow tastes of a tiny minority with avant­ garde material; on the other, critics reproach Great Performances for "dumbing down" its offerings to gamer pledges. What is more important-serving a minority of (elite) viewers who might not find what they're looking for elsewhere, or reaching out to the widest and most diverse audience possible? This question has been with Great Performances-and public television-from the start.