The PBS Fall Arts Festival will include the Guthrie Theater's âH.M.S. Pinafore.â  THE last time a production of the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis was featured in a national PBS production was 1975. That esteemed regional theater makes its return on Friday, when its production of “Gilbert and Sullivan’s ‘H.M.S. Pinafore,’ ” including an exuberantly choreographed second-act number, “He Is an English Man,” kicks off the new PBS Arts Fall Festival.  The latest on the arts, coverage of live events, critical reviews, multimedia extravaganzas and much more. Join the discussion.  The PBS Fall Arts Festival will also include a film about the choreographer Bill T. Jones.  The question is: Will the audience be there to watch it on a Friday night, usually a low-rated evening for PBS? And if viewers do tune in, are their tastes eclectic enough to bring them back the next week for Cameron Crowe’s very different biographical film of the Seattle grunge band Pearl Jam? Or for a show about banjo music in November hosted by Rosanne Cash?  PBS has long considered serious arts coverage part of its mission, given that commercial networks broadcast very little of it. But lately dedicated viewers have had to work much harder to find it. In recent years, even as PBS’s science, drama and public affairs programs have been seen in their own dedicated time slots each week, other arts programs like “Great Performances” have bounced around the schedule, with productions heavily weighted toward New York and Washington.  Some viewers have even gotten the impression that PBS isn’t interested in the arts. This year John Jacobsen, a Seattle director and screenwriter, created “The Artist Toolbox,” a 13-part series of interviews with artists — a category that includes the chef Daniel Boulud, the abstract painter Sam Gilliam and the German violinist David Garrett — about their creative processes, partly to fill what Mr. Jacobsen sees as a void on PBS.  “A lot of those great arts shows don’t seem to be on there anymore,” he said in a telephone interview. “There doesn’t seem to be any active mission at PBS to find the shows and find the funding and put those shows on.” His program, which returns next year for a second season, runs on public television stations but is not part of the PBS lineup.  With the new festival, which runs for nine weeks, PBS is hoping to change that impression by showcasing several programs under a single umbrella, making them easier to find and promote. Some of the elements, like “Pearl Jam Twenty,” which is an “American Masters” production, would have been broadcast on PBS anyway and are being folded into the festival (though other episodes of “Great Performances” and “American Masters” will continue to be shown outside the limited-run festival). Others, like “Pinafore,” are an effort to seek out regional productions that wouldn’t reach a national audience without financial support from PBS. All but one production are from outside New York, and short documentaries on the local arts scene in each production’s host city accompany the programs.  “One of the great original ideas of PBS was that we were going to bring the arts to a national audience, so they didn’t have to go to New York, they could see it at home,” said Gerry Richman, vice president for national productions at TPT/Twin Cities Public Television, which produced “Pinafore” with the Guthrie for PBS. The festival, he said “is continuing in that tradition.”  Paula Kerger, the president of PBS, has made arts programming a priority. In recent years, she said in a telephone interview, finding money for expensive performance shows has been a challenge. Moreover, “I think the problem is it got lost in the schedule,” she added. “Every year I would look at some really good pieces, sometimes performance, sometimes documentary, that got lost.”  That the initial festival is limited to nine weeks — including a December pledge-drive special built around the tenor Andrea Bocelli’s September concert in a rain-drenched Central Park — reflects the difficulty PBS had raising money. Ms. Kerger began the process in November 2009 and had initially hoped to create a much more extensive weekly series, but opted for a smaller lineup. “I wanted to get this started,” she said.  Money, some to support companion online and educational materials, came from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Anne Ray Charitable Trust, among other sources.
From âH.M.S. Pinaforeâ to Pearl Jam, PBS is assembling a lineup of performances and films to remind viewers of its ambitions in arts programming.