And yet, despite it all, one modest little cathode-tube relic that\u2019s been beaming into households since the dawn of educational TV \u2014 Richard Heffner\u2019s The Open Mind, the gleefully eggheaded talk show on which Martin Luther King Jr gave his first sit-down televised interview \u2014 continues to soldier on. Indeed, the program just passed its 70th anniversary, making it the longest-running PBS show in history.<\/p>\n
\u201cMy grandfather wanted to bring intellectual firepower to discussions of public policy,\u201d notes Alexander Heffner, who took over as host after Richard Heffner\u2019s death in 2013. \u201cHe wanted there to be a platform on early television that offered something other than bandits and robbers.\u201d<\/p>\n
The elder Heffner, a history professor at Rutgers University, began his no-drama interview show on radio in 1953 (his first guest was Eleanor Roosevelt). But in 1956, as Richard Heffner watched television assert a growing dominance over the culture, he began broadcasting from a local NBC affiliate, doing his 30-minute talk show on live TV. A decade later, in 1966, he\u2019d moved The Open Mind to Channel 13, a New York public TV station he\u2019d helped to launch five years earlier, which by 1970 would become a flagship for the newly launched National Educational Television network, precursor to PBS.<\/p>\n
Wherever he was broadcasting it from, though, the vibe was always the same \u2014 aggressively intellectual. Every week guests like Thurgood Marshall, Malcolm X, Jonas Salk, Elie Wiesel, Henry Kissinger, Norman Mailer and Margaret Mead, among many others, would settle into the austere round-table set and engage in the sort of esoteric, deep-dive political and sociological conversations that seemed, even back in TV\u2019s early days, defiantly antithetical to the medium.<\/p>\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/07\/maqJ5keA.png\")
Alexander Heffner<\/p>\n
\u201cThere was no answer that was too complex or too long,\u201d says Alexander Heffner. \u201cHe always gave his guests time.\u201d<\/p>\n
Amazingly, Richard Heffner\u2019s reputation for dispassionate civil discourse got him noticed in, of all places, Hollywood. In the mid 1970s, MPAA president Jack Valenti, looking for a way to add some cerebral heft to his organization, convinced the elder Heffner to join and chair its ratings board. It was not a perfect fit. \u201cMy mother didn\u2019t raise me to count nipples,\u201d Richard Heffner famously complained. But he spent the next 20 years counting something \u2014 he was responsible for giving 1983\u2019s Scarface its initial X rating (for violence) and, later, in 1990, for launching the MPAA\u2019s NC-17 rating.<\/p>\n
Still, his TV show, as well as his teaching, was always his main focus, and he continued to conduct his low-key highbrow interviews until his death \u2014 indeed, even after his death. \u201cHe always had episodes in the can,\u201d notes his grandson, \u201cso there were episodes that aired posthumously.\u201d<\/p>\n
Alexander Heffner, who had some experience himself with broadcasting \u2014 during college, at Harvard, he covered the 2008 presidential elections as one of CNN\u2019s \u201cyouth correspondents\u201d\u2014 took over The Open Mind in 2014. And he\u2019s been very much following in his grandfather\u2019s footsteps ever since. To celebrate the show\u2019s 70th anniversary this year, for instance, he\u2019s assembled a series of resolutely un-viral interviews with city mayors from around the world (currently airing on PBS\u2019 World Channel).<\/p>\n
\u201cWhether it\u2019s by biology or osmosis or a combination, I have followed in his path,\u201d Alexander Heffner says of his grandfather. \u201cHe imbued a sense of civic responsibility in me, which was what The Open Mind was all about from the beginning.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Sesame Street got rezoned for pay TV a decade ago. Reading Rainbow relocated to YouTube last year. Even…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":773718,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[29],"tags":[49,48,75,4972,348],"class_list":["post-773717","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-tv","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-entertainment","tag-pbs","tag-tv"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/773717","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=773717"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/773717\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/773718"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=773717"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=773717"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=773717"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}