PBS Pulled a Film for Political Reasons, Then Changed Its Mind
On March 25, the veteran film producer Erika Dilday spoke at a documentary conference in Copenhagen, on a panel addressing the many challenges, political and otherwise, that now face nonfiction-film distribution. “Even though it’s terrifying, it’s also incredibly energizing,” Dilday, the executive director of the nonprofit that produces PBS’s long-running, Emmy-winning series POV, told the audience. “I’m ready to paint my face, tie a band around my head, and crawl through the mud to try to save our ability to show independent content on public media.”
In the background, though, the fight was not going well. Since Donald Trump returned to the White House in January, public media has been under heavy threat from legislators and the administration; plans are in the works for Congress to claw back $1.1 billion in federal funds from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. At a House DOGE subcommittee hearing the day after Dilday spoke in Copenhagen, the chair, Marjorie Taylor Greene, accused PBS of “brainwashing and trans-ing” America’s children. Dilday herself had already seen how the situation was playing out on TV schedules. At the end of February, she’d heard from PBS that the release of Break the Game, a film from POV’s current slate about a trans video gamer’s relationship with fame and her fans, would be postponed indefinitely. By all appearances, the network was obeying in advance. (The Atlantic has a partnership with WETA, which receives funding from PBS and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.)
Dilday passed along that news to the film’s director, Jane M. Wagner, in a February 24 phone call, Wagner told me. She said that the call included Chris White, an executive producer at POV and American Documentary, the nonprofit that Dilday leads. The film would not be shown as planned on April 7, they explained, because executives at PBS were worried about Break the Game’s transgender themes and the risk of further political backlash. “PBS is our platform, and we have to respect their directive,” Wagner says White told her. (Neither Dilday nor White responded to multiple requests for comment on this story.) Two days later, Dilday sent Wagner an email that confirmed the details of their phone call, including PBS’s concerns about political backlash. “I am so sorry about this,” she wrote.
[Mark Leibovich: It’s not easy being (Marjorie Taylor) Greene]
At some point in the days that followed, the webpage for the film on PBS.org was taken down, along with an associated reading guide. On April 7, PBS rebroadcast a 2022 film about a man with disabilities in what had been Break the Game’s original slot. Wagner was devastated. She’d spent six years making the documentary, and paid for most of its production on her own. The network’s decision to abandon it didn’t even make sense to her on its own terms. “The administration is going to come for public broadcasting because they reject the notion of public broadcasting in general,” she told me when we spoke last week. “It doesn’t matter what you show.”
In any case, PBS quickly changed its mind last Friday afternoon, around the time that I reached out for comment on the film’s withdrawal. Less than two hours after I’d emailed the network, Wagner received a message from White at POV: “Wanted to let you know that PBS has just come back to us with a confirmed Break the Game airdate of June 30,” he wrote. A network spokesperson eventually shared the same news with me directly: “‘Break the Game’ is part of POV’s summer season line-up, and it will air in June,” she wrote in an email sent on Tuesday morning, adding in a follow-up that “a slot for this program had been identified in June to commemorate Pride Month.” PBS did not respond to questions about why Break the Game’s original airdate had been canceled, or why the new one had been assigned so quickly after I’d requested comment.
“It’s not hard to connect the dots here,” Wagner told me. It was “painfully clear,” she said, that PBS had switched positions on the film in an effort to “avoid public scrutiny and accountability.” Certainly, the back-and-forth suggests that PBS executives are not exactly crawling through the mud in defense of independent filmmaking. When the network’s president and CEO, Paula Kerger, was asked at the DOGE subcommittee hearing to defend PBS’s other trans-themed documentaries, she gave a tepid, practiced answer: “These are documentary films that are point-of-view pieces that are part of our primetime schedule for adults.” Of course, she could have said the same about POV and Break the Game: The series is literally named point of view, and the film’s original broadcast slot had been set for 10 p.m., during the prime-time schedule for adults. The fact that the network still chose to disappear Wagner’s movie—and then to re-appear it later on, still without an explanation—suggests that the institution is at sea. Self-censorship may be easy to undo, but it’s also easy to avoid in the first place. PBS seems to have created this scenario of its own accord, and now it’s showing that it doesn’t even have the courage of its lack of convictions.
“I never would have described myself as a political filmmaker, or as a social-justice filmmaker, or even as a journalistic filmmaker,” Wagner told me. Indeed, PBS’s decision to withhold Break the Game appears to be a function of its timing: The original April 7 airdate would have come a bit too soon after the DOGE subcommittee hearing. A few of the documentary films that have already aired during the current season of POV, before Trump’s second inauguration, are explicitly left wing. Twice Colonized, which was broadcast last October, tells the story of an Indigenous-rights activist from Greenland (of all places) who, according to the synopsis, “works to bring her colonizers to justice.” That film’s discussion guide, which remains available on PBS.org, invites viewers of the film to think about how they understand the terms cultural erasure, institutional racism, and mental colonization. Another film on the current slate, Who I Am Not, which premiered in December, tells the story of an intersex South African beauty queen and an intersex activist.
Break the Game is neutral by comparison: It neither depicts activism nor advances an ideological position. POV’s producers pitched the film as “a sharp, compassionate exploration about the darker side of online gamer culture” in a draft press release. The film tells the story of Narcissa Wright, a virtuosic gamer and habitual livestreamer known for her record-setting speedruns of The Legend of Zelda and other games, who lost a major portion of her online fan base after she came out as trans. At first, Wagner figured that she’d capture Wright’s attempt to win back fans by setting a new speedrun record: The film would be “the Rocky of the digital world,” Wagner said. She thought it was going to end with Wright at a gaming convention, getting “a standing ovation and being accepted.” But the finished product—which comprises mostly animated sequences and footage from Wright’s webcam—has less to do with a famous gamer’s comeback (which doesn’t really materialize) than with her relentless, sometimes self-destructive push to find connection online. Wright’s experience as a trans woman provides the central context for the film, but it isn’t quite its subject matter.
[Adam Serwer: The attack on trans rights won’t end there]
“The movie is kind of two movies,” Alex Eastly, another gamer who appears in the film, told me. The first movie is about Wright’s relationship with her mother, Eastly said: “That’s the emotional core of the film.” The other movie, she said, “is about how trans people become a lightning rod for a lot of displaced frustration with the world at large.” (Wagner plans to stream the film on Twitch on Monday night.)
Eastly told me that she wasn’t surprised when she learned that the film had been bumped for political reasons. “This isn’t an issue specific to PBS. This is society-wide,” she told me. Wagner said that although she’s not a political filmmaker, “I still believe in speaking truth to power.” What had happened, she said, left her feeling “existential devastation.”
The episode calls to mind a similar controversy from more than 30 years ago involving PBS and POV, when a documentary short called Stop the Church was abruptly dropped from the network’s programming two weeks before its scheduled broadcast in the summer of 1991. The film was about a raucous demonstration at St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York City, where more than 100 people were arrested for protesting Cardinal John O’Connor’s positions on abortion and the AIDS crisis. PBS executives decided that airing the documentary, which took a mocking tone toward the Catholic Church, would be overly provocative, given that another POV film—Tongues Untied, about the lives of Black gay men—had produced a controversy of its own just the month before and had gotten dropped from the schedules of some member stations. PBS executives had stood behind that film, even as it was cited on the floor of Congress as evidence of the network’s political agenda. But standing up for Stop the Church wasn’t worth the risk, they thought, of incurring yet another rhubarb over taxpayer-funded programming and more public pressure on local stations. They told POV that they wouldn’t air the film, Marc Weiss, the creator of the series and its executive producer from 1986 to 1997, told me. POV had little chance of fighting back, as far as he could tell, and doing so would have been unwise: A second scandal in a row could easily have led to the series’ cancellation. “It was a calculation, and I’m not proud of it,” he said.
Whatever outrage that decision fostered was soon forgotten, as POV and PBS were celebrated for their courage in defending Tongues Untied. But contemporary critics such as Arthur Kropp, the president in 1991 of the progressive advocacy group People for the American Way, did see the dustup as a portent way back then. “This is the kind of censorship you can’t fight—self-censorship,” Kropp, who would die from AIDS a few years later, said in an interview with the Los Angeles Times. “This is the first indication of where we’re heading.”