Even before the TV networks started closing their Baghdad bureaus, it was obvious that nothing got viewers reaching for the clicker faster than the words, “In Iraq….”
The audience for “Over There,” a fine war drama, vanished before FX executives' eyes. News specials from the battle front went to the ratings rear. Recently, CBS war correspondent Lara Logan lamented the state of American TV news, saying she'd rather “blow my brains out” than watch it. But that was before she took on a new role at the network's D.C. bureau -- with on-air duties for “The Early Show.”
Enter Linda Ellerbee. The longtime news anchor and host of the “Nick News” series since 1991, Ellerbee presents her latest special, “Coming Home: When Parents Return from War,” at 8 p.m. CT Sunday on Nickelodeon.
The program is terrific, expertly told, worth watching -- just like most of the previous Iraq War-themed programs I'd seen in the past five years.
So when I called Ellerbee up, I didn't ask her why she did it. I wanted to know why she thought anybody would watch.
“Good question!” said Ellerbee in her wonderful off-camera voice, a quicker and raspier voice (and laugh) that she switches off when the mic is switched on.
“I think because we are Nick News, we have an established viewership and a reputation among parents. You know you're not going to see war footage. You know you're not going to see blood. You are not going to want to run from the images.”
Ellerbee adds wryly, “I could be wrong,” as if to remind you that she is, after all, the Christopher Glenn of Generations Y and Z, the woman who has walked her young audience, and their parents, through AIDS and child abduction, 9/11 and Katrina, gay families and global warming (in 1993!) and continues to find her services in demand in the marketplace of kids' TV.
Sunday's half-hour special profiles children who had a parent stationed in Iraq or Afghanistan. We meet Michael, of Fort Stewart, Ga., who was his mom's emotional ballast while her husband was serving abroad.
“Knowing that my stepfather is coming home is like knowing I'm going to get that one Christmas present I've always wanted,” he says.
We also meet kids whose father came home, as one in five serving in war do, bearing the emotional scars of PTSD. “There's a whole lot of Iraq in my kids that shouldn't be there,” the dad says.
We meet kids whose father came home missing a leg, and we meet kids whose father came home in a coffin.
We hear from Lt. Gen. William Caldwell, commander of the Combined Arms Center at Ft. Leavenworth, who tells “Nick News” that the number of enlisted people with families has doubled since the 1980s.
“At Nick News, we tend to do what we feel is important, not necessarily what we think will sell,” says Ellerbee. That maxim has served her well going back to her NBC days, when endeared herself to Gen-Xers like me by co-anchoring, with Lloyd Dobyns, a very entertaining if commercially unviable late-night newscast called “Overnight” in 1982 and 1983.
“We're lucky,” says the head of Lucky Duck Productions, “because Nickelodeon gives us the freedom. And we thought it was important to honor the kids of the troops, because they too sacrifice and they too have to be brave.”
The kids featured on air were selected from hundreds interviewed over the phone. After doing this for nearly two decades, Ellerbee says, her staff is “extremely well connected” and can put together a show that has “geographic, racial, economic and gender balance … and in this case, stories that typified different things that happened when parents come home from war.”
And as you might guess, Ellerbee hears from past interview subjects who are now adults. She featured some of their stories in a 2006 retrospective special, none more striking than that of Hydeia Broadbent, who was featured in a 1992 program on AIDS.
“She was HIV positive, she was crying … and now she is a healthy, strong, seemingly mentally and emotionally balanced young woman. She's an AIDS activist.” And then there was the show about physical disabilities, where viewers met a plucky and upbeat girl with a seemingly limitless future. Now, says Ellerbee, “she's in a nursing home with the elderly. And I want her so much out of that environment.”
She also hears from her former audience, some of whom are now old enough to watch her new specials with their kids.
“I get on airplanes now and flight attendants come up to me,” says Ellerbee, who's 63. “When I get on the plane and the pilot is someone who grew up watching 'Nick News,' I'm really gonna feel old.”
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