‘EGG’: It’s Not Always Just With Breakfast

It was only recently that New York’s stunning magazine series “City Arts” ended its five-year run of elegant and inventive original programs after earning a spate of Emmys and a prestigious Peabody Award.

Public station WNET each season produced up to 20 of these episodes that were accurately described by one publication as a “series of love letters to New York’s arts community” that evolved into “an ongoing demonstration of what sharp young eyes can do with a hand-held camcorder and many hours of editing.”

In other words, “City Arts” was an East Coast role model for what KCET should have been regularly offering viewers in Los Angeles, whose arts panorama is nearly always narrowly defined by local TV and its stargazing doofuses as Hollywood and nothing else.

Now comes the next best thing, thanks again to WNET.

It’s “EGG the arts show,” a standing ovation for creative arts from coast to coast.

Spun from New York public station WNET’s stunning “City Arts” series, it’s gorgeous without being showy, brainy without being pretentious, poetic without being la-di-da. “ ‘EGG’ is not for eggheads” is executive producer Jeff Folmsbee’s one-liner in the show’s publicity packet.

At once redefining and celebrating arts, “EGG” approaches its second episode as a luminous, if slender addition to television in Los Angeles.

Just try and find it here, though, unless you’re accustomed to watching TV at 10:30 a.m. Sundays, the time slot that KCET has given these 12 half-hour programs that range from this week’s inspired celebration of dancers to a coming glimpse of the cosmos as art and inspiration for art.

KCET would have preferred airing the series at 7 p.m. Fridays, said broadcasting director Jackie Cain. But that half hour is occupied by “Life & Times Tonight,” the station’s inconsistent current affairs program, ever a work in progress. “I think [“EGG”] is a brilliant series, but the producers wanted it on our air before we had a decent time period for it,” Cain said. “We were working with them simply to get it on the air.”

That’s true, said Folmsbee from New York, where he and producer Mark Mannucci also were behind both “City Arts” and WNET’s “City Life,” an acclaimed series of documentaries about that metropolis.

“EGG” does not air on the PBS network, and is offered to individual stations instead. Thus, it’s in just nine markets besides New York, where it airs at 8 p.m. Thursdays. “This is our pilot year, and we really wanted L.A.,” Folmsbee said. “Everybody agrees 10:30 Sunday morning is not the ideal slot, but they didn’t have anything else for us.”

Even more obscure is the 12:30 a.m. Boot Hill where KCET is burying the splendid third episode of “EGG” titled “The Body.” That’s because some of it features Rubens-size-plus photographer Laura Aguilar’s bold and funereal artwork and the mystical movements of butoh, drawn from post-World War II Japan in the 1960s. It is an inventive package that deserves a wide audience.

“Notions of beauty have changed” since Rubens painted his fleshy nudes in the 17th century, Lee Hendrix, curator of drawings at the J. Paul Getty Museum, notes in “The Body.” Notions belied by the undaunted spirit of Aguilar, whom another curator calls a “proud large woman who embraces her body without the self-loathing” that media impose on similar-sized females.

This is a time to program those VCRs, for few other viewers will encounter Aguilar’s pride or aesthetic obesity at 12:30 a.m., least of all blue-noses or the junior viewers that KCET says it fears may stumble across her in late morning.

Little kids inadvertently locating brief nudity slid into an “EGG” segment airing on KCET between adult programs “Religion & Ethics” and reruns of “Mystery”? Get outta here.

“I love Laura Aguilar’s work,” Cain said. “I just don’t think it’s [for] Sunday morning at 10:30.”

And Folmsbee, who really must want L.A., says “The Body” at 12:30 a.m. works for him, too. “They’ve got tough programming decisions to make,” he said. Talk about walking on eggshells.

Nonetheless, exiling a cultural program to the wee-hours boonies--because of its bit of exposure on behalf of artistic expression--smacks of a dumbing down that is contrary to the cultural mandate of public television. After all, this is not gratuitous flashing. Moreover, just one other station, CPTV in Connecticut, has bumped “The Body” to a different time, and only to 11:30 p.m. It could be worse. Somehow relating arts to insomnia, Miami station WPBT airs the entire series at 12:30 a.m.

This queasiness extends to The Times, which might have deemed a photograph of Aguilar in the nude inappropriate to run with this column had any images been provided.

Sunday’s “EGG” episode on dance, meanwhile, is as smart and intoxicating as anything on TV.

It opens with a visual extravaganza, young dancers rehearsing and then performing Stephan Koplowitz’s “Fenestrations” on narrow catwalks in tall windows before enthralled commuters at New York’s Grand Central Terminal. Then comes the anomaly of Oregon Ballet Theater star Tracy Taylor creating delicate beauty on stage with gnarled dancer’s feet.

The episode concludes magically with Dudley Williams, who at age 62 is still performing with the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater. Although dancing is a young person’s racket, Williams isn’t hanging up his toe shoes, he says, and his face is fiercely alive as he pushes his sinewy body to the balletic limit.

WNET’s “City Arts” has inspired other public stations to create similar series about the arts in their communities. The list does not include KCET, whose local arts centerpiece last year was Fritz Coleman’s “It’s Me! Dad!,” which it boasts “introduced the charming [KNBC] weathercaster to a whole new audience.”

One that surely would gain at least as much from an L.A.-style “City Arts.” Says Cain: “We’d love to do something like ‘City Arts.’ I love the styles. I love the openness, the access, the specificity about New York. We should have the same thing. And we’re talking about it.”

She said it could happen in conjunction with the coming digital broadcasting revolution that would enable KCET to offer a separate channel devoted to the arts. On a distant horizon, that is.

Meanwhile, feast on “EGG,” if you’ve nothing else going Sunday mornings.

*

* “EGG the arts show” can be seen Sundays at 10:30 a.m. on KCET with the exception of Episode 3, “The Body,” which can be seen at 12:30 a.m. Feb. 13.

*

Howard Rosenberg’s column appears Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. He can be contacted via e-mail at calendar.letters@latimes.com.