Trio: Brilliant But Canceled?

In the annals of television, few have done so much with so little as the people behind the Trio channel.

Broadcasting 24 hours a day to almost nobody, with a pittance to spend on programs, Trio has won over smart, sophisticated viewers who managed to find it on their digital cable boxes.

With its eclectic schedule of classic TV shows, documentaries, fine arts and just plain odd stuff, all of it packaged with polish and verve, Trio has been a precocious child that acts like it’s much larger than it really is.

The people who have been running the channel for the past two-and-a-half years have been adept at finding the gems buried deep in the rockpile of popular culture, whether it’s airing “Laugh-In” reruns and classic David Letterman shows, repackaging historic flops like “Cop Rock” and “My Mother the Car,” or realizing that “Battle of the Network Stars” is funnier now than it was in 1978.

Trio has been on a roll since 2002, when a former VH1 executive named Lauren Zalaznick took over the channel with a mandate to make it a hip choice for grown-ups with taste.

“Trio is meant to be a very forward-looking channel,” said Zalaznick, who will philosophize at the drop of a shoe. “We only make stuff about other stuff. And the mandate always was: Never be nostalgic. Trio was diametrically opposed to TV Land, which is rooted in nostalgia.”

Sadly, the thousands of viewers who have grown attached to the channel — including the editors of Entertainment Weekly, who named Trio the “It” cable network of 2003 — may soon have nothing left but nostalgia.

On July 28, NBC Universal, the latest in a string of corporate caretakers for Trio, announced a new distribution deal for its many TV channels with the nation’s No. 1 satellite company, DirecTV. The press release mentioned NBC, MSNBC, USA, SciFi and Bravo — every one of its channels, in fact, but Trio. This was taken as a bad sign, and rightly so, since 12 million of the 20 million homes where Trio can be seen are customers of this one dish company.

The 8 million remaining homes with Trio are served mostly by Time Warner Cable through digital cable boxes, such as the ones that are in 52 percent of its Kansas City customers’ homes.

Publicly and privately, no one at Trio is ready to give up quite yet. For her work on Trio, Zalaznick was recently named president of Bravo as well, so this isn’t really about career preservation.

Rather, it’s about something every TV viewer should care about. For years now the cable industry has promised that with 500 channels at their disposal, cable customers would be able to choose from a menu of virtually endless variety.

And yet, that same industry is now perhaps weeks away from taking one of the most singular and well-executed niche channels in its history and smothering it in the crib.

I’ve written often about programs on Trio. Many of my fellow TV critics have done the same, and it’s a tribute to the Trio staff that our fraternity has devoted so much ink to a channel that, most places, only our readers with dishes can tune in.

I started writing about Trio in 2002 at the one-year anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks, when many cable channels replayed video of the attacks or recounted the first year in the “war on terror.” Trio was doing something completely different: airing a documentary I’d seen at Sundance called “The Making of We Are Family.” It recounted how dozens of big-name recording artists pitched in to remake the Sister Sledge classic “We Are Family” to promote world harmony in the days after 9/11.

From that point on I kept my eye on Trio.

Four times a year it puts together an entire month of thematically linked programs. For a month devoted to country music, Trio acquired a terrific British series on the origins of the genre, “Lost Highway,” and married it to a marathon of the “Nashville Star” talent contest that first aired on sister channel USA and the 1969 documentary of Johnny Cash recording his legendary LP at San Quentin Prison.

This month the theme is “Texas: America Supersized.” Zalaznick commissioned an original documentary on the Lone Star State to go with numerous movies that Trio’s Kris Slava acquired on the cheap, such as “Fat City,” which offers the startling assertion that obesity in Houston is even more, uh, widespread than it is in Kansas City.

What has gotten Trio the most press, however, is “Brilliant But Cancelled,” its ongoing tribute to great television series that were cut down in their prime. Next month — assuming there is a next month for Trio — it will air “EZ Streets,” the 1997 CBS drama starring Ken Olin and Joe Pantoliano.

With its grown-up storylines (the show was one of the first to be rated TV-MA) and mesmerizing score by Loreena McKennitt, “EZ Streets” was as beautiful a show as ever appeared on network television, albeit briefly.

It would be easy to infer that Zalaznick’s affection for artistically advanced but commercially unviable TV stems from the fact that her own channel has been in peril virtually from the day she signed on. (One of Zalaznick’s first acts as president in 2002 was to set up a Web site, savetrio.com, that urged DirecTV customers to make it known that they liked the channel.)

But that is too simplistic a conclusion, for two reasons. One is that for every weekend marathon of American Film Institute classics, Trio seems to have another weekend of schlock TV from eras past. For every arts special it has dusted off, it puts on something like “Good Clean Porn,” in which old X-rated films from the 1970s were shown “minus the distracting sex scenes.”

Trio, as Zalaznick will happily spend hours telling you, is a postmodern smorgasbord of compelling TV, presented without moral judgment. If a viewer tunes in “Battle of the Network Stars” and sees Robert Stack smoking a cigarette just before the 100-yard dash, she might laugh, or be horrified, or do nothing. All are equally valid responses in the Trio universe.

The other reason Trio can’t just be written off as a quixotic venture is that it has never thought quixotically. Zalaznick designed Trio to succeed. In carving out an identity — from its programs to its peppy red logo to its buzz in the media — Trio has succeeded like few other upstart cable channels.

What cheeses me, and must surely gall the people at Trio, is that no other major cable operator besides Time Warner even carries the channel.

Nielsen doesn’t measure Trio’s audience, but one indicator of its reach is that more than 200,000 viewers have signed up at triotv.com to receive regular schedule updates. Were Trio to be carried in 40 million or 50 million homes instead of 20 million, it could attract that many viewers regularly and be well on its way to a permanent place on the nation’s channel lineup. (Discovery, the largest cable channel, is available in nearly 90 million homes.)

Sadly, it appears NBC Universal doesn’t have the slightest interest in creating a bright future for Trio. Its new owners have been handed a promising channel that could be a real crown jewel — one could say it’s the Bravo that Bravo could’ve been. Instead, it looks like they will end up using Trio’s remaining subscriber base to distribute some harebrained scheme that has the NBC peacock logo emblazoned all over it. And to think this is the company that once kept “St. Elsewhere” on TV because they figured that viewers would eventually find the quality. Well, now it’s got the quality — it just needs to scare up some viewers.

Meanwhile, the folks at Trio keep planning their uncertain future. They’re lining up what a publicist promises will be a “one-of-a-kind” series of political films to coincide with Election Day.

It would be a travesty if Trio didn’t make it to November. Had more Americans been allowed to see it in the first place, they would’ve joined me in voting for it with their clickers.