Charlie Brown will get a rock once again this Halloween but PBS will get the life of Charlie Schulz for the American Master series this fall. In
"Good Ol’ Charles Schulz," AMERICAN MASTERS presents an unexpected portrait of the man behind the most popular comic strip in history. The feature-length documentary premieres Monday, October 29, 2007, 9:00-10:30 p.m. ET on PBS.
Schulz’ genius – evident throughout his 17,897 comic strips – lay in depicting the daily collisions of insiders and outsiders, of mundane cruelties and transcendent hopes. With both whimsy and profundity, Schulz offered millions of readers different facets of his own personality, along with a unique take on 20th-century America. ‘Peanuts’ burst on the scene in 1950 with a minimalist aesthetic and emotional wallop unlike anything seen before. The strip combined open expressions of malice (the very first punch line was "Good ol’ Charlie Brown … How I hate him!"), psychological insights and a lifelong loser of a protagonist in a way that upended not only the comics page but also the era’s prevailing "Father Knows Best" mythology. It had an immediate impact on readers of all ages, from bohemia to Peoria.
AMERICAN MASTERS: Good Ol’ Charles Schulz