‘The Class’ Doesn’t Exactly Make the Case for PBS

With public broadcasting under constant attack by the Trump Administration, no one is really addressing one obvious question: What’s even on public broadcasting anyway? I’m not talking about the big-ticket shows that have been around since the last century, but the vaguer items on the schedule. The Class, which just finished its run, is a six-part documentary about Deer Valley High School in Antioch, California, that’s representative of PBS output, somewhat counterintuitively, because there’s surprisingly little expectation that anyone would ever want to watch it.

This is despite The Class having a surprisingly strong hook–it depicts the senior year of several students from 2020-2021 in the midst of the COVID shutdowns. It’s not entirely clear how intentional the main interesting part of that was to the original pitch, since most of the actual focus is on Mr. Cam, a young hotshot college advisor who’s helping the kids at Deer Valley High School with their college admissions in between his own stints at grad school. The guidance counselors seem happy to have Mr. Cam around because they claim to be understaffed. It never really explains how exactly Mr. Cam’s job as a college advisor differs from his just being a regular guidance counselor.

Which is pretty much the whole problem with The Class writ large. Despite being nearly six hours long, this documentary series practically goes out of its way to avoid actually explaining anything. A normal person might find it odd that while the children in The Class can’t go to school, and have to take their classes online, they can apparently still go their part-time jobs at local chain restaurants.

If I wanted to be generous, I could claim that The Class assumes we must already know about these absurd COVID-era policies and doesn’t feel the need to rehash them. After all, the documentary’s name is The Class, not The COVID, and we’re supposed to be paying attention to the students. But did the students themselves have any opinion about the shutdowns, aside from the fact that they were unpleasant? Well…no, not really. Which seems a little weird, actually, now that I think about it. They’re teenagers. Surely they get mad even at things that don’t really affect their lives that much?

But no, all the teenagers we see in The Class are remarkably placid and at times even blasé about what’s happened to them, a decision I suspect had more to do with the editing room than what the raw footage actually presented. The Class almost hits an appropriate level of anger when a school shooting happens. Outside the school after a basketball game, a student from another school shot a Deer Valley High student. Then, to add insult to tragedy, the school board responds to the incident by cutting funds from other programs to pay for a police officer to just hang around the school full time.

Now, you probably read that preceding paragraph and went, wait, if the shooting happened after school, outside the school, when the school wasn’t actually in session, and someone who didn’t even go to the school committed it, how would having a police officer around during regular class times have even helped with this specific crime, let alone any hypothetical future one? Despite the school board’s rather bewildering logic behind this terrible budgeting decision, The Class instead decides to contextualize all of this in terms of anti-police protest. This is most likely because, as we all know, it is good to protest the police, but it is not good to protest public officials, especially when the only other thing they did that The Class discusses that we know of was a COVID shutdown policy that they may well have built on similarly shaky and incoherent logic.

 It’s hard for me to guess since The Class never really attempts to explain the details of that policy, let alone its rationalization. The documentary tells us when President Biden’s adminsitration starts administering the COVID vaccines but not when President Trump announces the COVID vaccines. It’s tempting to read political bias into that, although honestly, the timeline is so all over the place it’s genuinely difficult to interpret anything that happens in terms of cause and effect.

What does The Class discuss instead? Well, just wishy-washy feelings from the students that it treats with gravity yet not urgency. It’s boring, and not in a way that you can defend as educational. A tightly edited, chronologically coherent version of The Class with episodes covering distinct time periods in the school year grounded by national events giving perspective to the local ones could have been genuinely excellent.

It also could have been a compelling argument for the continued existence of PBS, period, because more commercial outlets don’t fund this kind of hyperlocal documentary journalism. But then, that’s the big problem with public broadcasting in general right now, not having any idea how to deal with Trump despite years, if not decades, of forewarning. Just because PBS can broadcast shows unlikely to find a forum anywhere else doesn’t mean they should. The shows themselves still need some sort of intrinsic, defensible value aside from their mere existence. I’m honestly not sure people who even live in Antioch, California, will see The Class as anything more than a high[school scrapbook.