Square One TV
PBS's answer to math phobia: a half hour of sketches, parody game shows and music videos about percentages, capped every day by Mathnet, the Dragnet spoof whose detectives carried calculators instead of guns. Five seasons, 230 episodes, and a generation of adults who forgot every formula but can still sing the theme.
In 1985 the Children's Television Workshop, the Sesame Street people, asked Tom Lehrer, who had written songs for its earlier series The Electric Company, for a theme for a proposed show called That's Mathematics. Lehrer set his lyrics to "That's Entertainment!", the estate of composer Arthur Schwartz refused permission, and the company went, as the story goes, back to square one. Square One Television premiered on PBS on January 26, 1987, built to attack what CTW saw as a math crisis among American schoolchildren, and it did so in the Electric Company style: short sketches parodying whatever kids were already watching. Mathcourt tried defendants for math crimes before Judge Sandra Day O'Crater. Mathman was Pac-Man with arithmetic, chased by a blue tornado named Mr. Glitch. There were General Mathpital, Late Afternoon with David Numberman, and at least one original music video per episode, with guests like Kid 'n Play and the Fat Boys performing about the topic of the day. Game-show segments like Piece of the Pie and Close Call turned percentages and estimation into contests, with Reg E. Cathey announcing.
The closing segment every day was Mathnet, a straight-faced pastiche of Dragnet in which police mathematicians George Frankly (Joe Howard) and Kate Monday (Beverly Leech) solved thefts, frauds and kidnappings with math. Each case ran five segments, one per weekday, each ending on a cliffhanger, and the parody was meticulous: the detectives carried calculators instead of guns, the unit's motto was "to cogitate and to solve" in place of the LAPD's "to protect and to serve," and James Earl Jones turned up as the chief. The squad started in Los Angeles and later moved to New York, and when Leech left after the third season, Toni DiBuono's Pat Tuesday took the desk. One case was cracked with a parrot and the Fibonacci sequence.
The last new episode aired on November 6, 1992; PBS reran the show until October 1994, and it resurfaced on the Noggin cable channel from 1999 to 2003. What lingers is the trick. The show never pretended math was fun on its own terms. It assumed you were already watching television and smuggled the math in behind the parodies, which is why people who cannot remember how to find a percentage can still tell you what happened to George Frankly.
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