NOEL HOLSTON TV column: Mental Engineering Goes to the Super Bowl

Nobody has more riding on Sunday's Super Bowl than John Forde. He's betting his dream.

Forde (pronounced Fore-DEE) is the creator and host of Mental Engineering, a public-TV series in which he and a Politically Incorrect-like gang  of  wits and scholars analyze commercials. Not just their style and artistry or whether they work, but their substance, their meanings, which of our buttons they aim to push. Kind of like dream-interpretation.

Mental Engineering first appeared in 1997 on a public-access cable channel in St. Paul, Minn. Unique, indispensable and long overdue, the show gradually developed enough of a following that Twin Cities Public Television  found a regular, late-night slot for it. Other cable-access operations and public-TV stations nationally, including WNET/13, found space for it as well. But while the show has drawn the attention of media outlets from Swing magazine to ABC's World News Tonight and garnered positive reviews from many TV critics, Forde has had a hard time lining up the sort of  corporate or foundation support that public-TV increasingly relies on. Gee, I wonder why. Could it be that Mental Engineering is a little more threatening to the system than Ebert & Roeper and the Movies?

Because his pockets are only so deep,  Forde hasn't been able to produce any new half-hour episodes in more than a year. But that didn't stop him from pitching PBS a grander idea -- a post-Super Bowl review of commercials unveiled during the game. And PBS bit. At last count, 242 public-TV stations have the Mental Engineering special, Super Commercials, on their Sunday night schedules. WNET will broadcast it at 10:30 p.m.

Forde and company traditionally have had their fun with commercials he taped off the air. For the special, he's having to depend on the good sportsmanship of some ad agencies to get him advance copies of commercials that will air during the Rams-Patriots game. The special will be taped in St. Paul Saturday afternoon so a lawyer can screen it for libelous remarks. We're kind of on dicey legal grounds here, he says. Comments about the commercial itself are pretty well protected, but comments about the underlying business practices-they could crush us.

Forde says he was most surprised by the pressure PBS put on him to find some big, national names for the panel. They literally said, Ask Bill Clinton.' But what makes the show go is, it's peer to peer. You can't have Susie, Timmy and Jimmy and then Mr. President. That totally shoots it. But we did ask Chris Rock, and he thought about it for several weeks, and we asked Billy Crystal and got a no fax the next morning.

Forde ended up with a balance he's happy with. Joining him and little-known but keenly insightful semi-regulars Chris Vigliaturo and Leola Johnson will be Aisha Tyler, host of E!'s Talk Soup, and comedian Lizz Winstead, co-creator of Comedy Central's The Daily Show.

He expects typically lively give and take. I don't feel we have to hit a home run, he says. Just go out and slap the double or maybe triple that we always do. 

And if they knock in some runs and don't leave anybody stranded, what might come of it?  The ideal would be to get a couple of corporate underwriters and get PBS to put it in with their hard feed on Sunday night, he says. We don't think we'll get that high, but we think there's  a pretty strong chance we'll be invited back next year. I'm pretty confident that PBS is going to want to talk about distributing us at least as one of their a la carte programs if we can get funding on our own. It depends on the audience we deliver.

E-mail Noel Holston at noel.holston@newsday.com.

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Last modified: February 01, 2002