Yahoo Lifestyle Like Mister Rogers Before Him, ‘Saved By The Bell’s Peter Engel Found Faith & A Path Toward Morals In Kids TV: Guest Column
Carl Kurlander is a screenwriter (St. Elmo’s Fire) who served as a writer-producer for four of Peter Engel’s NBC series. He also teaches at the University of Pittsburgh, where he has made a series of documentaries including the birth of educational television and how AI is poised to transform the way young people learn. He was mentored by Peter Engel, the man behind the TV fixture Saved by the Bell, who died last week. Here, Kurlander contrasts the wildly different paths taken by Engel and Fred Rogers that led each to generate programming that helped kids cope.
Making Good Attractive: How Peter Engel and Fred Rogers Shaped Young Minds Through Television
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I was stunned to hear Peter Engel passed away recently at 88, though he lived a long and interesting life. When I worked for Peter in the 1990s at NBC, he was introduced to crowds before Saved by the Bell tapings as “The Man Behind the Bell.” I currently teach at the University of Pittsburgh, where Fred Rogers help pioneer the world’s first community-supported educational television station. At first glance, Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood and Saved by the Bell might seem worlds apart — one featuring a soft-spoken ordained minister in a cardigan, the other showcasing trendy teens navigating high school hijinks. Yet both shows shared a surprisingly similar mission: to make moral lessons accessible and appealing to young audiences.
Two Different Paths to the Same Goal
On April 1,1954, Fred Rogers left his promising career working as a floor manager at NBC in New York to work at the public TV station WQED while studying to become a Presbyterian minister because he felt he had a mission to use the then new medium of television to “make good attractive.”
Peter Engel took a very different path. As Peter himself told it, when he came to Hollywood in the 1970s from his beloved New York, he fell into the stereotypical decadent life, doing drugs and dating an adult film actress who starred in the X-rated Emmanuelle films. Then one day he saw a vision of Jesus on the beach. Peter would say, “No one said a word when I did a thousand bucks of cocaine, but when I saw Jesus in Malibu, everyone said, ‘Are you crazy?'”
While Fred deliberately chose ministry and educational television from the beginning, Peter’s spiritual awakening came after years in the entertainment industry. Born Jewish, he became a born-again Christian following his beach epiphany. Despite their different journeys, both men ultimately dedicated themselves to creating television that would positively influence young viewers.
Educational Television Meets Teen Comedy
In July 1996, Peter was sent to Washington to represent NBC at a Children’s Television Summit hosted by President Bill Clinton, Vice President Al Gore, Hillary Clinton and Tipper Gore. Congress was about to legislate that networks would be required to carry at least three hours of educational television for children each week. Peter joined Fred Rogers, Bill Nye “The Science Guy” and Bill Cosby (before his downfall), as well as Fox Kids CEO Margaret Loesch and other executives from major networks and academic authorities on children’s television.
Even before this summit, Saved by the Bell had been praised by members of Congress for its wholesome, moral programming. During the ’90s, NBC leveraged the “E/I” (educational and informational) requirement by developing multiple shows under Peter’s guidance: spinoff Saved by the Bell: The New Class; Hang Time, about a girl on a boys’ basketball team; City Guys, about a working-class Black teen and his rich white friend attending an urban high school; and U.S.A. High, about American teens studying abroad.
I began working for Peter in the early 1990s when he read a pilot I had written at NBC for comedian Louie Anderson and asked me to join the staff for Saved by the Bell: The New Class. I had been writing features for Disney, Universal, Orion and Columbia after my first screenplay St. Elmo’s Fire had been a surprise hit. Television was still looked down upon, but my agent Rob Carlson encouraged me to take the job to get some experience working in a writers room, assuring me the show would probably only last 13 episodes. He was not the first to doubt Bell‘s longevity. The original order for the series had been a co-venture between NBC chief Brandon Tartikoff and Disney’s Jeffrey Katzenberg with an order for 70 episodes. But after the first seven, Disney pulled out, believing the show already had explored all possible storylines. The show and its various spinoffs ended up with almost 900 episodes.
For millions, Saved by the Bell was simply fluffy comedic escape that entertained kids on Saturday mornings and after school when it became ubiquitous in syndication. For those who somehow missed it, the show revolved around a group of teens at the fictional Bayside High School in The Palisades. The “gang” was led by Zack Morris, a cool kid played by Mark-Paul Gosselaar who could talk to the camera and sometimes freeze the action with a “time out,” and his on-again/off-again pursuit of the dreamy cheerleader Kelly Kapowski played by Tiffani Amber Thiessen. But the magic of the show was this closeknit group of friends that also included the jock A.C. Slater (Mario Lopez); the smart, feminist Jesse Spano (Elisabeth Berkley); the geek Screech (Dustin Diamond); and the fashionable Lisa Turtle (Lark Vorhees), who Screech often was pining over. There was no DEI mandate, and the fact that A.C. was played by someone of Hispanic heritage and that Vorhees was Black never was mentioned. What was great about the show, in a Brady Bunch kind of way, was that whatever scrapes they got into — and inevitably Zack ended up in Mr. Belding’s office for something — they were loyal friends who cared about one another.
That sense of caring was no accident as it came first from Peter, who, like Fred Rogers, created a supportive environment that extended beyond the camera. Peter made a great effort to involve the parents when working with minors and cautioned everyone to use appropriate language around the young casts. Script Supervisor Ellen Deutch posted on Facebook how Peter would have her monitor the set for swearing — the penalty being culprits were to go to his office — though he did this with good humor, as he would sometimes lapse himself and then read a passage from the Bible as penance.
At the height of what we called “The Engel Empire,” Peter had six shows running simultaneously — a feat matched then only by television megaproducer Aaron Spelling. Peter made everyone feel like they were part of the Bell family. At company picnics, where he made his often unathletic writers play softball and delighted in making good-natured fun of our lack of athletic prowess. If it was anyone’s birthday, we got a cake, and Peter inevitably would mimic Lee Strasberg’s Hyman Roth character in The Godfather, saying, “Make sure they see the cake.” (Each season, my wife Natalie retired a pant size for me as Peter had every meal delivered to the writers room, and we started calling ourselves “human veal.”)
Consultants and Moral Lessons
One of the reasons Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood had such impact in influencing generations of young children is that each week Fred Rogers met with his mentor, University of Pittsburgh Professor Dr. Margaret McFarland, who famed child psychologist Erik Erikson called the most knowledgeable person he ever met about child development. Margaret was Fred’s off-screen partner and helped him use the show to deal with complex issues — from a child’s anxiety about getting their first haircut to processing events like the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy.
When we started The New Class, NBC had the entire writing staff meet with educational consultant Karen Hill Scott, who consulted on all of Peter’s E/I shows. After Peter’s passing, I went up to my attic, where I have binders full of notes from Karen and NBC research about concerns of young people in this demographic. The notes addressed such issues as peer pressure, bullying, racial tensions, academic underachievement and conflicts between students and teachers — topics that remain relevant today, especially in our social media age.
All of this had its critics. In my attic, I also found an article from Newsweek in 1998 on “Bubble Gum TV” with the headline “It’s Saturday Morning. Do You Know What Your Kids Are Watching? High School Morality Tales with Bare Midriff.” Peter did have a tendency to cast attractive actors, and he had the same costume designer Liz Bass for all his shows who was only 10 years older than the kids when she started and had a fun sense of style which made these shows hip to the audiences watching them. But at least these shows — and Peter ended up making a lot of them, as many as Fred Rogers — were trying to get some moral message across.
The Clinton Connection
When we were doing an anti-smoking episode, Peter called me into his office and asked me to get “my buddy” Bill Clinton to do a cameo on the show. I had become involved in the Clinton campaign when a memo I wrote about the then-governor of Arkansas going after the young demographic by appearing on MTV got into the hands of campaign adviser George Stephanopoulos.
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At Peter’s insistence, I called George, who shockingly did not reject the idea out of hand. Although they were in the middle of Middle East peace negotiations, George called back and asked if I wanted the president in person or a taped message. Worried about incurring Peter’s wrath if Clinton canceled, I said a taped message would be fine. A few days later, Peter and I were collaborating on what Bill Clinton’s message would be. The only change the White House made was removing an allusion to Screech, which I thought would be fun but probably wasn’t “presidential enough.”
The Lasting Influence
Near the end of his run with shows for what NBC called the “tween” demographic, I co-created and ran the show Malibu, CA with Peter, a cross between Saved by the Bell and Baywatch that ran for 52 episodes as a co-venture between NBC and Tribune. Peter would reinvent himself once more producing the show Last Comic Standing, that kick-started the careers of Amy Schumer, Roy Wood Jr. and Taylor Tomlinson.
I would keep in touch with Peter over the years, and he even had a cameo in the documentary I made about Pittsburgh reinventing itself, My Tale of Two Cities. When I told Peter I was working with city leaders to make Pittsburgh a production hub, he cautioned that I was trying to re-create what I had in L.A. in Western PA. Even as he aged, Peter still had that gleam of Zack Morris about him and was going to make every moment count before the bell rang.
Fred Rogers and Peter Engel represented two very different approaches to children’s and teen programming, yet both were driven by a desire to positively influence young minds. Fred’s gentle, deliberate approach focused on preschoolers’ emotional development, while Peter’s fast-paced, comedic shows tackled the social dynamics and moral dilemmas of adolescence.
In today’s fractured media landscape, with concerns about social media’s negative impact on youth mental health, their shared commitment to “making good attractive” feels more relevant than ever. It took until after his 2003 passing for the impact of Fred Rogers to be fully appreciated. However Peter’s legacy comes to be regarded, he managed to create hours of television that entertained while educating, that made viewers laugh while subtly imparting values of friendship, integrity and kindness.
Both Fred Rogers and Peter Engel remind us that popular entertainment and morality need not be mutually exclusive — that with intention, care and the right team, television can be both wildly successful and genuinely beneficial to its audience.
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