A Look at Square One TV

Synopsis

Premiering on January 26, 1987, Square One TV was an educational television series devised to reinforce mathematical concepts, produced by the Children's Television Workshop for PBS in the United States.

Like The Electric Company a decade earlier, Square One TV was a highly entertaining show with a sketch format and top-notch acting and writing. This was particularly evident in Mathnet, a suspenseful Dragnet pastiche calling upon the talents of Joe Howard, Beverly Leech, and Toni DiBuono as mathematicians solving crimes.

Structure of the show

[Mathman] [General Mathpital]

Episodes of Square One TV often featured a number of segments ranging from music videos and game shows to varied recurring features such as Mathman, Fax Headfull commentaries, Math Court, General Mathpital, Nobody's Inn, and animated segments with Lt. Dirk Niblick and the Math Brigade. Segments encompassed both parodies of popular cultural icons or television shows and original ideas. Specific episodes often concentrated on specific mathematical concepts (such as multiplication or combinatorics), and existing segments were often reused in later episodes.

[Math Court] The second half of each episode was dominated by Mathnet. Specific "cases" continued over the course of five episodes, culminating in a plot climax and resolution on Friday, in which the perpetrator was captured and the surrounding mysteries were solved. Thirty installations of Mathnet were produced altogether. Individual Mathnet cases were sometimes rerun within the same season.

230 episodes of the show were produced between 1987 and late 1992. Reruns of earlier programs were often interspersed with new material and continued to air as late as 1994 or 1995 in most areas. As with The Electric Company, 65 edited episodes were rerun on the limitedly-available Noggin network from 1999 to 2003.

Square One Math Talk

[Buster and Maria] In 1995, two years after production had ceased, CTW commissioned a fifteen-minute school curriculum-oriented program called Square One Math Talk. Math Talk was essentially a classroom-oriented repackaging of Square One TV (minus Mathnet) with animated continuity segments featuring the characters Maria Lopez and Buster the Parrot added to provide additional commentary and, occasionally, comic relief. Most segments seen on Math Talk appeared earlier on regular Square One TV, although certain segments were edited or joined in progress. Twenty numbered episodes of Math Talk were produced, plus two additional episodes intended to introduce the series to teachers and families.

Math Talk is noteworthy for the fact that it is still limitedly broadcast in some areas to this day. In West Virginia, WPBY, WNPB, and WSWP air the program throughout the instructional year every Tuesday at 1:00 p.m., as of early 2007.

The illustrated Square One Math Talk episode guide

[Treasure in Monterey Bay video cover]

Video availability

Individual episodes of Square One TV have yet to be released on video or DVD. A small handful of Square One and Mathnet-oriented specials (including "Treasure in Monterey Bay," at right) were released on video in conjunction with Republic Pictures in the mid '90s, although they are out of print. In addition, compilation videotapes of Mathnet and Math Talk are available for schools from GPN Educational Media.