TV Talk: T.J. ‘Doo Wop’ Lubinsky finally got to make his dream music show

Trib Total Media TV writer Rob Owen offers a viewing tip for the coming week.

Locally based TV producer T.J. Lubinsky hit on a winning formula for public TV pledge specials in 1999 with WQED-TV’s “Doo Wop 50,” Lubinsky’s first national pledge show. He’s been making PBS music-centric pledge specials ever since.

Lubinsky’s latest “My Music” special, “Steve Lawrence & Eydie Gormé: Memories of My Mom & Dad” (8 p.m. Saturday, WQED-TV) marks the culmination of a dream deferred.

Lubinsky always had a taste for older music. As a kid growing up in Ocean Grove, N.J., he knew of Lawrence and his music.

“I’m a 15-year-old kid. I’m just starting to discover girls and teenage crushes and puppy love and all that stuff that happens,” Lubinsky recalled. “Bottom line is, I really fell in love with Steve Lawrence’s voice.”

Years later when he’d become a successful PBS pledge music special producer, Lubinsky went to Lawrence’s agent to pitch a show. She’d always come up with an excuse why it couldn’t be done.

“Year after year I would call her and I would beg, I would find out what her favorite deli was and have food sent to her apartment,” Lubinsky said. “I did everything to try to impress this lady that he would be in good hands, but she turned me down year after year.”

Until, that is, the manager could no longer say no.

“The manager died,” Lubinsky said. “So then I said, ‘Oh, there’s my opportunity.’ It didn’t come when I wanted it to come, but there it is.”

Lubinsky went to David Lawrence — son of the late Eydie Gormé and Steve Lawrence, who is in the end-stage of Alzheimer’s disease — and pitched the show as a tribute to David Lawrence’s parents.

The result is a broadcast that celebrates Gormé and Lawrence through full performances, alone and together — “This Could Be the Start Of Something Big,” “I’ve Got You Under My Skin,” “Blame It On The Bossa Nova” — and interviews with David Lawrence, American songbook ambassador Michael Feinstein and Carol Burnett, who gave Steve Lawrence an opportunity to show off his comedic side on “The Carol Burnett Show.”

And, yes, there will be a music CD pledge premium offered with the special.

“Everybody says, ‘Oh, physical (media) is dead,’ but I don’t think so,” Lubinsky said. “People want the CDs because they’re curated original recordings by original artists.”

While Lubinsky made his mark with his music specials at WQED, he left his role as the station’s director of on-air fundraising 20 years ago and has worked as an independent producer ever since.

At first, after leaving WQED, Lubinsky made his “My Music” shows — the Lawrence special is No. 76 in the series — and licensed them to PBS directly for national distribution. But about six years ago, Lubinsky stopped making shows for PBS and now sells his shows to public TV stations.

“I have this great relationship with all the programmers and the fundraisers in the system, and I’m a known commodity in terms of what I do and specialize in,” Lubinsky said in a phone interview from his TJL Productions home office in Wexford. “If I do it myself, I can then get my hands directly on the stations, work with them for each market and create custom-crafted stuff for each local station. That’s something you just can’t do when you’re involved with PBS. It’s one size fits all, and we weren’t fitting as good (together) as we could fit on our own.”

Recently, Lubinsky bought back the 14 shows he produced for WQED, including a trove of never-seen interviews and performances.

“There was this huge archive but nobody was there to manage it, and really the only one who could manage it was me because it’s all in my head,” Lubinsky said. “I would shoot all these extra songs and all these interviews that I would do with the artists, and nothing ever had been done with that because I left there.”

Some of that material will get repurposed in a new weekly, non-pledge half-hour series, “The Oldies Show with T.J. Lubinsky,” which will debut on PBS stations in April.

“(PBS stations have) been saying to people for years and years, ‘Give us money, and we’ll give you some more shows like this,’ so we’re trying to deliver on that promise the way nobody has before and give something without bashing people on the head for money,” Lubinsky said.

The model for his new series, he said, is an oldies radio station — just done on television.

In addition to musical performances, the show will feature interviews culled from Lubinsky’s archives.

“I sat with the artists and did hours and hours and hours of interviews with all of them, but they’ve never been seen because there wasn’t time in the pledge breaks to stop and do a five-minute interview with someone if you only have eight minutes to ask for money and the money is what allows us to do the show,” he said.

“People keep saying, ‘Oh, well, analog is just a thing of the past, TV is a thing of the past. It’s all streaming apps now.’ And my answer to that is, ‘OK, it may be so for younger people,’ but even though older people are streaming all the time, the reality is we’re going to be the last people to go and the last of the last people are over 65, and I’m the only one super-serving them with content that they love.”