Rick Sebak's latest offering of Americana, "A Program About Unusual Buildings and Other Roadside Stuff," airs tomorrow night on WQED. Click photo for larger image.

LOS ANGELES -- You've got to love the titles of WQED producer Rick Sebak's specials. They are always as simple as can be: "A Flea Market Documentary." "Sandwiches That You Will Like." "An Ice Cream Show." And now there's "A Program About Unusual Buildings and Other Roadside Stuff" (8 p.m. tomorrow on WQED).

"I've always had an affection for generic titles," Sebak said during a press conference at the TV critics summer press tour. "I don't want to make the definitive work, nor do I ever think I'm making the definitive work. It's the generic quality I love and the simplicity. ... I like the fact that it's more ordinary and therefore somewhat extraordinary in the world of television."

The way Sebak's shows celebrate Americana is also extraordinary in this cynical age.

"They're celebrations of small family owned business that somehow manage to survive and still provide a service that no corporation could ever think about doing," Sebak said. "So they end up being a sharing of joy, and it's an odd niche in television and it's one of those places that I find that public television allows that to happen and no one else does."

In "Unusual Buildings," Sebak visits a shoe-shaped building in Eastern Pennsylvania and one shaped like a hot dog in Los Angeles. There's also a ketchup bottle that's a landmark in Collinsville, Ill. In the program, one woman says the ketchup bottle is more beautiful than the Eiffel Tower. Sebak was asked if he used that sound bite because it was "patently ridiculous or do you put that in because you believe it?"

Sebak defended the woman.

"It's not so patently ridiculous," he said. "It's a small town. That's their Eiffel Tower. It's the landmark that defines the town, that gives you a sense of place just like the Eiffel Tower does. Obviously we love a comment like that, but I don't think it's ridiculous."

Sebak said his next national program for PBS, tentatively titled "A Cemetery Special," has funding and will likely premiere in October 2005.

"It's a show that I've wanted to do locally for many, many years, but no one seemed to want to give me the funding for it on a local level," Sebak said. "We found a cemetery in Wisconsin that has an ice cream social every year and one in Virginia that has a farmer's market every Thursday. Before the great park movement of the 19th century, cemeteries are where people went to have picnics. We forget that. They are not unpleasant places."

They certainly won't be after they get the warm, funny Rick Sebak treatment.

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