For his latest WQED special, producer Rick Sebak spent some time "Right Beside the River." The 75-minute special -- airing as part of a two-hour pledge block that begins at 8 tonight -- returns to a subject area Sebak chronicled in his first hour-long WQED documentary, 1987's "The Mon, the Al and the O."

But Sebak said he avoided repeating himself by extending the focus beyond the rivers themselves. He finds the mound in Moundsville, W.Va., visits the Marx Toy Museum in adjacent Glen Dale and travels to Vandergrift on the Kiskiminetas River.

"Vandergrift was designed by Frederick Law Olmsted as a planned community, and it was to be the ideal steel mill community," Sebak said. "And I happened upon a great used book store, so I used that story, too."

Sebak first thought about a special on river towns last summer while driving up the Mon Valley with his mom.

"It was a beautiful summer Sunday and I just thought, wow, look at all these great towns," he recalled. He began production just after Christmas and, in serendipity, received an e-mail from the Marshall County, W.Va., historical society about an old farm house, Cockayne House, being turned into a museum.

"I knew I wanted to do a farm on a river," Sebak said, and that visit led him to other stories for the special.

In addition, he re-did a story that was cut from "The Mon, the Al and the O" about the Fredericktown Ferry in Fayette county.

"I would have said it would never be here in five more years [back then] and here we are 22 years later and it's still running," Sebak said. "It's way up the Mon, beyond California, and it's a little, red ferry boat that goes back and forth across the river. It was saved by the fact that they built a new prison in Fayette County" and corrections officers use the ferry to get back and forth across the river.

Sebak's next show will be a national production for PBS on breakfasts across America. It's slated to air sometime in the first half of 2010.