The foundation of PBS’ fall push is Ken Burns’ 14-hour epic event, The Roosevelts: An Intimate Portrait, airing Sunday, Sept. 14 through Saturday, Sept. 20.

“For the past few years, we’ve been focusing on a programming strategy in which we put like genres on same nights,” says Anne Bentley, PBS’ vice president of corporate communications. “Sunday nights is drama. We’ve claimed Wednesday nights as the smartest night of television, with our science and natural history programming. This helps us promote these nights of the week in a very strategic way.”

To kick off that strategy for fall, PBS will premiere The Roosevelts this Sunday night, one week before the broadcast networks launch their fall seasons.

On Monday morning after the premiere, PBS will for the first time release all 14 hours of the series on several platforms to allow viewers to catch up or binge-watch it. Those platforms include Apple TV, Roku, the PBS app, PBS.org and on its affiliated station sites.

“We felt that if we waited another week to release it, we would lose some of the buzz,” says Jen Allen, PBS’ senior director, primetime strategy and advertising. “We wanted viewers who miss the premiere to feel like they can get caught up and then come back in the stream and watch with everyone else.”

When it comes to paid media, PBS’s audience target is apparent by its choices: brainy game show Jeopardy! dedicated a custom category to The Roosevelts, The New Yorker ran a custom-caption contest and on Sunday, The New York Times’ crossword puzzle will include a Roosevelts theme. PBS also ran a special insert in Time Magazine.

Meanwhile, Burns himself proves to be a huge promotional asset. Burns started making appearances at this summer’s Television Critics’ Association’s press tour, and hasn’t stopped since. He’s showed up on Comedy Central’s The Daily Show and MSNBC’s Morning Joe, and attended dozens of local screenings. On Sept. 16, Burns and House of Cards’ creator Beau Willimon will take the stage at Washington, D.C.’s Warner Theatre to compare and contrast the real-life Roosevelts with those scheming Underwoods. Apparently, the differences aren’t as great as you might think.

PBS also is all over social media, and next week will turn its Twitter feed over to The Roosevelts’ three main characters over three days. Teddy, Franklin and Eleanor all will tweet out quotes and photos, and the PBS Twitter page will be custom-skinned for each character. Burns himself, a “huge Tweeter,” Bentley says, will be Tweeting throughout the week.

“We also did all the traditional blocking and tackling, with paid media running on national cable and on CBS’ Sunday morning show. Those are placements that have worked well for us in the past,” says Jim Dreesen, PBS’ vice president of content marketing and audience development.

“We only do this four to six times per year, so when we do it, we want to throw the biggest rock in the pond possible for our stations. This launch will really set the tone, and then we’ll launch the rest of our fall season from this.”

Once The Roosevelts wraps up, PBS starts premiering its regular programming, including season two of Masterpiece’s The Paradise on Sept. 28, six new episodes of Antiques Roadshow and six new documentaries from Makers, which tells stories of groundbreaking American women in different spheres of influence.

On Wednesday, Oct. 15, How We Got to Now, hosted by Steven Johnson, premieres the first of six episodes, telling the stories behind the “remarkable ideas that have made modern life possible,” according to PBS.

How We Got to Now takes broad themes, such as “clean” or “time” and then talks about the specific inventions in that class that have changed everyone’s lives. For example, safe drinking water, sewers, subways and even iPhones are the result of “clean” engineers, while advances in “glass” has changed everything from astronomy to disease prevention to global communication. Even time needed to be tinkered with because at one time, time was set locally and 2 pm in one town could be 2:08 pm in another, making things understandably confusing if you traveled from one place to another.

PBS has been promoting How We Got to Now since South by Southwest took place in Austin in March, where Johnson appeared on stage with Twitter’s Biz Stone, and then traveled to the Aspen Ideas Festival and TCA over the summer. A companion book to the series also will be released in October.

“Johnson is really a gregarious, neighborly guy, and he runs with all of the tech people we read about in the press every day,” says Dressen. “The audience for this is a blend of the Apple store person and the hardware store person. This show will appeal to the curious, to people who want to make, do, tinker and create.”

To find those people, PBS is advertising in specific trade publications and again turning to social media. Specifically, it’s creating a series of GIFs that will run on its Tumblr blog promoting the project and that PBS and Johnson will tweet out.

“Creating shareable content helps turn fans into evangelizers for our brands,” says Allen. PBS also gives that same content to its stations to use in their own promotion.

The Roosevelts and How We Got to Now are two of PBS’ tentpole events this fall, but there’s something on the schedule for everyone. Jane Austen fans are especially anticipating Death Comes to Pemberley, a two-part mini-series that adapts P.D. James’ stylistic novel, a sequel to Austen’s Price and Prejudice, and stars The Americans’ Matthew Rhys and Bleak House’s Anna Maxwell Martin.

Fall is television’s most crowded time of the year, but that doesn’t mean PBS plans to cede it to other players.

“We have to swim in the same stream as everyone else,” says Dreesen. “If we don’t, we’ll be forgotten and we’ll have to reacquaint ourselves with everyone come January.”

Of course, that reacquaintance is made somewhat easier by the fact that PBS’ blockbuster hit, Downton Abbey, returns for season five on January 4, 2015.

[Cube image of Ken Burns in front of out-of-home marketing on Wall Street courtesy of PBS]

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