Once upon a time there were two little TV stations. They occupied two of the hottest pieces of real estate on Nashville's public airwaves. They were situated among the first 10 channels on the dial, the coveted top tier of TV programming. But they were hidden in plain sight. For most people, they were the channel surfer's equivalent of speed bumps. You clicked on them, stayed long enough to see what you'd hit—then moved on.

Then a funny thing happened. The head of Nashville's Channel 9, a tiny educational-access channel that broadcasts out of a congested studio on the Nashville State campus, was sitting in his cluttered office one day when the phone rang. The caller represented A.C. Nielsen Inc., the media arbiter that measures TV viewership. He had a question: "What are you programming?"

In its regular monitoring of viewing habits, Nielsen had noticed a curious phenomenon. People were tuning in this tiny, nothing, speed-bump channel in growing numbers, and they were sticking around. Not big numbers, mind you, the caller said—"but you're showing up on our radar."

Back then, about nine months ago, the sole full-time staffer at Channel 9 and its sister station, Channel 10, considered being just a blip on the radar a major victory. Its low-cost niche programming is the sort of community-service esoterica that larger stations ditched years ago. Now there are bigger stakes. In two weeks, Nashville's two educational-access stations will announce a makeover with broad implications for the city. One station will become an information channel with a focus on Nashville, giving local public-affairs programming an enormous boost at a time when the city's network affiliates have largely abandoned it.

The other, in perhaps the bolder and more far-reaching move, will give the city's many arts organizations—visual arts, performing arts and more—a forum that binds them together. Not only that, but if the station realizes its most ambitious project, it will link Nashville's arts community to others all across the country, even around the world.

This is a tall order for two stations that broadcast on a shoestring with Wayne's World-level production capabilities. For the idea to work will depend on several factors: a board with lots of connections; the blessing of local government, which currently holds the purse strings; the ability to convince underwriters to back shows with only anecdotal audience measurement—and above all, talent willing to participate on the cheap while money is tight.

But for Nashville's two educational channels, all but unused until recently, two of these elements are locked down. And the others are coming together. It always helps to have a leader who looks like Santa Claus.

The jolly man with the beard is Michael Catalano, who became executive director of what is known as the Metropolitan Educational Access Corporation (MEAC) in October 2003. A former New York event producer and longtime jazz guitarist with the deep, soft, snake-charming murmur of an all-nite deejay, Catalano has an edgily laid-back manner that camouflages his eyes-on-the-prize fixity of purpose.

For the past year-and-a-half, Comcast Channel 9 has developed a growing buzz, thanks to a package of satellite programming known as Classic Arts Showcase. It's a hodgepodge of often astonishing archival arts material in unscheduled eight-hour blocks, offered free of charge to nonprofit stations and made possible by a foundation built on the Adolph's Meat Tenderizer fortune. With no viewing guide, or any way of knowing what will come next, a viewer might find a passage from Giselle, trippy experimental animation, excerpts from a Derek Jarman or Powell/Pressburger film, footage of the young Mikhail Baryshnikov with the Bolshoi Ballet, Broadway show tunes or surreal performance clips.

It is the kind of quirky, unpredictable programming that viewers leave on all day and night as video wallpaper. (It has another demographic as well: as one fan remarks, "It's perfect for taking drugs.") Word of mouth has not only brought Channel 9 a regular audience, it has sparked viewer interest in Channel 10, which broadcasts a variety of educational programming from the Annenberg Foundation as well as Teddy Bart's Roundtable, a teen news program and projects for Metro Schools.

Starting this fall, with the encouragement of Mayor Bill Purcell, Catalano intends to take Metro's two historically underused educational-access channels and turn them into independent—and eventually self-supporting—entities. On July 28, at the public-access studios at Nashville State, Purcell will join Catalano to unveil the stations' new identity.

"We started looking at the stations, and we thought, why not structure one to be education and the other arts?" Catalano says. "I want this to be everybody's link."

The new Channel 9 will bring Nashville "the best in local, regional and national arts programming." Within its loose guidelines, it may feature anything from Blair School of Music talent to Frist Center lecturers. The new Channel 10 will provide "education, information and news from Nashville and around the world." Its reach spans from the Center for Religion and Culture at Vanderbilt to programs sponsored by the Metro Police Department.

Catalano says the plan will work, paradoxically, because of the two channels' meager resources. Thus far, the annual budget of $100,000, provided for by Comcast by way of Metro, allows for only one full-time staffer: Catalano. There's almost no overhead—the channels share studio space with Metro's other Public Educational Government Access (or PEG) stations. There's no money to bankroll productions either.

Instead, Catalano and the seven-member MEAC board mean to turn the stations into "a business incubator," using PEG's low-cost facilities for local producers who want to shape and polish programming models they can ultimately shop around. Catalano estimates that series may be produced for anywhere between $2,000 and $25,000, depending on the scale of the show. The major costs would be crew and editing.

More important, MEAC means to wean Channels 9 and 10 off Metro's teat by attracting and developing shows that can sustain themselves through underwriters.

"Our goal is to become freestanding—not dependent on the city for funding," says Elliott Mitchell, a MEAC board member whose involvement with public-access television goes back to the early 1970s. He insists support must come from many different sources. He remembers working many years ago at a Rochester, N.Y., station when a major underwriter threatened to pull out over a controversial show.

"The general manager just said, 'Bye,' " Mitchell recalls. "He had a broad enough base of underwriters. It was a valuable lesson."

Catalano says he's grateful for the $60,000 in seed money Metro has committed to MEAC. "But if you get public money," he says, "you need to be able to walk away from it."

Metro has had educational-access channels off and on (mostly off) since 1977, as a standard part of its agreement with cable providers. In exchange for using the public airwaves, cable companies offer X number of public-access channels and pony up a small percentage of their gross revenues.

In Nashville, X equals four. The best-known are Channels 9 and 10's sister stations: Channel 3, the local equivalent of C-SPAN; and Channel 19, Community Antenna Television (CATV), the popular open-mic night of local broadcasting. The former broadcasts Metro Council meetings and other civic functions. The latter hosts The Bat Poet. By comparison, New York has maybe 12 of these channels; depending on the hour and the station, you could find either professional-caliber programming or a subcultural hubbub that has handed SNL material for decades.

Because Metro wasn't doing anything with its first educational channel, after 1982 the city went without one for 16 years. In 1998, cable provider Intermedia supplied the city with two new channels, but even then they were broadcasting little more than secondhand Nashville Public Television programming and on-air classes from Nashville State and TSU. If you weren't tuning in for coursework—or you didn't have some weird obsession with Louis Rukeyser—you kept on flipping until you made it safely to SportsCenter.

"There was not much activity for some time," says Metro Council member Lynn Williams, who has a degree in mass communications and a background in radio and TV commercial production. But Williams says research showed that the stations could function with a separate purpose and mission from Metro's other channels. With a colleague, former council member Bob Bogen, she sponsored legislation that would shape the two channels into something different.

The result was MEAC. In 2003, Purcell appointed a seven-member board to oversee the organization. He pulled Mitchell, a former CATV executive director, off the PEG board; he drew in notables such as Beth Fortune, former press secretary to Gov. Don Sundquist, who now chairs the committee. Her onetime boss at the Nashville Banner, former editor Eddie Jones, is on the board, as are retired Metro Schools administrator David Jones and veteran talent agent Tandy Rice.

Rice's initial attitude toward Ch. 9 and 10 echoed most of the city's. "I wasn't familiar with them," he says. "I'd go as far as Channel 8, then skip to ESPN."

Board members say that apart from the mayor's zeal, and an influx of cash from two now defunct would-be cable providers, the galvanizing force was the arrival of Catalano. Ironically, he had been doing freelance work for Nashville Public Television, which had once eyed the stations for its own. But local arts organizations and city fathers remembered him more from his dramatic late-1990s turnaround of what was then called the Sinking Creek Film/Video Festival. Under Catalano's guidance, a 28-year-old festival on the verge of death grew 10 times its size in four years. It was Catalano who spearheaded the name change to the Nashville Independent Film Festival (which has since dropped the "Independent").

"Having Michael Catalano appear was one of the greatest elements," says Elliott Mitchell. "He's extremely well-connected. This wouldn't have happened if Michael, Lynn Williams and Bob Bogen were not around."

So what do Catalano and the MEAC board members have in mind? Judging from information packets MEAC has prepared to woo underwriters, Channels 9 and 10 aspire to fill the glaring void in local public-affairs programming and arts coverage left by the city's network TV affiliates—a rare exception being WTVF's FivePlus auxiliary channel, with its locally produced current-events shows.

Channel 10's proposals, for example, include a feel-good documentary series about the Metro Police Department, a health show featuring staffers from Metro General Hospital, and a Spanish-language show devoted to "El Protector," the police department's outreach program to the city's growing Hispanic population. Catalano wants to offer the last of these to Mexico City's equivalent of Channel 10, as it cautions immigrants about crucial cultural differences—for example, not to approach a police vehicle north of the border.

Tandy Rice is developing another Channel 10 series called Follow the Leader, half-hour interviews with Nashville plutocrats about the qualities of leadership and their roles in the community. Rice, who could sweet-talk a beef bone away from a pit bull, already has commitments from Vanderbilt Chancellor Gordon Gee, Mike Curb and Ted Welch, to name three out of 20. "Tons of people have never had a face-to-face with Martha Ingram," Rice says, warming up his pitch. "It'll be almost like People magazine."

Interspersed with these shows will be national broadcasts from Pacifica's proudly left Democracy Now and the rather less-so Armed Forces Network. "There's so much nonsense, so much bias in news," Catalano says with a shrug. "I want them to balance each other out."

It is the sister station, Channel 9, that entails more difficulty and the broader base—and which stands to have the bigger impact. Nashville's creative community, from theater companies to galleries to writer's nights, has been routinely ignored by local TV news coverage. When artist Adrienne Outlaw began doing arts pieces as a correspondent on public radio's WPLN-FM, she said colleagues and gallery owners alike told her the media attention had an immediate effect.

"A lot of artists and gallery dealers told me they had people come in as a result," says Outlaw, who has cut back to occasional appearances on WPLN. But when she approached local TV stations about similar programming, she says she was told they'd consider it only if she delivered a prepaid package. "There are not enough people who understand the visual arts working in TV," she laments.

One who did, though, was Michael Catalano. He liked Outlaw's idea of a half-hour visual-arts broadcast, half local work, half updates from around the world. Better still, she didn't want it to look like the usual PBS embalming-by-talking-head. "As much as I love art, I don't watch TV shows about art," Outlaw explains. "They're too static. Usually it's just a curator sitting in front of the work. I want something more—I hesitate to use the term—MTV."

She's currently working on a prototype for Channel 9 to show underwriters. If it succeeds, she will join a rapidly expanding list of artists and arts organizations negotiating to provide content for the revamped channel. Programming this fall could include films from the Sinking Creek/Nashville Film Festival archives, Blair School and Frist Center lectures, musical segments from local performers, and interviews with visiting talents from Vanderbilt's "Great Performances" series—anyone from performance artist Laurie Anderson to Ed Asner.

The programs could then be shared with stations in other cities. "We could export who we are to the rest of the world," Catalano says. "How we're seen outside the city isn't really who we are." Wherever Channel 9 can't get access, Catalano vows to use ingenuity. "I can't shoot TPAC," he says. "But I could call [Tennessee Repertory Theatre's] Dave Alford and follow him for a day and broadcast that."

If the channel sounds like a local version of Classic Arts Showcase, that in itself could have interesting repercussions. All across Nashville, exciting work is starting to get a footing—at the Frist Center, at the Belcourt, at Ruby Green, at the Nashville Chamber Orchestra, at Radio Free Nashville, at Isle of Printing, at Watkins, at Plowhaus, at Actors Bridge, at Angle of View. While "no one in Nashville is creating art in an isolated environment," as Adrienne Outlaw observes, audiences do not see these as connected to any larger creative awakening. Instead, they're like fascinating puzzle pieces that don't quite add up to a picture. Given equal attention and a common forum, the exposure of all these different factions to a wide audience could create a potent crossover. Match, meet gunpowder.

But how will anybody measure the bang? MEAC will rely only on "anecdotal audience measurement"—meaning water-cooler chatter, email, calls and other unscientific methods. There will be no way to tell how many are actually listening unless the station does its own surveys.

"I can't imagine that they would try some kind of widespread name-recognition campaign," says Bennett Tarleton, a mainstay of the local arts scene who currently serves as director of audience development for Tennessee Rep. Tarleton was one of several arts-organization representatives who met with Catalano last winter, and he says the station just needs to build on the word of mouth Classic Arts Showcase has been getting. "As long as the key people in the community are aware, they'll tell the 27,000 people they know. If you tell the right people, the rest of the world will build it."

Elliott Mitchell isn't worried. "I've always seen community TV as the medium that speaks best to a city," he says. "It's local people talking about local problems to local people. Or local successes. It's neighbors seeing their neighbors' faces on TV." Asked the worst that could happen with Channels 9 and 10, Mitchell says offhandedly, "Well, it could be that people just aren't interested in it."

But Michael Catalano believes the worst has already happened with Metro's educational programming.

"It was unused," Catalano says. "It has this huge potential that for one reason or another has been overlooked. This is the most amazing place I've ever lived, and we can create community-based programming that reflects this very unique community. The funny thing is, it's a much easier sell than the film festival, because it's television. It's on 24 hours a day, all year round.

"Nothing—that's the worst thing that could happen. And it's already happened."

Really? Nothing worse could happen as MEAC tries to launch two revamped stations on a table-scraps budget?

"Well, yeah," Elliott Mitchell says, laughing. "Michael could keel over."