It’s been a relatively quiet week in New York City, my hometown, out on the edge of the East River. And its been a while since any of us here have heard a good joke about Methodists. So we were sort of excited that a few local theaters—mostly the types that run films shot by handheld cameras and Europeans—are showing a new movie: A Prairie Home Companion it’s called.

Unfortunately, turns out it could easily be the worst movie so far this year. Like one of Aunt Ida’s Swedish raisin dumplings, it’s stale right out of the oven. In fact, it might not even be a movie at all. It’s a series of moving images on film—people, mostly, idly chatting, and wandering around looking for people to chat with—but beyond that, well. No matter. We New Yorkers are a people raised to believe that when an incoherent and self-indulgent film project wanders into town, you don’t split hairs.

A Prairie Home Companion, the movie, is essentially a taping of A Prairie Home Companion, the venerable public-radio show scripted and hosted by Garrison Keillor, only with a few extra characters conjured from Keillor’s imagination and something vaguely resembling a backstage storyline. It’s the show’s last night. A soulless Texas corporation has bought out their tiny radio station. But none of the performers know this as it starts. The singing Johnson sisters, Rhonda and Yolanda (Lily Tomlin and Meryl Streep), reminisce in their dressing room, then go sing their number. The singing cowboys, Dusty and Lefty (Woody Harrelson and John C. Reilly), horse around a bit, then go sing their number. The angel of death (Virginia Madsen) meanders around the set. Garrison improvises a little. There are some sound effects. The angel of death does something, but it doesn’t make sense. A sense of loss and ending hangs in the air.

Several critics have pinned their approval of the film on the musical performances. They’re good. But you could listen to the show’s ditties on NPR for free. You’ve paid at least $10 to see a movie. You deserve something of a story to tie the song and dance together.

There are a number of reasons why Keillor, the writer, and Robert Altman, the director, don’t deliver. Keillor says he wanted to try writing a screenplay because he knew he was no good at it. Altman, true to recent form, is much more interested in just watching his characters than making them do stuff.

Still, this only makes it boring. What makes it painful to sit through is the same thing that makes you retune your dial minutes into the radio show. The entire conceit of A Prairie Home Companion—a yesteryear Minnesota Shangri-La, perpetually sardonic—is tired beyond the point of concise description. Jokes about how stiff Lutherans are. Lightly satirical commercials for powder-milk biscuits and coffee. Stories about Norwegian bachelor farmers, over and over. Folk music, folk music, folk music—for 30 years. Condensed into film form, you’re hit with decades worth of irrelevant, flatly repeated humor in 90 minutes.

This is public broadcasting’s fault.

As it’s so intent on reminding you during pledge drives, public radio provides you with programming that the market wouldn’t otherwise provide. Their rationale is that truly enlightening entertainment can only exist when it’s insulated from things as vulgar as ratings, and that preserving certain shows, like they were endangered species, is a public service.

This paradigm is all wrong. To continue to be worthwhile, quality entertainment needs challenges. It has to do new things (even if forced). Left in a protected environment, it stagnates and plays itself out.

Public radio’s news and talk features would seem to be a counterpoint. Morning Edition, Marketplace and Car Talk don’t change often and are generally solid. They are the exceptions that prove the pattern. World events, and people’s car problems, constantly refresh themselves. The news from Lake Woebegone doesn’t.

True, A Prairie Home Companion has corporate sponsors, and, staggeringly, four million U.S. listeners each week. Actually having listened to the show, the only logical explanation would seem to be that there’s a giant, imponderable warehouse somewhere in America, like the one in the last scene of Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark, and that somewhere deep within four million radios have been plugged in, tuned to the nearest NPR affiliate, and forgotten about. To put its popularity in perspective though, if Keillor’s radio shtick were spun off to a network TV show, it would have placed 66th in last week’s ratings. Respectable, but not the stuff of a multi-decade contract.

The movie rebels against the idea of the market interfering in its folksy radio performance. In an unfocused sort of way, it tries to get its viewers to dislike the twang-voiced, scripture-quoting corporate axe man (Tommy Lee Jones) who arrives to shut production down. As the axe man looms though, Keillor’s character (he plays himself, essentially) is strangely indifferent. Perhaps, deep down, even he knows it has gone on too long.

It’s not pleasant to imagine what would have happened if a similar corporate axe man had barged in on Keillor 20 years ago and told him to stop wallowing in the details of childhood, find some new material (preferably something more current than the emotional reticence of Norwegian Americans), or ship out. Then again, A Prairie Home Companion has said it a thousand times: Minnesota folk are the strong, silent, stoic types. He would have survived. He might even have sharpened his screenwriting skills a bit.

–Louis Wittig is a writer living in New York.