TV nerds: tell me about “public access television”

[Famous Mortimer]

And, of course, there's Weird Al's film UHF - would that have been based on public access or might it have aimed a rung or two higher?

I was going to make a sweeping post about UHF stations, realised I didn't know enough, then gave up about 10% of the way into this Wikipedia page. But.

Take, for instance, KTMA in Minneapolis. It was originally created to broadcast Twins baseball games, but then thanks to one of their producers being a comedy fan, it created "Mystery Science Theater 3000", and some original local wrestling content, among other things. But, most independent UHF stations would just show whatever was cheap - old sitcoms, westerns, public domain movies, and so on. Not a lot of original programming. My vague memory of the movie is that they couldn't afford to pay syndication fees, so had to make their own stuff, but they still had proper studios and an audience and so on.

A long way to say "probably a rung or two higher", sorry.