CHICAGO — In his latest special for WTTW, Geoffrey Baer meets with a cross-section of workers around the city to get a behind-the-scenes look at what their jobs entail. “Chicago Works” tackles a variety of professions, from city employees on rat patrol to the crew at the United Center responsible for the frequent basketball-court-to-ice-rink changeovers.

It’s a solid enough premise, and Baer, a longtime fixture on Chicago public television, has always been an enthusiastic host with a real appreciation and curiosity for the city and its quirks. But the special fails to create that delicious feeling of falling down a rabbit hole and discovering new and fascinating information. You don’t even get much sense of the personalities of the everyday people featured herein.

It would be unfair to expect something more along the lines of Studs Terkel’s “Working,” the 1974 nonfiction book that explored how we feel about our work lives.

There’s also a certain amount of boosterism at play, at the expense of good old-fashioned honesty.

Take the segment on Chicago’s river bridges, a type of raiseable bridge called a trunnion bascule bridge. Here’s Baer’s intro: “They’ve starred in movies. They tie up traffic. They’re historic.”

Sure. And they were used by our previous mayor during the Black Lives Matter protests to literally cut off the city’s South Side from the North Side, like some kind of medieval drawbridge. There’s no mention of that because Baer’s too busy showing us how things work. But we don’t even get more than a short, very general idea of how the bridges function: Machinery moves and the bridge goes up. OK.

At the Shedd Aquarium, Baer talks to a trainer as she’s feeding a beluga whale and asks her thoughts on her work. “There’s nothing quite like them,” she says of her charges. “It’s very special.” This is not a critique of her, but if that’s the kind of pleasantly bland, nonspecific answer Baer’s questions generate, then he’s not asking interesting enough questions, like: What’s the most complicated part of your job? What’s the most memorable day on your job? What’s one thing about your job that isn’t common knowledge? What do you hate about your job?

He does ask a version of “Did you always want to do this?” throughout the special, and it’s always something of a dead end. When Baer asks this of a Metra train engineer, the answer is no. Despite being a third-generation train man, his family actually encouraged him not to go into this profession. Baer laughs but doesn’t ask the obvious follow-up: Why? Here’s what he does ask: Why do you think kids like trains so much? “I don’t know,” comes the answer. “That’s probably a question for a child psychologist.”

In all fairness, these deadpan responses become very funny as the special goes on, and maybe that’s at least one of Baer’s intentions here, as the straight man setting up the punchline. After being informed by a Streets and Sanitation worker that rats can squeeze through a hole the size of a quarter, Baer asks, “Do you kind of respect them?” The woman pauses, confused. “No,” she says, “I kill them.” At the International Produce Market near Pilsen, where produce wholesalers are based, Baer notes that a lot of the activity happens in the middle of the night. Why is that, he asks? “Well, because you have to stock the shelves at the grocery stores before all the customers get in.” Talking to the Zamboni operator at the United Center, Baer asks the guy if he ever met Frank Zamboni, the inventor of said ice resurfacing machine. Yes, comes the answer. What was he like? Pause. “Normal guy.”

Baer visits the set of NBC’s “Chicago Fire,” and I was legitimately interested to learn that in scenes where everything is meant to be aflame, the props need to survive multiple takes. On this day, they’re filming on a set dressed to look like a recording studio, and the props — electric piano, control console, even a spiral book — are made of steel, rather than flammable materials. That’s a funky enough detail that it would have been fun to learn more about that job, of fashioning everyday items from steel (and then what happens to them afterward?).

Some of the professions featured here have been the subject of similar short TV packages, including a look inside the Wrigley Field manual scoreboard, and you get the sense that the segments were determined not only by what interests Baer and his producers, but also who was willing to take part. But future specials could refine their approach in ways that might be fruitful. We live in a moment where federal services that once worked fairly efficiently in the background (and therefore were not top of mind for most of us) are being intentionally dismantled. Suddenly, the value of all those invisible workers at the National Weather Service or the FDA becomes overt, and I think there’s a space where Baer could offer insight locally, by spelling out all kinds of city services we rarely think about because we don’t have to — when they work.

Public works and city services provide a real and valuable function, and having a better understanding of some of that is not only compelling but creates a better sense of what makes the city tick. That can, and should, be public television’s bailiwick. Especially now.

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(Nina Metz is a Chicago Tribune critic who covers TV and film.)

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