Masterpiece: America's 50-Year-Old Love Affair with British Television Drama
Masterpiece: America's 50-Year-Old Love Affair with British Television Drama by Nancy West
Published by: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers
Publication Date: November 24th, 2020
Format: Hardcover, 264 Pages
Rating: ★★
To Buy
"Fifty years, 450-plus programs, 2,250-plus episodes, and 250 awards: these are Masterpiece's achievements by the numbers, and they are a record to be proud of. Out of the thousands of TV shows produced in America since the 1950s, roughly thirty have reached the fifty-year mark. Most of these are soap operas, sports, or news programs. No other primetime dramatic series comes close to Masterpiece's longevity nor has won as man Emmy, Peabody, or Golden Globe awards. On a less tangible level, few programs have cultivated as loyal a viewer following." In 1961 when Minow gave his infamous "Vast Wasteland" speech television was undergoing a sea change. Gone were the anthology series and high art television produced in New York City, Kraft Television Theatre, CBS Playhouse, Goodyear Theatre, and Playhouse 90, and in were the lowbrow comedies produced in LA. In fact Gilligan's Island openly mocked Minow with their eponymous boat. But when The Forsyte Saga aired in 1969 on NET, the forerunner to PBS, the way back to quality anthology television and out of the "Vaste Wasteland" was apparent. Everyone was talking about the Forsytes and three months after its finale it was on Stan Calderwood's mind when he was in London. Stan would go on to be the first president of WGBH and he cold called the BBC. He needed content for the newly formed PBS and the BBC had it. A deal was quickly struck and on January 10th, 1971 Masterpiece Theatre launched with The First Churchills. A show not without its flaws, too many wigs and maybe a little too racy, but their audience was hooked. By the time the first season finished in 1972 they knew they had something special. Even Minow approved. The show, while initially more focused on literary adaptations, knew that if they maintained the same thematic relevance of tradition, nostalgia, and conventionality, they would maintain their audience because these are all things that Americans crave that their own country is unable to provide, especially in the sphere of television. Masterpiece Theatre was aspirational television. Just by being a viewer you were being educated and thought of as bettering yourself. Checking out history books from the library to compliment your viewing wasn't unheard of in the many letters they received from viewers over the years. While this occasionally has led to the show being viewed as having a superiority complex that only caters to white upper and middle class viewers the fact that after all this time it is still around, still competing, speaks to its success. In fact, while America is called a country without traditions, it certainly has created one on Sunday nights around the television.
If you're a fan of beautifully made books this will be an offense to you. What I thought would be a coffee table sized tome with copious pictures is a small volume that looks like it was made by a nearly defunct university press. The paper meets the "minimum requirements" for "Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials" and that is patently obvious. The font is minuscule and appears to have had no typesetting. The photographs are laughable and misidentified. As another reviewer pointed out, why is the the British DVD cover for Sherlock even in here instead of a picture from a press kit? In other words, if you were looking for a book whose very presence was worthy of a show named Masterpiece, this is not it. If you're a fan of Masterpiece though, this book might give you a little more of an historical framework with regard to the political climate when the show was formed and the fact that it lacks diversity. But that is all. It reads like a textbook, which isn't surprising as Nancy West is a professor at the University of Missouri. Though it doesn't read as a very good textbook. It reminded me too heavily of the introduction to television and film books I read in my undergrad comm arts classes. Except that this book has constant niggling errors. I mean, come on, when Wolf Hall aired it wasn't the only Tudor show to air in almost twenty-five years! Just a decade earlier Henry VIII starring Ray Winstone aired as did The Virgin Queen starring Tom Hardy. And yes, I know I shouldn't be saying that Robert Dudley, the 1st Earl of Leicester, is the star of a show about Queen Elizabeth, but come on, it's Tom Hardy! And I'm sorry, but misidentify Brian Blessed in a photograph is actually a crime in my world. One would think creating a framework for this book wouldn't be hard, Nancy West could have even used The Best of Masterpiece Theatre from the thirty-fifth anniversary as a starting point, but no, instead she's all over the place. She's discussing personality traits of Worricker, a series literally no one watched, and doesn't really talk about shows from the seventies or eighties, focusing more on her favorite actors. Which is where this book gets weird. As you trudge through the morass of text the author's personality comes out more and more and she's a bit of an odd duck. She starts lusting after the vicars on Grantchester and any attractive man she feels needs a qualifier. I get that Andrew Davies and Pride and Prejudice paved the way for this, but in a scholarly approach to the history of the show, maybe talk about it in some sort of discourse, don't just drool. But the main problem of this book is that she hates America. She hates everything about this country from its supposed lack of culture and tradition and its need to psychoanalyze itself to its television. What did Thomas Magnum ever do to you!?! You know some of the biggest names from Masterpiece appeared on Magnum, P.I.? Ian McShane? Jenny Agutter? Francesca Annis? Julian Glover? Peter Davison? Any of these ringing a bell? Nope? Actually, not surprising. None of them are hot vicars. And yes, I think she's a fan of Fleabag. But if you want to read a book by a fan of this show, might I suggest Rebecca Eaton's autobiography? You'll get more insight than you'll ever find here.
The Goosebumps series by R.L. Stine started in summer 1992. Seeing as I viewed myself as a sophisticated adult because I was just about to start high school I wasn't the target demographic. That would have been my brother who is four years younger than me. He loved authors like John Bellairs, so of course this fell into his wheelhouse. He wasn't a fanatic because his main loves were video games and WWF and WCW wrestling, but I remember him having a few books on his shelves, particularly Night of the Living Dummy. One thing R.L. Stine gets is what Rod Serling did before him, and that's that dummies are terrifying. Which is lucky, because this season is all about Stine's evil dummy. For the most part. It's about how the dummy has influenced, one might even say destroyed, two generations in Port Lawrence, Washington. The problem is it's hard to categorize this show, there's a nostalgia element but there's a lot of cheese too. You have horrific moments and then you have Justin Long doing some of the most insane physical humor you will ever see as the dummy possesses him. There's no inbetween. And the show isn't able to find a common ground. It doesn't know what it wants to be and I think this is because it's made by Disney. It wants to reach the widest audience possible so it hedges its bets. When it could go dark it goes funny, when it could go terrifying it goes gross. In that regard it does kind of want to be Buffy the Vampire Slayer, even with an alum of that show, the late and unlamented Forrest. But here's the thing, even Buffy wasn't able to find the sweet spot in telling a story about an evil dummy. The season one episode "The Puppet Show" is one of those ones if I was a person who skipped episodes when rewatching favorite shows I just might skip. It's a shame Sid had to show up in the second Buffy video game, because he's a horrible fighter, but it is what it is. What I'm trying to say is that it's like a once in a lifetime situation to get this balance right and in the end Goosebumps failed. I was willing to give it the benefit of the doubt, because there are solid episodes here, but the finale left me cold. Instead of bringing our Port Lawrence Scooby Gang together to vanquish the big bad instead we get a rambling episode about the origins of the dummy. We're in Egypt and traveling circuses, we're far away from our core cast. The town then gets possessed by the dummy and everyone has makeup like the henchmen from the Buffy musical as my brother pointed out. And I guess they win, it's very convoluted and Justin Long appears to still be possessed at the end and that's where we're left. Because while the show was renewed it was renewed as an anthology. So guess what? Next season we'll get new stories and characters that they might just as well leave on another cliffhanger. I mean, really!?! I invested my time in this uneven show and I'm not going to get closure!?! Not to mention that I feel like I need therapy because I realized I'm now the age of the parents of the teens on the show. At least the flashbacks to their high school years had the requisite amount of flannel. The flannel is all I have to comfort me now.
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