Book Review - Rebecca Eaton's Making Masterpiece
Making Masterpiece by Rebecca Eaton
Published by: Penguin Books
Publication Date: October 29th, 2013
Format: Kindle, 320 Pages
Rating: ★★★
To Buy
Rebecca Eaton was born in 1947 to an English Literature professor and an actress, both of whom where alcoholics, which led to her being a very organized, hypervigilant child working to meet everyone's needs. The show that would come to define her life is, as she sees it, stories about families. And her family circumstances led to her, in essence, producing their lives. She was there to keep everything on an even keel. It's no wonder that she ended up one of the most famous executive producers in television history. Spending much of her childhood in books when not managing her family she received an English degree from Vassar and on August 9, 1969, she left New York for London to begin her job at the BBC, it just happened to be the same day as the Manson murders. She knew nothing about radio, or even that the job was in radio, all she knew was that she could live in London for a year and that's where she wanted to be. This was when her love affair with England truly began. Meanwhile America's love affair with England was also beginning in earnest. With the airing of The Forsyte Saga in the same year Americans couldn't get enough period dramas from across the pond. PBS was officially formed in 1970 and in 1971 Masterpiece Theatre was launched with The First Churchills, a show no one, particularly the host Alistair Cook, who would be on one year contracts the entirety of his twenty-one year tenure, liked. The show was entirely paid for by Mobil, with the first season consisting of thirty-nine hours of already-made BBC drama. Mobil believed in affinity marketing, if Masterpiece Theatre was beloved and classy, they would be viewed the same way. But it was a delicate dance that would end spectacularly after thirty-three years. By the second year of Masterpiece Theatre Rebecca was already in the door at WGBH in Boston. She was producing non-fiction shows and documentaries. She developed a strong reputation and work ethic and when the second executive producer of Masterpiece Theatre died of Cancer Rebecca was offered the position. On the same day she learned she was pregnant. She took the leap and ended up on the journey of a lifetime. When British tastes started to change to modern fare and the backlog of shows that Masterpiece Theatre could buy dried up, Rebecca was the one leading the charge to not just produce shows that were already in the pipeline but to suggest and shepherd new shows. And thus Middlemarch and The Buccaneers were made. Which lead the British to see that there was still an interest in period dramas. But Masterpiece Theatre and Rebecca would again and again come up against changing audiences and expanding markets and, in a rather remarkable show of vengeance, how petty HBO could be. Yet they weathered the storms, they rebranded, and while The Buccaneers was a resounding hit, they were always looking for their next Upstairs Downstairs or The Jewel in the Crown. Which would unexpectedly arrive in the form of Downton Abbey. A show Rebecca initially turned down but everything worked out. Because as she's said, "I've been very, very lucky in my career, in spite of myself."
Historically I have never been a fan of Rebecca Eaton. The reason is twofold. The way her name appears in the credits of the shows she has executive produced makes her seem, to me, and apparently others, above Masterpiece. That she is somehow better than her job title and that she alone should be getting credit for a show she might have had no involvement in other than buying it for distribution. It has never sat well with me and has made me think less of her. The second reason is more to do with my local PBS station, WHA-TV. They are not well run and their practices can be a bit sus. Rebecca Eaton was coming to do a big event for WHA-TV which is located on the UW-Madison campus within Vilas Hall which houses the departments of Comm Arts and Theatre and Drama. I was invited because not only was I a Theatre and Drama alumna but a PBS supporter. I was excited. Then the day before the event they sent out an email saying that the event was free but meeting Rebecca cost extra. I remember it as a hundred dollars, my Dad thinks it was more. I mean, I know they need to make money, but it was badly timed. Why not have a great event with Rebecca and have her ask for donations not demand an entrance fee right before your partygoers head out the door? Needles to say I did not attend and that was the last fuck I had to give with regards to my local PBS station. Therefore I approached this book with mild trepidation. Booked as a biography of someone I don't really like I think the average person would question my sanity. But my love for Masterpiece is so great that I will endure any hardship. I mean, just the lengths I go to to watch old shows is staggering and so much more energy than I expended downloading this to my Kindle. Plus I got it on sale. I was actually expecting it to be more of a autobiography given some reviews I had read. But it's not really her bio, just a bio inasmuch as how her upbringing prepared her for the job and what was happening in her life to frame her state of mind while dealing with Masterpiece. Because that's whose biography this is, this is Masterpiece's. Rebecca just happened to be there for a lot of it and was able to get the stories. She's a plainspoken writer who relies too much on aphorisms and platitudes, but she's willing to admit when she makes mistakes and that she was always constantly learning on the job. She never stopped. She openly admits that they could have had Colin Firth in a wet shirt back in 1996 but she was convinced that viewers wouldn't care. She was wrong and it made her realize that adaptions of classics aren't one and done but cyclical. Each generation wants their own version. But the incident of losing out on Colin Firth just demonstrates how myopic she can be. She never thought Mobil would leave, she never thought that HBO would be a threat, and seeing as this was written before the streaming boom, one can only imagine what that has done to their numbers with so many outlets vying for the same content. But what made me sad reading this book is that it was the introductions of Alistair Cooke and Russell Baker and Diana Rigg and Vincent Price that set Masterpiece and Mystery! apart and that is gone with the changing times. This is true lost media and I mourn its loss. At least Alan Cumming makes up for a bit and that's down to Rebecca. So I guess I can say I've changed my tune with regard to her. But not in regard to WHA-TV.
Growing up in a house where Masterpiece Theatre was always on in the background it's interesting what impressions remain of shows I only glimpsed in passing or watched a few minutes of. Over the years I had caught bits and pieces of Bramwell but my memory of the show boiled down to a room with bare brick walls with metal beds against them that looked like a warehouse. That would be Eleanor's hospital, The Thrift. Eleanor Bramwell is a doctor who, due to sexual discrimination, can't get a decent job, let alone actually enter an operating room. And who, because she tells female patients the truths their husbands are trying to hide and eschews unnecessary operations, is viewed as problematic. So in walks an angel investor and The Thrift is born. I can't help but feel that this was England's answer to ER. When ER debuted in 1994 it took the world by storm. A year later Bramwell premiered and since that time everyone has been wondering, what the hell was going on with this show. There literally isn't a likable character on it. They are all bombastic and problematic and have raging god complexes. This applies most to Eleanor. You want to root for her because she's breaking new ground, but she's annoyingly dogmatic until something goes wrong and then she's even more dogmatic about finding a solution. Which sometimes never happens. Her patients die. A lot. Though this just plays into the melodrama and Gothic nature of the show. Because if you thought that England's answer to ER would be mildly normal, well you don't know those crazy Brits. Amputations, ovariectomies, asylums, child prostitution, abortion, self-harm, transphobia, murder, wrongful imprisonment, faith healers, rape, you get it all with Eleanor Bramwell! And everything is handled in a barely contained hysteria, because the melodrama is what this is all about. And the melodrama is the only thing consistent in the show. Each season they felt they wanted to go in a new direction. Season one was setting the story, season two, well, it was extra asshole Eleanor, which, given she is a doctor makes sense, but given you're supposed to like her, not the smartest move, season three the show becomes more "realistic" due to the purchase of a handheld camera and character driven episodes, and season four, the less said about the fever dream that is season four where half the cast is gone without explanation and the show decides it wants to be really gritty with a vibe that can only be described as The Crimson Petal and the White meets From Hell well, the better. This show had it's moments, mainly between Eleanor and her father that were sweet and hopeful and showed a functional if fractious family that was of a class not often depicted on screen. Too bad its legacy is for the more wild moments. Even Google's AI overview agrees. And that's a bad sign. 
Twenty Seasons of Mobil Masterpiece Theatre 1971-1991 edited by Gregory Vitiello
Celebrating All Creatures Great and Small: For the Love of the Yorkshire Dales by All Creatures Great and Small 
Invisible Helix by Keigo Higashino
Born to Be Posthumous by Mark Dery
A Swirl of Shadows by Andrea Penrose
The original All Creatures Great and Small has always held a special place in my family's heart. My grandfather, who has to be held partially responsible for turning me into an Anglophile by having the rule that every Sunday when we visited the TV had to remain on AND remain on PBS, had the complete series of books by James Herriot that I ran off with. As for my father, let's put it this way, when one of my friends announced she was marrying a rural Canadian vet his first question was had they watched All Creatures Great and Small together yet. I have a sneaking suspicion that my parents didn't get an invite to the wedding because my friend knew the gift would be the complete DVD set of All Creatures Great and Small followed by incessant pestering if they had watched it yet. Therefore when the new series was announced it was greeted with incredulity in my house. How could they remake such a classic!?! My Dad was actually a little flabbergasted that I wanted to watch it when it started on Masterpiece. I told him my reasoning. First, it had aired in Britain earlier and all my friends there who had the same fanatical devotion to the original show that my father has fell in love with it. Secondly, it would be a return to something comforting and secure on a Sunday night, which I think we can all agree we need right now. On January tenth the first episode, "You've Got to Dream," aired and I KNEW my father was hooked by the fact he was copiously sobbing at the complicated labor of a cow. I was more shocked than anything though when after a few episodes he said he thinks that Samuel West is a better Siegfried Farnon than Robert Hardy. This is as close as it gets to blasphemy in my house. But the show is magnificent. It's a breath of fresh air, and those gorgeous Yorkshire landscapes! THIS is what Masterpiece Theatre has always been about. Tapping into the perfect dream of England, with a little trouble and strife along the way, but a happy ending to cap it off. Nicholas Ralph who plays James Herriot says he hopes next season that his character and Helen go on their first date after her engagement with Hugh was broken in the Christmas special. Personally a true happy ending to me will be their marriage! Or I will be willing to substitute Samuel West wearing those gorgeous knee-high leather boots in every episode.
The Forsyte Saga wasn't just how Masterpiece Theatre came to be, it was also the beginning of what we now know as Event Television. It was a runaway success in England, the country virtually shutting down when it aired. The then president of WGBH seeing the viewing numbers once it aired stateside decided that there was an audience for British programming in America and created Masterpiece Theatre, with another Susan Hampshire led drama, The First Churchills, as the inaugural broadcast on January 10th, 1971. If, like me, you knew about the Forsytes more because of the Damian Lewis adaptation in 2002 than the original and have therefore been hesitant to embrace this older, and dare I say it, black and white production with flimsy sets and sometimes ludicrous old age makeup, let me say that I loved this production. It was just what I needed at this moment in my life. The newer series has so much emotion, it's like a raw nerve, and I can't handle watching it because I end up a blubbering mess, despite which I still adore it. Now this isn't meant to be a slight on the older series saying it lacks emotion, it's entirely the opposite, I think it's more realistic. People don't live their lives like they're one of the Brontes! They live it in little, contained rooms where specific sets and emotions are kept in check. Therefore when something does happen, when change upsets these little well ordered lives, it has a greater impact. I grew to love all the characters and all these little rooms. Over the twenty-six episodes my opinions of all characters were constantly in flux, but I knew one thing, I never wanted it to end. There was just something so comforting in watching this family's life unfold over the decades. I always wondered why the 2002 series ended when it did, not seeing out the series until the death of Soames AKA Damian Lewis, but now I get it. There's a VAST tonal shift when we move from the older generation to the younger. Before there were huge swathes of time, the whole series taking place over forty-seven years, and tons of characters with a set narrator, and then we have a small set of characters going slowly through a few years in their lives. To give you an idea of the change, in one episode nineteen years elapses, and in the final fourteen episodes, more than half the series, only seven years! But of all the shows I've watched this years for Fifty Years a Masterpiece, I know I will return to this, and interestingly enough another adaptation by Donald Wilson, 
Years ago I went to the Paine Art Center and Gardens up in Oshkosh to see "Fashion in Film: Period Costumes for the Screen." I freely admit I went for one reason and one reason only, and that was to see the costumes from the Colin Firth adaptation of Pride and Prejudice. There were lovely surprises too, an amazing costume Cate Blanchett wore in Elizabeth that had a panel that was actually from the time of Queen Elizabeth I, the ballgown from Ever After, and on and on, I spent hours looking and looking again. They even had all the costumes for the 2000 Kate Beckinsale/Uma Thurman production of The Golden Bowl, AKA one of those movies I keep meaning to get to, especially as it was directed by James Ivory of Merchant and Ivory. But then I heard about the old Masterpiece Theatre adaptation, well, I figured six episodes had to delve deeper than a two hour movie! Plus it starred Gayle Hunnicutt, loved by me for being James Beaumont's mother on Dallas and the final girl in The Legend of Hell House. Another delightful surprise was Daniel Massey, brother of the amazing Anna, as Prince Amerigo, who also had a complicated love life just like the Prince, leaving his wife Penelope Wilton for Penelope's sister Lindy! So what of this Henry James story about a father and a daughter who end up caught up in the affairs of ex-lovers... I really don't know what to say. I watched six episodes and nothing happened. I'm not even sure if there was an affair. Was the dutiful daughter Maggie's husband having an affair with her father's wife Charlotte? Meh, can't be certain, and I couldn't even really bring myself to care. There is just so much verbiage and talking around the issue that nothing ever really gets said. And as for the narrator? Well, if he were still alive he would make a killing doing those little audios that help put people to sleep. I literally zoned out for whole chunks of time. I would have said I fell asleep without knowing it, but I was on a treadmill and seeing as I didn't end up in a pile on the floor I must have remained upright. I will say that the sets and costumes kept me entertained. And looking back on that long ago trip to Oshkosh, the large living room that they placed the costumes for the movie in looked very much like it could have been a room in Mr. Verver's house.
Thérèse grew up beside her cousin Camille in his sickbed. When they were older it just made sense for her to stay in the bed and be his wife. She walks through her life in a daze. Nothing ever breaking through the monotony of her day to day existence with Camille and Madame Raquin. The shop bell below their home rings and customers must be served. Every Thursday their friends come over for tea and dominoes. Life plods on. Then one day Camille runs into his old childhood friend Laurent. Laurent's passion is painting, but sadly it can not support him so he's taken a mundane office job. But soon his passion is Thérèse. They begin a torrid affair resulting in the murder of Camille. This three part miniseries starts out rather sedately. The first episode is interesting but it isn't until the second episode, after the murderous denouement of the first, that it becomes something more, something memorable. Kate Nelligan as Thérèse and Brian Cox as Laurent fully embrace the over the top Gothic nature of the tale in such a way that they are mesmerizing. There's a feeling of the darker tales of Edgar Allan Poe when Laurent starts taking to visiting the morgue daily and having his dreams haunted by the dead. Also there's a wonderful unsettled feeling as to what Thérèse's motives were. Did she ever care for Laurent or was he just a means to get ride of her husband? Or did she really not know how her mind would unravel following Camille's death? The height of this is their frantic wedding night. They knew they could never just marry because then perhaps people would wonder what really happened to Camille. So instead, a year after their crime, they have finagled their Thursday night domino friends to insist that the two of them wed, and wed they are. But the haunted honeymoon to come is so deliciously Gothic it almost felt like the Brontes wrote it while taking acid. Laurent is haunted by the painting of Camille he executed that is hanging in the bedroom. He also keeps thinking he sees his dead friend's bloated corpse in their wedding bed. Thérèse is equally frantic. Soon they are beyond miserable, the three of them in the marriage, Thérèse, Laurent, and Camille. All this is happening behind their closed bedroom door while trying to maintain a happy facade for Madame Raquin. But soon that even cracks and tragedy besets tragedy until the scales are balanced.
When I first "discovered" Colin Firth, AKA when I watched Pride and Prejudice in the summer of 1996, I embarked on a voyage of discovery among his back catalog of work. I rented EVERYTHING the local video store had. Another County not to be confused with the far superior A Month in the Country! The ill-timed and ill-conceived Valmont. Apartment Zero with it's deliciously devious denouement. I even trolled late night television and stumbled on Camille. But one day I saw a DVD release for a show called Lost Empires. Seven episodes full of Colin Firth! That's one more than Pride and Prejudice! I remember when it arrived I invited my mom to watch it with me. We made it only as far as the first episode. Because as she said; "If I have to watch Laurence Olivier for one more minute doing stupid jokes and dressed up as an Edwardian child with makeup I'll scream." Or something to that effect. I did try to point out that as he died at the end of the episode we wouldn't have to see him anymore. She didn't buy it. And in fairness, I wasn't that interested in completing it. Watching a baby Colin can only carry your interest for so long. But I've been viewing this Masterpiece Theatre retrospective as a chance to get around to the shows, some of them classics, that I hadn't gotten to yet. Therefore seeing as I already had the DVD set, Lost Empires was top billing! Oddly enough my first impressions aren't too far off my final impressions, but over the years I've watched a lot more shows of similar themes so I feel more justified in my opinion. I have watched a lot of miniseries set in music halls, from Tipping the Velvet to that one dreadful episode of Thomas and Sarah, and this has to be the least annoying due to the lack of songs getting stuck in your head combined with not being overly problematic with regards to black face and really horrific racial stereotypes. Yes, there's still an entitled white man playing an Indian mystic and a really weird hatred of midgets, but for what music halls were known for it's pretty tame, especially when you watch other shows. Which means instead of dwelling on how problematic it is in that regard, you can pick apart all the other problems. The bleak, fatalistic attitudes, the creepy sex parties, oh, and the shoehorned in happily ever after that really makes no sense. So if you want to see some really young Colin Firth doing an occasionally passable Yorkshire accent in a miniseries that is trying to state something bigger than they are capable of, IE the end of the music halls and the end of the age of the British Empire, than this downer of a miniseries is for you!
Starting out in a whorehouse and ending in a prison with heavy Jack the Ripper overtones throughout makes The Charmer feel a bit off-brand and risque for Masterpiece Theatre. But it was the late eighties, perhaps they were trying to embrace an audience fed on years of Dynasty and Dallas? And you can't say it doesn't grab your attention with the charming yet menacing turn by Nigel Havers as Ralph Gorse, a man who'd never say no to a ligature. But knowing it's based on a series of books by Patrick Hamilton, the master of despair and dread, who supposedly based the character of Gorse on a serial killer, you can't say you didn't know what you were getting into...Unless you totally forgot about Patrick Hamilton's pedigree of Rope and Gaslight like I had, then you're watching the show slightly baffled that what you thought was going to be a nice little romp in the thirties veers into very dark territory. In fact, this note should have been passed along to whomever did the music, it's a little too cheerful, if you get my drift, and you'll get the Cole Porter song "You're the Top" stuck in your head for days. The material is primarily pulled from the second volume in Hamilton's series, Mr. Stimpson and Mr. Gorse, which I think would have been a far better title. Because while Gorse is a charming gigolo working his way into weary women's lives for a bit of lucre it's really the cat and mouse game between him and Mr. Stimpson that drives the plot. Mr. Stimpson feels that Ralph thwarted his love affair with Joan Plumleigh-Bruce, played divinely by Rosemary Leach. And OF COURSE Ralph did. But the problem is even if Ralph is a psychopath with sociopathic tenancies, he's not this dogmatic hypocritical stick in the mud that is everything Mr. Stimpson is. I'm not sure if it's because of how Bernard Hepton plays the roll or just how Mr. Stimpson is written, but you want him to lose. You want him to lose so bad. Yet ironically he is the voice of reason. But while there are reviewers who claim they wanted Ralph to get away with his crimes, I did not. I wanted accountability for everyone and for Joan to come out on top. Well, two out of three isn't bad.
When I went looking for shows to fill in the gaps of my Masterpiece Theatre knowledge accessibility was the prime directive. Could I actually find it to watch. So many of the shows aren't on streaming and many of those that were released on DVD are now out of print, so I've been relying heavily on eBay, a habit my wallet doesn't like. And I won't deny that the nineteenth season had an obvious choice in Traffik, because it's one of the most famous series from Masterpiece Theatre and it went on to be adapted into the Oscar winning film by Steven Soderbergh. But then I saw that The Dressmaker was on Amazon. I literally knew nothing about it going in other than it has a small yet stellar cast in Dame Joan Plowright, Billie Whitelaw, Pete Postlewaite, and a painfully young Jane Horrocks. The story itself is rather simple, Jane Horrocks plays Rita, a young girl raised by her aunts who finally gets asked to her first party, a bit of a do for the American GIs who have come to Liverpool. There she meets Wesley, who, as their relationship progresses, wants to move faster than Rita is comfortable with. He plays cruelly with her heart, not showing up for dates, refusing to call her. The most romantic thing he ever said to her is that she looked like a drowned rat. Eventually he's brought round to meet the aunts and he takes a real shine to Margo played by Billie Whitelaw. She instantly knows that this boy is after one thing and one thing only and is nowhere good enough for their Rita. Sadly for Rita, her heart is going to be broken. Now the handling of World War II is a bit like if the writers from Riverdale decided to take a stab at it, with laughable brawls between the Yanks and the Brits, but thankfully this is the backdrop, not the bones of The Dressmaker. The bones are the family unit; Aunts Nellie and Margo, Rita and her dad Jack. The way they bicker and carry on, it's comedic gold. This alone would have made it a good little movie, but the ending, oh, the ending takes it to a whole other level. I don't want to spoil it, I so don't, but I will say, the triumph on Joan Plowright's face as she stands atop the staircase would be worthy of Damehood if she wasn't one already! 
While Masterpeice Theatre has been around all my life the real moment I became a British miniseries addict was in 1996 when I first saw Pride and Prejudice starring Colin Firth. This was the point of no return. And I was canny enough to lay a lot of the credit at the feet of Andrew Davies. The more I saw of his adaptations the more I realized how good he was at his job. I don't care for all these revisionists out there, Andrew Davies was and is the king of adaptions. Period. In my attempt to watch everything he'd ever adapted I stumbled into George Eliot's Middlemarch. What struck me most was this adaptation was made only a year before Pride and Prejudice and at that time it was apparent that Andrew Davies was attempting to make a different Firth a star, Colin's younger brother Jonathan. Jonathan is a very talented actor but he has never attained the stardom his brother has. Whether this is just coincidence or lack of drive I don't know. But I first saw him in Covington Cross, a show notable stateside for the fact Glenn Quinn quite Roseanne to be on it. Jonathan also played a right asshole in the first season of The Inspector Lynley Mysteries as well as the ghost of a circus performer I believe on an episode of Ghost Whisperer. As I've said, an odd career. But with Middlemarch there's a scene where he's playing pool that gave me a chilling sense of deja vu. Because the same scene is in Pride and Prejudice! Literally the only difference is they swapped Firths and the felt covering on the pool table is a different cover. It's like Davies KNEW this scene had to work with a Firth brother and the first time didn't take so he tried it again and sunk it perfectly in the corner pocket. While these Firthian observations are all well and good the more pressing draw to me now is my love of Rufus Sewell. Oh my Lord M who is the only highlight of Parade's End. I first saw you in Cold Comfort Farm, then was amazed by your performance of Fortinbras in Hamlet, you only blinked six times the entire time you were on screen! But you stole my heart as Will Ladislaw, just as you did Dorthea's! Who needs financial security when you have love? 
Ah, The Cinder Path, I think this might have been my first foray into Catherine Cookson territory. There's a chance that this other movie I was obsessed with might have been written by Catherine Cookson, but I have yet to figure out which one or even if it is by her. Let me know in the comments below if you have a detailed knowledge of films that are about farm girls who look vaguely like Kathy Ireland who get involved with their boss's son/nephew and have a magical summer together but she ends up pregnant and he goes back to his friends... You would literally be solving one of the mysteries of my life. Back to The Cinder Path. So there's one reason and one reason only I watched The Cinder Path, and that's Lloyd Owen. So I've always been obsessed with The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles. Like hardcore obsessed. Like I have a fan magazine actually signed by Indy himself, that would be Sean Patrick Flanery to everyone else. Well when I was rewatching the show a few years back now I was all, who is that hot actor playing Professor Henry Jones, Sr., the role iconically created by Sean Connery? The answer was Lloyd Owen. So I started looking up other things he'd been in around the time he was Indy's dad. I vaguely remembered him in Coupling, but The Cinder Path looked interesting. Also Catherine Zeta-Jones from around the time of The Darling Buds of May! Interesting fact, she was also on The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles if you were interested in other facts from that show. I have lots of facts from that show. LOTS. Anyway, this is pure Catherine Cookson, slightly over the top, I mean, love saves our hero from the shrapnel that could either move towards his heart and kill him or away from his heart and save him. It's so melodramatic it's kind of ridiculous but also hits the spot just right when you're in the mood. The only real complaint I had for this miniseries is that Catherine Zeta-Jones spent way too much time on horses and "the cinder path" which was a form of punishment didn't look that punishing. I wanted more, walking on hot coals, this was kind of, could they at least look like they're in pain?
When I was in grade school and high school Les Misérables was everywhere. In grade school the t-shirt for the musical was a badge of honor that your parents had taken you to a big city to see the show. In other words, that you had money. Just like winter coats with ski lift tags. In high school it was the cool music and theatre kids who wore them as a coat of arms. I, being the misanthrope that I have always been, took it as a mark of how cool I was that I had never seen the musical and had no desire to. Cats ALL THE WAY! I continue to revel in the fact that I have never seen Les Misérables and have no plans to ever see it. I know some of you are shocked and even some of you who I consider my close friends are planning on disavowing me, but you're not going to guilt me into seeing it. EVER! Therefore hearing that Masterpiece was doing a no singing, no dancing adaptation of Victor Hugo's novel made me very happy. I could finally see an adaptation without hearing "One Day More!" Even better, Andrew Davies was adapting it. I know a lot of you have issues with him, to that I say you're hypocrites. Davies can have a moistened Colin Firth but any other sex is off bounds? How do you think say the Bennet's had children in the first place!?! Sigh. Some people would rather live in cloud cuckoo land than the real world I guess and "modern" adaptations have, for the most part, succeeded by grounding them in reality. I also liked Davies attitude going in that he was going to adapt the book to show the lesser known storylines, the plot points that weren't worthy of the musical. Plus casting Dominic West as Jean Valjean and David Oyelowo as Javert was genius. I will watch anything with Dominic West, I ever finished out the shit show that was The Affair because he was in it and am really looking forward to the new adaptation of The Pursuit of Love. As for Les Misérables itself... it showed a very bleak and at times incomprehensible world. There is a lot of death and so much of it is unnecessary... but then, that's life. None of us get out of it alive. Though most of us don't just randomly die in a garden with no ovious cause of death. Could we get a crossover with Masterpiece Mystery and bring in Poirot? 
January tenth of this year marked the fiftieth anniversary of Masterpiece, no longer Theatre, but still Theatre in my heart. If you watched the "special" hosted by Alan Cumming you were probably just as baffled as I was that it was nothing more than an infomercial for their most recent seasons without touching on the glorious history and the wonderful shows they have aired over the past fifty years. Let's just do a really fast montage of the hosts to prove that it wasn't the biggest mistake of our lives firing Russell Baker, OK? Sigh. In fact the very touching tribute to Diana Rigg at the end of the second episode of All Creatures Great and Small this season was longer than the tribute to past hosts in a special about the show's history! My quibbles aside, Masterpiece didn't just change television, it changed me. It informed everything about me growing up. It was a touchstone, there every Sunday night, where I could get respite from the world and escape into a show before the onslaught of Monday morning. The theme music was used as the processional music for my eighth grade graduation. I have spent more hours than you can count going through shelves at used bookstores to find the old tie-in editions with the beautiful poster art that Mobil produced for each show. I learned about new shows wandering bookstores and seeing the newly released tie-ins for the upcoming season. I have found more favorite authors than I can count because of this show! 
