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.
Twenty Seasons of Mobil Masterpiece Theatre 1971-1991 edited by Gregory Vitiello
In the waning days of Netflix DVD I attempted to view as many Masterpiece Theatre shows on DVD that I could that had gone out of print. I even was able to game the system and got to keep the entirety of The First Churchills. Would that I could go back in time and pick anything else to keep other than The First Churchills. I didn't know a miniseries about Winston Chruchill's ancestors could be so boring. I actually have a theory that England was still so shaken by his death only five years earlier that they were desperate to cling to anything about this great man and therefore everyone claims this series is a masterpiece when it so obviously is not. The dog was good. I liked the dog. One of the DVD sets I rented was Maggie Smith at the BBC. Because I had found out that her Talking Heads monologue, Bed Among the Lentils, was an extra on the DVD that also had The Millionairess. The Millionairess ironically costars James Villiers who played Charles II in The First Churchills, and is mostly noted for how racist Tom Baker's role as an Egyptian doctor is. Back to Bed Among the Lentils. So the Talking Heads series by Alan Bennett are monologues given directly to the camera, like how a newsreader is a "talking head." They aren't very long and require a really great actor to pull them off convincingly. Obviously Maggie Smith, who often collaborated with Alan Bennett, fits the bill perfectly. She goes through a kind of existential crisis in only fifty minutes. She's a vicar's wife who is a drunk but because of her standing in the community has to go to Leeds to buy her booze and soon takes up with the local grocer. She is not likable, she is not sympathetic, and in the end she appears to be born again. There are three sections stitched together and really, the middle section is where she shines, because she describes, in detail, showing up drunk to do the flowers at the church and the destruction of the teazles. And as anyone who has watched any British show centered around a church knows, the teazles are sacred. It's a bright spot in a rather depressing and at time unrelenting narrative. If I had been watching anyone other than Maggie Smith I wouldn't have made it through. It's comes across as just sad and stupid. But I don't know if it's because of this specific tale or because of the conceit in general. People have very short attention spans. I remember at a reading Patrick Rothfuss gave once he said he always made sure any reading he did never went beyond fifteen minutes, because that's the average human attention span to listening to someone read. Now, obviously this is different, this is theater. Well, theater on your television, but still theater. Except that there's something about someone doing a monologue or a soliloquy in an actual theater that captivates you. Maybe it's the immediacy. The intimacy. There's a connection that is forged between the actor and the audience that is just impossible to replicate through television. Maggie was a talented actor, but did that make this little monologue palatable? No. But I fear I'm just not the audience for it because I have friends who watch it yearly and all I can think is, better you than me.
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, 
