July 4, 1985—Joan Wilson, an executive producer
responsible for turning the British-originated series Masterpiece Theatre
and Mystery into American public television standbys, died of pancreatic
cancer at age 56 in Boston.
In a sense, this post, written on the Fourth of July,
is my equivalent of counter-programming: an acknowledgement that America, for
all its claims to independence, remains enthralled to the Mother Country for
its notions of good taste.
Over the years, the sniffing of certain critics has
been audible over these series’ middlebrow inclinations, stately costume dramas,
and what Slate’s Bryan Curtis saw as its “curatorial” cultural
mission. (Indeed, the longtime default criticism of Merchant-Ivory films was
that they were slightly higher-budget alternatives to Masterpiece Theatre.)
But in the ‘70s, a time when much of American
commercial TV in the 1970s consisted of cops, lawyers, improbable adventurers (The
Six Million Dollar Man), and jiggle queens (Charlie’s Angels), TV
series that aimed for quality felt like an oasis for viewers like me.
I began watching this fare when The Six Wives
of Henry VIII first aired on CBS in the summer of 1971, then rebroadcast a
few months later, without commercial interruptions, on PBS as part of Masterpiece
Theatre. From then on, I watched other series under the latter umbrella
such as Elizabeth R, The First Churchills, The Last of the Mohicans,
Pere Goriot, Cousin Bette, and adaptations of the Lord Peter
Wimsey mystery novels of Dorothy L. Sayers.
Not all of these were successful—indeed, The First
Churchills moved at a glacial pace, in hagiographic style, about a
controversial figure who deserved a far more incisive treatment: Sir John Churchill,
the Duke of Marlborough. But at their best, they offered the opportunity to see
top-flight talent: Glenda Jackson, Helen Mirren, Kate Nelligan, and Anthony
Hopkins, among others.
A former actress, Ms. Wilson was not present at the
creation of the series. That distinction belonged to Stanford Calderwood,
President of WGBH, and Christopher Sarson, executive producer at the same PBS
affiliate, who—seeing the rapturous attention given in England in 1967 to the
mini-series The Forsyte Saga, thought something like this could work in
the U.S. They convinced Mobil to underwrite the costs of Masterpiece Theatre.
The departure of Sarson opened the way towards Ms.
Wilson overseeing the series and taking it to new levels of popularity and cultural
influence through casting suggestions, and, where needed, tough-minded editing
to make the fare more palatable to U.S. audiences.
Upstairs, Downstairs might
not have become positively addictive for American audiences had it not been
trimmed by half of its 50-episode length, and clipping several minutes from a
Roman orgy scene in I, Claudius helped PBS avoid greater condemnation from
American puritans.
The consistent result was “what American middlebrows
have been seeking since the advent of the medium: TV without guilt,” according
to William Henry III of The New York Times.
Michael Gorra, a professor of English at Smith
College, summed up much of the not-so-secret appeal of Masterpiece Theatre
to many academics in an essay included in Prime Times: Writers on Their Favorite TV Shows:
“Costumes accents, servants, the past, a safe past
that couldn’t hurt us, at least not over here. I loved all that, and if you
push on most English teachers my age, they’ll admit to having loved it, to
having their own period of swooning Anglophilia in front of their parents’ TV.”
I am not a fan of the odor of Anglophilia emanating
from both Masterpiece Theatre and Mystery, and I wish that PBS had
used these series as springboards to long-lasting American counterparts.
But, despite such carping by me and others, the cultural
influence of these British imports was not only significant but beneficial. Bookstores
benefited from the spotlight given to I, Claudius and The Jewel in
the Crown, and the success of mini-series featured in Masterpiece Theatre
led American TV to experiment with the genre, often with great success, in the 1970s
and 1980s.
Recognizing the importance of series host, Ms. Wilson cultivated
friendships with English journalist Alistair Cooke for Masterpiece Theatre
and actor Vincent Price for Mystery.
Ms. Wilson was also connected, in the most deeply
personal way, with her programming, as her second husband was Jeremy Brett, who,
before Benedict Cumberbatch, made Sherlock Holmes must-view TV on Mystery.
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