We asked Forum‘s producers to pick their favorite arts shows from 2013. Here is Online Producer Amanda Stupi’s pick.
It started out simply, with Forum’s Senior Editor Dan Zoll asking “Should we have the executive producer of Downton Abbey on?” I proceeded to freak out and spewed some indecipherable answer that sounded like “Yesohmygodwehavetohaveheron Iloveodowntonabbey yesohmygodyes.”Rebecca Eaton was the guest Zoll was referring to, and she is actually the Executive Producer of the entire Masterpiece series, not only Downton Abbey. I’m a huge Downton fan, but the interview stayed with me for lots of other reasons as well: I found it refreshing that Eaton acknowledged the timing and luck involved with her success. She used the word “malarkey.” Guest host Rachael Myrow read an email from a listener that said “OMG, Mr. Selfridge bit so hard,” and Eaton responded to the criticism without missing a beat. And lastly, as the person who manages the online side of a radio show with a longstanding and loyal following, I related to Eaton’s challenge of rebranding a classic like Masterpiece.
Interview Highlights
On How She Got Her Job:
“I have been incredibly lucky in my life and my career, because I fell into public broadcasting by wanting to live in England. That’s all I wanted to do growing up. I read all these books and was just a complete Anglophile living in Pasadena, California. There was a program at my college, which sent two graduates a year to work at the BBC in London. I just took the job, I didn’t know what BBC even stood for, I just wanted to live in London and go to the theater. Then one thing, as so often happens, leads to another. And I was there for a year and a half, and came back just at the moment that NPR was starting. PBS had gone on the air a year or two before… this is 1971, and I volunteered at WGBH in Boston and started producing an arts show…”
On Rebranding Masterpiece:
“I don’t know anything about branding or rebranding, and it might’ve been a blessing that I didn’t because rebranding a classic like Coke, for instance, is a really dangerous thing to do. You run the risk of alienating your very faithful fans, and that’s what Masterpiece had. And you run the risk of throwing away millions of dollars to try to attract new people who basically won’t be attracted. So, not knowing any of that, we were able to get a little bit of money from PBS and from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting — a very little bit of money — and we did our own research. We basically hired a wonderful branding expert named Bob Knapp and said ‘Don’t give us any malarkey, don’t give us any mission statements, any expensive ideas, we need really doable advice.’ He did… So, we took a deep breath and redid the kind of window dressing of Masterpiece.”