Inside PBS Blog

Our latest guest on Five Good Questions was Masterpiece executive producer Rebecca Eaton. She has been bringing fan favorites like Prime Suspect and Miss Marple to your homes for more than 20 years.

Critics are just as impressed by her work as we fans are. In addition to being recognized as an Officer, Order of the British Empire, she has won Emmy Awards and Peabody Awards for her body of work.

So without further ado, we are happy to present Eaton's answers to your questions. Let us know what you think in the comments section.

P.S. All you Charles Dickens fans out there will be very happy when you see what's coming up on this season of Masterpiece.

1. Do you have a favorite Masterpiece hero? Sarah Marian

I have several! But first I must confess that I have a real weakness for British actors, so my choices are often because of an actor's performance as a hero. So, in no particular order:

1. Captain Wentworth in Jane Austen's Persuasion, as portrayed either by Ciaran Hinds in our 1997 production, or Rupert Penry-Jones in our 2008 production. I love the Captain for the deep passion he harbors for Anne Elliott for 8 years after she is persuaded to reject him, and for his willingness to come back. Second chances!!
2. Robson Green as Owen Springer in Reckless (1998). He is sexy and funny and adores Francesca Annis, an older woman.
3. Michael Kitchen in Foyle's War. He is quiet and enigmatic but has a moral center as strong as true North.
4. Helen Mirren as Jane Tennison in Prime Suspect. Who says my hero has to be a man? Helen is such a fantastic person that I probably should just admit that Helen Mirren HERSELF is one of my heroes. She fires on all cylinders: intelligence, emotion, professionalism, sensuality, and wit.
5. And finally, I must say that one of my towering Masterpiece heroes is Alistair Cooke, our late host and one of the best journalists of the 20th century.  He was a hero before I met him and then, to my great good fortune, he became a friend.

2. I loved the campy 70's and 80's shows, enjoy the Dickens presentations on TV and now Netflix, but enough with 19th British life! There are brilliant works to be dramatized from the 20th century American canon. Could there ever be a better time to dramatize the work of Faulkner? Steinbeck? Dos Pasos? Hemingway? Tin

I couldn't agree with you more, and believe you me, we've tried to dramatize works of the American canon. But there are two major problems. The first, of course, is money. What's not well-known about Masterpiece is that our British partners finance nearly the entire production budgets of the programs. We're only a minority funder, and costume dramas cost nearly $2,000,000 an hour to make. So Masterpiece would consist of only one mini-series per year if we produced an American classic on our own.

And secondly, Hollywood studios own the film rights to most American classics, and they're sitting on them. They have no plans to make movies out of them and they are reluctant to let others make them. And you can't adapt a book without the underlying rights.

3. How do you and others at Masterpiece decide what to produce? Carol
         
Deciding what airs on Masterpiece is definitely the most important part of my job - and it's also the most difficult part to describe. My decisions are very subjective (no focus groups, no committee meetings…) but based on a sense of what I know our audience has liked in the past, as well as some standard-of-excellence measurements I use. They go something like this: is this a good story? Does it fit in with what Masterpiece historically has done? Are the writing, directing, acting, and production values first-rate?

The actual logistics of how this all works vary enormously. Since all our productions are made by British companies, we are "pitched" projects: sometimes only ideas, sometimes in book-form, sometimes as already-written scripts, sometimes as finished productions. A lot of my time is spent reading, talking to producers, and screening programs.

I do have a wonderful writer, Kathleen Cahill, who also reads the scripts which are submitted. And the team here at Masterpiece (about 10 people) is terrific at looking at potential shows and giving me their very honest, and sometimes very blunt, opinions!

4. How much does it cost to create a typical Masterpiece mini-series? How long do the projects take from start to finish? How many people are generally involved including cast, crew, and production staff? How do all these figures compare to a typical Hollywood movie? Melissa

A typical Masterpiece mini-series these days is 3-4 hours long. In the days of I, Claudius and The Jewel in the Crown, they were up to 13 hours long. Depending on how elaborate they are, period drama mini-series can cost over $2,000,000 per hour to make. Of course, we pay only a fraction of the cost. Our British partners, like the BBC, pay for most of it. Because there are many drafts of the scripts, a mini-series can take up to 2 years, from being a "twinkle-in-the-eye" idea to being broadcast on Masterpiece. The number of people involved varies hugely. An average cast and crew number is about 125 people. A big feature film could cost at least ten times as much.

5. When thinking about future Masterpiece productions, would you consider or are you considering works by any of these authors: Margaret Atwood, George Sand, Henry James, Catherine Cookson, Oscar Wilde, Edgar Allan Poe, Robertson Davies, or Angela Thirkell?
           
I've read something by each of these writers except, I think, George Sand - although we did air a film called Impromptu in 1993. It was the story of George Sand's relationship with Frederic Chopin and starred Judy Davis and Hugh Grant! We've also aired adaptations of several Catherine Cookson novels, and Henry James' Turn of the Screw and The American. We tried for years to find the money to do a mini-series of Robertson Davies' Deptford Trilogy. There's a script of Oscar Wilde's The Portrait of Dorian Gray under consideration at the moment. The bottom line is that an idea has to be acceptable not only to us, but also to the BBC or one of our other British partners because they are the principal funders. Thank you for the suggestions, though. We're always on the lookout for good ideas.

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