MASTERPIECE SERIES OVERVIEW
With 83 Primetime Emmys® and 19 Peabody Awards, MASTERPIECE has been essential Sunday night viewing for millions of fans for more than 50 years. From iconic period dramas to intriguing mysteries, contemporary shows and more, MASTERPIECE remains a celebrated drama anthology series in the American public media landscape. Beyond broadcast, MASTERPIECE has extended across digital platforms to delight current fans and reach younger audiences.
Since 2009, MASTERPIECE has made our email newsletter program a top and ongoing priority as an optimal way to reach fans directly and personally. Our email list has grown from under 100K in 2009 to more than 1M in 2025.
OBJECTIVE
Being an anthology series offers unique digital marketing challenges. While each individual show earns its own fans, we also want to build recognition for MASTERPIECE overall and its array of genres and shows. Also, given audience preferences for longer character arcs and storylines, we must work to maintain audience retention and commitment.
In response to some of these challenges, we launched our “insider” email newsletters, singularly focused on individual shows such as All Creatures Great and Small, Poldark and Sanditon among others. The intent was to deepen subscriber engagement by offering a more focused fan experience. Written in an empathetic, energetic fan voice and delivered episodically while the shows were in their television broadcast window, the “insider” newsletters took fans into the world of the show.
From “insider” newsletters focused on individual shows, we took the leap to our first genre newsletter, with the introduction of the MASTERPIECE Mystery! Insider. For decades, the Mystery! strand has been a powerful strand of the larger MASTERPIECE series, featuring shows like Sherlock, Grantchester and Miss Scarlet. Within that mystery genre were a variety of shows from cozy mysteries to grittier crime dramas. How could we create a powerful newsletter that would both super serve fans of individual shows under the Mystery! banner while also deepening genre engagement and piquing overall MASTERPIECE series interest? Our 2024 strategy for the MASTERPIECE Mystery! Insider was our most robust and ambitious to date, supporting shows Grantchester, Moonflower Murders, Van der Valk and The Marlow Murder Club, offering 24 emails over 6 months. Our content strategy was more robust and expansive than ever.
DESIGN STRATEGY: BOLD AND IMMERSIVE
Edward Gorey’s beguilingly, macabre animated artwork has long been the graphic calling card for MASTERPIECE Mystery! and was the perfect cornerstone for the distinct and immersive email design we wanted. Gorey himself wrote, “If something doesn’t creep into a drawing that you’re not prepared for, you might as well not have drawn it.” Utilizing Gorey’s gothic design elements, we wanted a template that was immediately recognizable, and both surprised and evolved as time went on, introducing unexpected graphic flourishes and animated GIFs. In select newsletters, red letters dispersed throughout the content together spelled out a word or words relevant to the Mystery! shows being broadcast.
CONTENT STRATEGY: UNIQUE VOICE AND PERSPECTIVE
Public media and MASTERPIECE fans are curious, passionate and eager to learn. Given this audience profile, MASTERPIECE has continued to invest in high quality, thoughtfully crafted digital content while some other media outlets have abandoned it.
For the 2024 MASTERPIECE Mystery! broadcast season, all digital content was conceived of with a dual audience in mind: email newsletter subscribers and digital platform viewers. The strategy was to create multi-dimensional and uniquely MASTERPIECE content to engage mystery fan subscribers around their preferred shows, but also widen their aperture of interest. The MASTERPIECE Mystery! newsletter would also contain exclusive content. Content centered on:
Insightful Cast and Creator Features:
Interviews with stars like Moonflower Murders’ Lesley Manville and Grantchester’s Kacey Ainsworth delved into the complex women who centered many of the mysteries in 2024, as did video conversations including this one showcasing the women of Grantchester on the female perspective in the series.
A discussion with the Grantchester on-screen couple portrayed by Melissa Johns and Bradley Hall offered a playful look at their relationship while also spotlighting Melissa Johns’ perspective as an actress born with one arm.
Informative Show Adjacent Content:
Uncover the Real History of Grantchester Season 9 offered details on topics covered in the series from working women in the 1960s to contraception.
Longtime Grantchester star Robson Green shared his take on what to do in the English village of Grantchester, the filming lcoation for the show.
Mystery writer and scholar Martin Edwards explored clergy as detectives in fiction, given the cleric detective at the center of Grantchester.
Moonflower Murders star Mark Gatiss reflected on distinctly British mysteries in a video interview.
Genre Themed Content:
A feature explored how the Inspector Maigret books (a new adaptation is coming to MASTERPEICE) transformed detective fiction.
Alan Cumming reflected on his hosting duties across MASTERPIECE Mystery! and his hit reality show Traitors.
We explored the surprising history of Britain’s most mysterious places.
Exclusive Inline Newsletter Content:
Episodic history explainers during Grantchester took subscribers deeper into the issues of 1960s England.
Moonflower Murders creator Anthony Horowitz offered perspectives on the mystery publishing world, filming the series in Crete and more.
SUBSCRIBER ENGAGEMENT & SURVEY RESULTS
Over the 24 “insider” email newsletters delivered weekly in the 2024 MASTERPIECE Mystery! season, open and click rates well exceeded those sent to the general audience newsletter . Open rates were 33% higher for the mystery-themed emails, and the click rates were 200%+ higher. 75K subscribers were added in 2024 via organic promotion, bringing the total subscribers to nearly 200K, our second most popular “insider” newsletter behind All Creatures Great and Small.
An email survey to subscribers at the end of the MASTERPIECE Mystery! season received 15K responses. Subscribers described their satisfaction with the newsletter at 8.96 on a scale of 1-10 (the highest of any of our surveys of this audience). Fifty seven percent strongly agreed the newsletter enriched their experience of watching MASTERPIECE, and 83% agreed the newsletter was useful even if it contained content about shows they weren’t watching.
Respondents also rated key newsletter on a scale of 1-10, results below:
CREDITS
Susanne Simpson, Head of Scripted Content, Executive Producer, MASTERPIECE
Bruce Kohl, Director, Digital Content, MASTERPIECE
Barrett Brountas, Senior Digital Content Editor, MASTERPIECE
Jesse Haley, Senior Digital Designer
SAMPLE MASTERPIECE MYSTERY! NEWSLETTER LINKS
Grantchester Season 9: Episode 1
Grantchester Season 9: Episode 3
Grantchester Season 9: Episode 8
Moonflower Murders/Van der Valk: Episode 2
Moonflower Murders/Van der Valk: Episode 3
The Marlow Murder Club: Episode 3
