Mystery Solved: The Red Letters in MASTERPIECE Mystery! Closing Credits
Eagle-eyed viewers of MASTERPIECE Mystery! may be aware of those mysterious red letters embedded in the closing credits of shows like Endeavour, Grantchester, Magpie Murders, and more. Strung together, those letters spell a word with a compelling connection to the show that preceded them. To solve the mystery of the connection, viewers may turn to Google; to discover the ins and outs of this fan-favorite puzzle, we turned to MASTERPIECE Senior Series Producer Erin Delaney, who shared a behind-the-scenes oral history of the MASTERPIECE Mystery! red words.
- 1.
Making it Red
I’m the senior series producer for MASTERPIECE—I’ve been here for quite some time, and over time, credits and other sort of bits and pieces of the shows change and evolve. Back in 2007, we worked with a firm and rebranded, dropping the word “theatre,” and switching to just call the Masterpiece strand “MASTERPIECE,” and to call the mystery strand MASTERPIECE Mystery!. For the intro, we kept the Edward Gorey look which I believe, going all the way back to the original Gorey open, has black and white with a little something red. So if you look at those old Gorey animations, you’ll see all the black and white people—the spying guy, the fainting lady—and then there’ll be a red note, a red rose in an urn in a cemetery, or maybe a little bit of red on the fan lady. And that became a color motif.
So when we launched the rebrand in 2008, the first thing we did was to reflect it with Alan Cumming’s wardrobe. You’ll notice in his intros, he tends to wear some iteration of black, a little white, sometimes gray, and always with a little red. He might have the pocket square, he might have a red tie, there might be a black and gray plaid shirt with thin red lines, sometimes a red shirt.
- 2.
Making it Fun
As we were figuring out what to do with the closing credits, we wanted to do something fun, too. As I recall it, there were at least three of us sitting around the lunch table, wondering how to make the Mystery! closing credits be more fun. Because we don’t want to drop the credits—for many of our viewers, they see a British actor in the show, and think, “Where have I seen her before? What has he been in?” But the credits are fast—we have a lot to pack in to those 30 seconds! While want to make it worth people’s while to watch, and we don’t have a lot of space. So what if we did some kind of puzzle? What could it be?
And then we thought there could be what Susanne [Simpson], our executive producer, calls it, “a pop of red.” I think of it as a little special red flourish that makes it all hang together for our mysteries, with red being traditional, but also the color of blood. Eventually we realized that we have all these names and all these titles to work with, all the letters of the alphabet—though it is definitely hard to find a Q, and sometimes it’s hard to find a Z, but the rest of the letters are well represented, and sometimes we even find apostrophes! So we thought, what if we put in an interesting word?
- 3.
Choosing Words
I’ve finally gotten out of the red word selecting game after many years, and I have two or three people on our team who really dig into it. The rules are that it has to be something that if a viewer shows the interest, identifies the word, and then looks it up online, we want it to lead somewhere a) interesting and b) in keeping with who we are, something that is about history, or mysteries, or literature, the things that we’re known for.
Also, it has to be not so long that it’s torture for the viewer. And it can’t be a direct lift from the dialogue, but something that if you were paying close attention to the show and, for instance, somebody was talking about this poem, you might have wondered who authored that poem. So the clue might be the author’s last name, or the book in which that poem appeared. It’s a bit of a puzzle both in figuring it out, doing some research, and then connecting it to the episode.
I had no idea how challenging it was going to be for us to come up with interesting words! Obviously, some shows are much better for yielding great words. All the Oxford ones, Lewis and Endeavour, were the best because Morse was always spouting literary references, crossword puzzle references, and obscure historical references. He knew everything. Some of the shows like Grantchester, because it’s gone on for so many seasons, and they don’t talk about literature a lot, can get hard. We’re tormenting ourselves wondering what a fun and interesting red word can be. But we’re still doing it, every single episode.
- 4.
Right Words, Wrong Words, Favorite Words
It can be hard to keep coming up with fresh stuff. Recently, someone on the team suggested one and I said, “I could swear that we’ve already done that. Did you check the red word log?” He checked, and sure enough, we’d already done it! And I said, “No repeats.”
Sometimes a show has so many good ideas that nobody can make up their minds, so they’ll ask me to choose, and then I’ll Google them all. I will confess, I have sneaked several Doctor Who references in—one of the perks of working for MASTERPIECE! And then some of them are just some cool historical figure that I think viewers won’t know, there’s no reason on Earth they would have looked it up if they hadn’t seen this red word in our show. And it’s just a fun little historical nugget.
I think viewers do love them. I see it on X [formerly known as Twitter] regularly, people who are saying things like “I caught the red word tonight, very interesting!” We don’t get ratings for red words, but I think there are a fair number of people who are aware of them, and I think on the Mystery! Facebook group, they like telling people, “Did you know about the red words?” So it’s really exciting.
If you miss the red letters when our mysteries are broadcast, you can always see them when you stream full episodes online (for a limited time) or watch them with PBS Passport, an added member benefit!
