Mystery!
Mystery! (also written MYSTERY!) is a television anthology series produced by WGBH Boston for PBS in the United States.
Mystery!
United States, United Kingdom
English
1980 –
2006
The series was created as a mystery, police and crime drama spin-off of the already established PBS show Masterpiece Theatre. From 1980 to 2006, Mystery! aired mostly British crime series purchased from or co-produced with the BBC or ITV and adapted from British mystery fiction. In 2002, due to pressure to include more American material, a series based on the novels of US mystery writer Tony Hillerman was produced, but the vast majority of Mystery! programming has always been and continues to be British literary adaptations co-produced with UK-based production companies.
In 2008, PBS combined Mystery! with its predecessor Masterpiece Theatre under the umbrella title Masterpiece, which includes the sub-brands Masterpiece Classic, Masterpiece Mystery!, and Masterpiece Contemporary.
Hosts[edit]
The first host of the show in 1980 was Gene Shalit. In the first broadcast, February 5, 1980, Shalit opened with the introduction: “Good evening. We’re about to set out on a series of entertaining mysteries—15 weeks of suspenseful, sophisticated, crafty conundrums that are darkly diabolical or amusing adventures with introductions that suddenly seem alarmingly alliterative.”[2]: 10 Shalit left the show in 1981.
Vincent Price took the reins in Mystery!’s second year. Price’s introductions included haunted house gags, including walking through cobwebs and ducking under spiders and bats. He came to Boston twice a year to tape openings and closings for the show. Actress Katherine Emory called Price “the sweetest scary man I ever met".[2]: 11 Price was in his seventies when he hosted the show, and eventually had to step down due to failing health in 1989.
Diana Rigg took over as host in 1989, and had the opportunity to introduce two mystery series in which she was the star: Mother Love and The Mrs Bradley Mysteries. Rigg had previously won a BAFTA Award for her work on Masterpiece Theater’s 1985 Bleak House adaptation. She left Mystery! in 2003.
Beginning in 2004, Mystery! aired without a host. When the show was re-branded under the Masterpiece umbrella in 2008, actor Alan Cumming became the host.
Funding trouble: 1996-2007[edit]
In the summer of 1995, Mobil announced that it would stop funding Mystery! at the end of the season. Its underwritten series Masterpiece Theater and Mystery! had been losing audiences for some time.
"Many times, over the years, we've watched our best mini-series debut with a flourish … only to see the audience gently or not so gently erode over the weeks," executive producer Rebecca Eaton said, citing last year's Middlemarch as an example.".[7]
Although Mobil had been experiencing restructuring, cutting 1,250 employees, the company refused to blame its actions on cost cutting. The company announced that it would stay with Masterpiece Theater at least through 1999 though it didn’t leave as underwriter until 2004.[8] After the ExxonMobil merger in 1999, the company reoriented its philanthropic mission to support public health and environmental causes, dropping its commitment to public television. PBS had avoided adding 30-second advertisements before programming blocks, despite underwriters’ requests for more robust representation on the channel. Mobil swore that the decision had nothing to do with PBS’s hesitancy in implementing 30-second advertising spots for its underwriters. Since 1980, Mobil had covered the entire cost of acquiring, repackaging and promoting British dramas for PBS, which had typically cost the company around $10 million a year.[9] Without Mobil, Masterpiece Theater and Mystery! were left without consistent support until 2011.
As a result of Mobil's initial break from Mystery!, Eaton and her staff began looking for newer, more “relevant” stories to tell in both shows. They also looked to past successes for help. Prime Suspect had gained a strong following in the U.S. as well as England, so PBS re-ran Series 4 on Masterpiece Theater during the 1995-1996 season.
PBS shifted Mystery! in 2002 from its Thursday prime-time slot during the regular American TV season to Sunday nights in the summer. Mystery! continued as a summer series from 2002 to 2004 with shows like The Inspector Lynley Mysteries, Hetty Wainthropp Investigates and Foyle's War.
2008 format change[edit]
In 2008, the series was absorbed into Masterpiece (the former Masterpiece Theatre) and began using the banner Masterpiece Mystery! In addition, its theme music was changed. It now carries a signature theme based on its sister program's former theme.[10] This version is hosted by Alan Cumming.
Rebecca Eaton reflected on the 2008 changes in an interview with Diane Rehm, citing Mobil’s departure, a competitive media landscape, and trouble branding Masterpiece Theater and Mystery! to new audiences. Eaton said:
“I realized that this ship of whom I was the captain was at risk of going down, and that I had to do something. And I truly did not know what to do and had no money to do anything anyway. But we got a grant from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and PBS which we were pretty much allowed to do anything with...we spent it on doing some research into how people perceived Masterpiece. And discovered that they used to watch it, they loved it, they regarded it very highly. They weren't watching it so much anymore. They thought it was too hard to find...And a lot of people were put off by the title. They thought, oh it sounds like it will be very challenging. It sounds like homework....We didn't change the content because we realized whenever anybody, particularly younger viewers watched it, watched Madame Bovary or Sense and Sensibility or Bleak House, they loved it. It was just sort of getting past the rather forbidding title of Masterpiece Theater and the confusing anthology nature.”[11]
The American Mystery! Specials featured three stories set in the United States. They were based on Tony Hillerman's Navajo Tribal Police stories featuring Joe Leaphorn, played by Wes Studi, and Jim Chee, portrayed by Adam Beach: