Ellen Gray: Masterstroke

MASTERPIECE CLASSIC: RETURN TO CRANFORD. 9 p.m. Sunday and Jan. 17, Channel 12.

FEW THINGS might seem cozier - or more old-fashioned - than having PBS' "Masterpiece" kick off its latest "Classic" series on Sunday with "Return to Cranford."

You have, after all, Dame Judi Dench, starring in a story based, like its popular predecessor, "Cranford," on the work of Victorian novelist Elizabeth Gaskell. Not to mention period costumes galore.

Easy enough to pull out the teapot and settle in for a night of entertainment far removed from the realities of the rest of television, right?

But just as the "Cranford" stories are really about change - chronicling the extension of the railroad to a small English town in the 1840s gave Gaskell's work an edge that no amount of frills or furbelows could disguise - the series bringing it to you has undergone some changes, too.

And if it isn't exactly your mother's "Masterpiece Theater" anymore, that's fine with executive producer Rebecca Eaton, who's overseen the long-running franchise at Boston's WGBH since 1985.

Trimmed two years ago this month to "Masterpiece" and divided into three parts - "Classic," "Contemporary" and "Mystery!" - the 39-year-old anthology series is picking up viewers even Eaton never really expected to attract.

"Our low-hanging fruit, our target for whom we'd like to capture for new audiences, are primarily women just slightly younger than our current audience," said Eaton during a recent visit to Philadelphia, where she was speaking at a convention of English teachers, an exercise she referred to affectionately as "shooting fish in a barrel."

"But what we are discovering is young women love this material. When they can get exposed to it. Whether it's Jane Austen, or [Charles Dickens'] 'Little Dorrit.' All kinds of reaction, word of mouth, to 'Little Dorrit' among teenage girls," she said of last spring's miniseries.

Really?

"Yes, yes. [They] completely love it. Because of the stories," Eaton said.

And they like to watch those stories online.

"So trying to find a way to make it available to these younger women the way they watch television, which is through streaming . . . we're trying to get longer and longer streaming rights, so it's out there [on PBS.org] longer than two weeks after or 30 days after" it airs, she said.

In the first season of the rebranded "Masterpiece," "Classic" "just took off like a rocket. Because of Jane Austen. Completely, the best ratings we've had in years, because of Jane Austen," she said. "'Contemporary' didn't do much business that season."

Now, though, it's "Masterpiece Mystery!" - which once stood alone as a show - that seems to have piqued viewers' interest.

"It's really, really gotten a foothold, and the audience has grown. And interestingly, 'Contemporary' is beginning to develop its own audience. That's the new thing, and people didn't know what it was. Very slowly, that's beginning to develop an audience," she said.

And while younger women may tune in for Austen, "We've added men when we've done 'Contemporary' and we've added men to 'Mystery!' " she said.

"We did it to make the program more accessible. And accessible meaning people could understand when to see the kind of programming they liked, rather than what I call the whiplash effect of having Jane Austen one week, ["Prime Suspect's"] Jane Tennison the next week and 'Jane Eyre' the next week," Eaton said.

Not that the division of genres isn't sometimes tricky. "There have been a number of close calls" on drawing the line between, say, a "Contemporary" story and a "Mystery!" or a "Classic," she said.

The Holocaust drama "God on Trial" was considered "Contemporary," but this April's production of "The Diary of Anne Frank" will be part of the "Classic" season because "it's a piece of literature and it's taught as literature," she said.

"What we're discovering is that the 'Contemporary' pieces that work well have an element of mystery to them," as in this season's "Collision" or "Place of Execution."

Turns out, Eaton said, that "the audience really loves a drama with suspense."

By contrast, " 'Endgame' didn't do as well, but I would do it again," she said, adding that the South African-themed film starring Jonny Lee Miller was "beautifully made and a really important story, a relatively unknown story about the secret negotiations to end apartheid and the way those negotiations happened has been repeated in Northern Ireland, and in the Middle East. So we have to do that."

Miller ("Eli Stone") will get another crack at the "Masterpiece" audience on Jan. 24, when he plays Mr. Knightley in a new adaptation of "Emma," written, of course, by the woman who's become "Classic's" go-to-girl.

"All of the sudden, it's Jonny Lee Miller all the time," said Eaton, who admitted she wishes Austen had written more than six novels.

"This 'Emma' is four hours long, which is the same length as ["Masterpiece's"] 'Sense and Sensibility,' but 'Persuasion,' 'Mansfield [Park]' and 'Northanger [Abbey]' were all shorter. And so it is quite faithful. It spends time with all the characters, because it can in four hours."

If that's the kind of length we see less and less on commercial broadcast networks, one reason may be that it's hard to get the programming deal "Masterpiece" does.

Thanks to the program's special relationship with Britain's BBC, which still supplies the lion's share of the series' programming and whose funding largely comes from license fees paid by the owners of TV sets in Britain, "it's a very, very economical arrangement for us," Eaton said.

"Our contribution is roughly 10 percent of the entire budget to make one of these things - and yet they appear on public broadcasting and they are associated with 'Masterpiece' and with PBS. And in this territory we get credit for them."

Cable outlets like HBO, Showtime and BBC America might seem to be cutting in to "Masterpiece's" territory, but Eaton is quick to dismiss them as threats, noting that BBC America, for instance, is trying to lure a different audience with a schedule more friendly to sci-fi than period drama. Some things still rankle, however.

"Every now and then, [competitors] eat our lunch. Because if HBO wants something, they have so much money, they can outbid us," she said.

"We couldn't have done [HBO's] 'Rome,' no. We could have done 'Elizabeth the Queen,' with Helen Mirren, and we would have done 'Elizabeth the Queen' with Helen Mirren, but HBO threw money at it and so they were able to do it. [A two-parter, it premiered on HBO as 'Elizabeth I' in April 2006.]

"And it's frustrating, because arguably, Helen Mirren is known in this country because of 'Prime Suspect,' and we took that in the very first instance when people [in the U.S.] didn't really know who she was, and built it up and built up the franchise and gave her visibility," she said.

Still, "it's pretty much all good news at the moment," she said.

Though no single sponsor's yet replaced ExxonMobil, which bowed out after 2004 - a successor could get its name in the title for $3 million a season - PBS continues to step up, and the program's "solidly funded for 2011," she said.

And then there are those seven Emmys for "Little Dorrit," including one for best miniseries.

"When you can be mission-driven and still go to Hollywood and put on your dress and collect seven Emmys, it's worth it," Eaton said. *

Send e-mail to graye@phillynews.com.