PBS revisits American drama with ‘Little Women’
PASADENA, Calif. — Although PBS’s “Masterpiece” is most often thought of as an outlet for British programming, every now and then an American drama sneaks in.
This spring the PBS series introduces a new two-part version of Louisa May Alcott’s “Little Women” (8 p.m. May 13 and 20, WQED-TV), the story of the March sisters, Jo (Maya Hawke, daughter of Ethan Hawke and Uma Thurman), Meg (Willa Fitzgerald), Beth (Annes Elwy) and Amy (Kathryn Newton), who make a life together while their father is away fighting in the Civil War.
Emily Watson plays Marmee, mother of the four, and Angela Lansbury stars as March family matriarch Aunt March.
Screenwriter Heidi Thomas (“Call the Midwife”) said having three hours to tell the story “was an absolute gift.
“[The story is] shaped like an arrowhead and gradually narrows down and comes to the point: It’s Jo, it’s her fate that ultimately defines where we leave the family,” Ms. Thomas said, noting the expanded running time allowed her to give Meg, Amy and Beth full lives, too.
“People adore the book,” Ms. Thomas said, “but they don’t always remember it correctly. Everybody has a different interpretation with that text. You really are messing with people’s memories as the actuality of the book [when writing an adaptation].”
And while this is a “Masterpiece” co-production with the
BBC based on American literature, it was filmed in Ireland and won’t mark the start of an American literature adaptation trend for the series.
“It’s very hard to get American novels done with the BBC because they are British Broadcasting, they have a mandate and they stick to the mandate,” said “Masterpiece” executive producer Rebecca Eaton, noting the popularity of the book in England made “Little Women” an exception. “It’s also very expensive to do American stories because if you shoot them in this country, they’re twice as expensive as in the UK just because of the way program making is done here. I think the world is getting slightly more international, but I don’t think this is a breakthrough moment.”
‘Doc Martin’ delayed
Subscribers to streaming service Acorn.tv got access to season eight of “Doc Martin” back in September, and it was expected the new episodes would be made available to PBS stations, including Pittsburgh’s WQED-TV, in late 2017 or early 2018, but that hasn’t happened.
Unlike much of the programming on public TV stations, “Doc Martin” is sold to stations individually and is not a PBS program. The British comedy-drama import stars Martin Clunes as Dr. Martin Ellingham, a tactless doctor in a small British village.
Streamer Acorn.tv, a subscription service that holds the rights to “Doc Martin” and decides when to make episodes available to public television stations, delayed the expected release. Current.org reports Acorn wanted a longer exclusive streaming period.
Following its first presentation at the Television Critics Association press tour, Acorn chief content officer Mark Stevens said “Doc Martin” will make it to PBS stations eventually.
“We just thought we would take a pause,” he said. “It was a pretty tight window historically, and we have a lot of subscribers reacting and responding to it. … It’s a big show for us, a popular show for us, and we just thought it was time to make that window [of exclusivity on Acorn] a little longer.”
Mr. Stevens declined to speculate on when specifically “Doc Martin” will be made available to PBS stations, but he said it will happen sometime in 2018.
WQED re-aired season seven of the series in December, and then its rights to air those episodes expired, which is why the station no longer airs reruns of “Doc Martin” while awaiting word on when new episodes will become available to broadcast.
Coming to Hulu
The Emmy-winning “The Handmaid’s Tale” returns for its second season on Hulu April 25 with a twohour premiere. The new season will explore Offred/June (Elisabeth Moss), her pregnancy and her efforts to free her future child from the dystopian horror of Gilead.
“I feel like we’ve locked into the idea of motherhood in season two in a whole new way,” Ms. Moss said at a Hulu press conference during the Television Critics Association winter press tour. “[We] always talk about the impending birth of the child growing inside her as a bit of a ticking time bomb. It’s a wonderful thing to have a baby, but the potential that she’s having it in this world she may not want to bring it into because if she does have the baby, it gets taken away from her and she can’t be its mother.”
Episode two takes viewers to the Colonies for the first time, with Marisa Tomei as a guest star.
Upcoming drama series “The Looming Tower” (Feb. 28), based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning book by Lawrence Wright, explores the rising threat of Osama bin Laden in the late 1990s leading up to the 9/11 attacks. Jeff Daniels stars as FBI counterterrorism expert John O’Neill.
New drama “Hard Sun” (March 7) stars Jim Sturgess and Agyness Deyn as detectives in a world on the verge of an extinction-level event, code named Hard Sun.
In other Hulu news, the streaming service is now home to all 331 episodes of “ER.”
The fourth and final season of “Casual” debuts July 31.
A second installment of the British drama “National Treasure,” this time about the disappearance of an about-to-be-adopted foster child, debuts April 4.
Channel surfing
This fall, PBS’s four-part “Native America” weaves history and science with living indigenous traditions. … PBS’s “The Great American Read” (8 p.m. May 22) explores the joy of reading through 100 of America’s best-loved novels. … After it was canceled in the U.K., Acorn.tv commissioned a second season of “Agatha Raisin” starring Ashley Jensen (“Ugly Betty”) that will premiere on the streamer late this year.
A portion of this column originally appeared online in the Tuned In Journal blog. Post-Gazette TV writer Rob Owen is attending the Television Critics Association winter press tour. Follow RobOwenTV on Twitter or Facebook. You can reach him at 412-263-2582 or rowen@post-gazette.com.