Even if you haven't been watching MASTERPIECE every Sunday for the past 50 years, there's a very good chance you tuned in to watch Downton Abbey. The six-season epic brought renewed attention to the drama anthology series when it first aired more than a decade ago, and we look back at the interconnected lives of the Crawley clan and their servants with a few of the people who helped the title turn heads and claim awards. And in this final episode of our three-part docuseries, we explore how MASTERPIECE might continue to evolve for the next 50 years, tackling the challenges and opportunities still ahead. A note: we try to include transcripts with every podcast on MASTERPIECE — and the transcripts for Making MASTERPIECE below have a little extra in store. Here, you’ll find links out for articles and information that help support the MASTERPIECE story throughout the transcript. We encourage you to explore and to learn more about the fascinating backstory of MASTERPIECE! And we also encourage you to read Nancy West’s MASTERPIECE: America’s 50 Year Love Affair With British Drama and Rebecca Eaton’s Making MASTERPIECE, both of which served as foundational texts for the development of this miniseries. 

Masterpiece Theatre enters its third decade and settles in under its third executive producer, Rebecca Eaton, as new challenges pop up to make the Boston-based anthology series' life a touch more difficult. Cable TV competition, shifting public taste and limited funding lead Eaton and her team to make dramatic changes at the dawn of the new century. Fortunately for public TV viewers, those changes come just in time to scoop up some unlikely new hits — from Middlemarch and The Buccaneers to Prime Suspect and beyond, including a certain family drama set in a fancy Yorkshire estate... A note: we try to include transcripts with every podcast on MASTERPIECE — and the transcripts for Making MASTERPIECE below have a little extra in store. Here, you'll find links out for articles and information that help support the MASTERPIECE story throughout the transcript. We encourage you to explore and to learn more about the fascinating backstory of MASTERPIECE! And we also encourage you to read Nancy West's MASTERPIECE: America's 50 Year Love Affair With British Drama and Rebecca Eaton's Making MASTERPIECE, both of which served as foundational texts for the development of this miniseries. 

Five decades is a long time for any television series to air, but when a show hits 50, it's possible some people might start asking questions about where it all started. That's where this podcast comes in. Fifty years ago, a group of public television producers in Boston had the inspired idea to import British costume drama for American audiences. But they didn't come up with the idea on their own — there's a former FCC Chair, a popular soap opera, and a Polaroid exec with Julia Child's The French Chef on his mind involved, too. For three episodes, Making MASTERPIECE will show how the most unexpected and unlikely of series — Masterpiece Theatre — grew into one of the longest-running primetime television icons of all time. What are its origins? What actors, writers, and executives shaped its trajectory? How has it overcome numerous challenges? And what does it have in store for its future, 50 years on? A note: we try to include transcripts with every podcast on MASTERPIECE — and the transcripts for Making MASTERPIECE below have a little extra in store. Here, you'll find links out for articles and information that help support the MASTERPIECE story throughout the transcript. We encourage you to explore and to learn more about the fascinating backstory of MASTERPIECE! And we also encourage you to read Nancy West's MASTERPIECE: America's 50 Year Love Affair With British Drama and Rebecca Eaton's Making MASTERPIECE, both of which served as foundational texts for the development of this miniseries.