Lyman’s Voice Is the Talk of Producers : Television: The narrator who gives ‘Frontline’ its backbone has made a career of voice-overs. It lets him keep acting as well.

Fans of public television are getting an earful from Will Lyman these days.

Lyman, perhaps best known for narrating the documentary investigative series “Frontline” on the Public Broadcasting Service, lately seems as if he’s all over PBS--or more precisely, heard all over.

In addition to the weekly “Frontline” program, he recently chronicled Christopher Columbus’ voyages on the seven-part “Columbus and the Age of Discovery” and he narrated an episode of the “American Experience” series called “The Quiz Show Scandal.” His latest “voice work,” as he calls it, debuts Monday with the opening episode of “The Machine That Changed the World,” a five-part PBS special on the history of computers. He’ll be back on Tuesday with the latest “Frontline.”

Lyman has exploited his rich, soothing, baritone voice to become one of the few people able to make narration a career, and demand for his talent keeps growing.

“I’m now getting calls from PBS stations all over the country who want the voice of ‘Frontline’ to do their shows,” Lyman said.

Filmmakers often employ well-known actors--Jason Robards and Richard Dreyfuss, for instance--to narrate their stories. But there are few people known exclusively for their TV narrative work, perhaps because too many producers undervalue the narrator’s role, said David McCullough, a historian who hosts “The American Experience” and whose own narration credits include PBS’ “The Civil War.”

“I’m surprised how many producers seem to take relatively little interest in the narration,” McCullough said. “It is sort of a last thought.” Yet the narration “gives flavor and character to the sound and meaning of the film,” he said.

Lyman, 43, said he finds narration extremely satisfying work. But it’s also a subsidy for his first love, acting. Over the past decade he’s landed various TV and theater roles, but none has given him the fame or financial security to abandon narration.

“Without the PBS work, without the narrations, I’d really doubt whether I was doing anything worthwhile in this world, to put it bluntly,” he said with a laugh.

Two years ago, Lyman landed a lead in NBC’s “Hull High,” but the program was quickly canceled. In 1986-88, he was the star of a French TV show called “Crossbow,” an adventure series in which he played William Tell, and he recently filmed an episode of CBS’ popular “Murder, She Wrote.”

A Vermont native who now lives in Boston with his wife and teen-age daughter, Lyman bears a striking resemblance to Clint Eastwood: tall and lean with sparkling blue eyes and a high forehead that meets thinning, straight hair.

But it’s his voice that appeals to certain producers, particularly those making programs for PBS about somber subjects such as the imperiled Amazon rain forests (“Decade of Destruction”) or war (“Vietnam: A Television History”) or allegations of child abuse (“Innocence Lost”).

Lyman’s mere tone connotes the impression that whatever he’s talking about, it’s a serious matter.

“Yes, I think my voice has the capability to project importance,” he said. “Certainly it has a lot to do with the equipment. I was very fortunate in that respect. The timbre, the pitch.”

Lyman has narrated most but not all of the episodes of “Frontline” since the show’s second season in 1984. The series is an amalgam of programs by independent producers and correspondents, who can narrate their own shows if they insist and if their on-camera delivery is approved by David Fanning, the executive producer of “Frontline.” They mostly defer to Lyman, though.

“Lyman is quite extraordinary in his ability to take simple sentences and give them the weight of great storytelling,” Fanning said.

In a few cases, Fanning will opt to leave Lyman out. “Sometimes when a program gets a little too radical, or there’s a little too much point of view” by the show’s producer, Lyman said, “they’ll pull me off of it and have the correspondent do it regardless of what he sounds like.”

Example: an episode last fall titled “Losing the War With Japan,” which was highly critical of Japan’s trade practices.

Overall, Lyman has become for viewers one of the recognizable threads that ties “Frontline” together. Despite the show’s independent authors, he provides “the familiarity that TV also asks of you as a series,” Fanning said. “That’s why ’60 Minutes’ is so successful.”

Yet despite the show’s lofty reputation with the public, TV critics and its peers--two of the show’s 1991 episodes recently won Alfred I. duPont Columbia University Awards for broadcast journalism--Lyman remains anonymous.

Does that bother him?

“It does in my lesser moments,” he said. “But I have to be realistic about my contribution to the show. I don’t do the research. I’m not responsible for the content. It would be nice if some journalist (reviewing a show) said, ‘And Will Lyman does a bang-up job on the narration!’ But that’s not what they’re writing about.”