Cable : Radio Daze : AMC’S FIRST LIVE-ACTION SERIES TUNES INTO THE GOLDEN AGE OF THE WIRELESS

Cable’s popular American Movie Classics rings in the New Year with its first original live-action series, “Remember WENN.”

A tribute to the Golden Age of radio, the series premieres Saturday--the anniversary date of the first radio broadcast to the public. Back on that day in 1910, radio pioneer Lee De Forest arranged a broadcast in New York of opera great Enrico Caruso along with other stars of the Metropolitan Opera.

Set in Pittsburgh in 1939, “Remember WENN” focuses on a stalwart group of hard-working actors, actresses, technicians and producers at WENN, a small, understaffed radio station. New York stage actors George Hall, Melinda Mullins, John Bedford Lloyd, Amanda Naughton and Hugh O’Gorman are among the regulars. AMC host Bob Dorian (as a nervous sponsor) and Tony Award-winning actress Patti LuPone and Irene Worth are among the guest stars.

AMC executive producer Paula Connelly-Skorka says the nostalgic AMC has been wanting to get into the series business for the last two years. “It was one thing that was put on the back burner,” she says. “We weren’t sure what we wanted to do. We are trying to produce material that will also complement our movies.”

Trying to find producers who shared AMC’s vision was difficult. “We really wanted to create the original days of radio. No one seemed to really grasp the concept.” Not until she met producers Howard Meltzer and Frank Doelger. “They seemed to get AMC, too. That is when we went forward with them.”

Before production began, Connelly-Skorka sent them a copy of the ill-fated 1994 feature comedy “Radioland Murders.” I said , Please don’t make this.’ It was awful. That’s exactly what we didn’t want the show to be.”

“They wanted something that was very Norman Rockwellish, that kind of left you with the good feeling that they had in the ‘30s and ‘40s,” says Meltzer.

Meltzer happened to be friends with Rupert Holmes, the Tony Award-winning composer and playwright (“Drood” ) and pop singer (“The Pina Colada Song”). “I directed a couple of his music videos and had kept in touch with him over the years. When I started thinking about writers, I wanted someone who had the sensibility of the ‘30s and ‘40s which is something very specific. I also wanted a writer who could really weave many different stories together at the same time. It was a very easy choice. It was a question of going to Rupert to see if he had time and if he was interested.”

Not only was he interested, Holmes has written every episode of the monthly series. “I have always been addicted to radio,” he says. “I missed that era. By the time I could listen to radio, there were only a few shows on the air and they were all on CBS on Sunday nights. There was ‘Suspense,’ ‘Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar’ and ‘Gunsmoke.’ ”

With radio, Holmes says, “the sets are as lavish as your imagination wants them. The characters look exactly as you would think they would look. It was a very democratic medium too because people, who would never get to play the hero or the heroine in motion pictures, if their voices sounded heroic or romantic, they were perfectly cast on radio.”

One of Holmes’ hobbies is collecting vintage radio shows. “It’s especially fun to listen to episodic radio in sort of sequence because you really get a feel for it. I have 90 consecutive episodes from ‘Jack Armstrong All-American Boy’ from 1939.”

He wanted “Remember WENN” populated with characters who are actors because “I have always loved then. I love behind-the-scenes. I love what goes on behind the scenes of any play, film or radio show.”

The series is set in Pittsburgh not just because the city’s KDKA became the first federally licensed station in 1920. “The characters in ‘Remember WENN’ are one shade of the big time,” says Holmes, who also has composed the music for the series.

“They have to work much harder than their New York counterparts. To put them in New York would have made them sort of harder to relate to. I wanted to write about people who were so thrilled to be in show business, even if it is show business within Pittsburgh. It’s a big city, but still not the first-run city. So they still have their dream of making it in New York.”

Each episode, Holmes gets to write a different genre of radio show. “I have tried to plot the show so the radio show itself becomes part of the plot or the framework within which that week’s dilemma is solved. What makes that fun is there are so many variants of radio shows. There was such a wonderful diversity. You not only had ‘The Thin Man’ on the radio, you had ‘The Fat Man.”’

Holmes finds it “lovely” to write a series set in 1939 because “there was a degree of courtesy and manners in the way people dealt with each other that I am allowed to evoke,” he says. “If Character A insults Character B, they are not going to be in their face. The insult will be between the lines. I like the fact that the people are going to be essentially nice people and that the feeling of most of the characters is a kind of coziness that radio bred. The beautiful thing about radio was kind of pulling closer to the speaker of the radio and grafting your imagination onto the performance.”

“Remember WENN” premieres Saturday at 6 p.m. on AMC.