‘Mystery!’ to Get a Make-Over

In the end, it won’t be the butler in the drawing room with a candlestick who killed off one of PBS’ most venerable series, but PBS itself--in the boardroom, with a flick of the budget pen.

The Public Broadcasting Service plans to stop funding production of the current incarnation of “Mystery!,” the Thursday-night anthology series of British whodunits that has been on the air since 1980, spawning a whole genre in the U.S. In its place, PBS is working with the show’s U.S. producer, Boston public television station WGBH, hoping to reinvent the franchise as American regional mysteries penned by a multiethnic group of writers.

The change is part of a push by new PBS President Pat Mitchell to cut back on the overabundance of British drama--which can also be found on cable’s A&E; and the less-widely distributed BBC America--and make the broadcaster more distinctive and reflective of the wider American audience, in the process drawing more viewers.

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Although individual programs such as the acclaimed “Prime Suspect” episodes starring Helen Mirren have attracted sizable viewership, the “Mystery!” audience, like that of PBS, has dwindled in recent years. Still, its ratings are slightly above the PBS prime-time average.

“I am under a mandate to widen the net and that is how I am going to measure our success--how many new people are we going to bring in to support public television at the local level?” Mitchell said Wednesday, confirming the conversations about the series’ future, which have been going on almost since she joined PBS last March.

“This is not about canceling ‘Mystery!’. This is about reinventing it,” she said. “I’m not here to destroy anything or dismantle anything, but to build something new from a foundation.”

WGBH spokeswoman Jeanne Hopkins said Mitchell “has expressed an interest in different ways of looking at ongoing series, and ‘Mystery!’ is one of them. . . . Extending the brand into new areas with American mystery writers is one possible area being discussed. Our main interest is in this series continuing to remain healthy for the viewers who value it, so if this is a time of transition we’ll see how it goes.”

PBS has leverage in the negotiations: The series currently has two corporate underwriters, but PBS has supplied the majority of the series’ funding since 1996, when it stepped in after longtime funder Mobil dropped out.

Although negotiations are ongoing, the traditional “Mystery!”--which has featured characters from “Brother Cadfael” to Agatha Christie’s “Miss Marple” to “Inspector Morse”--is likely to disappear after a season of already funded originals in the 2001-2002 season. Even those programs may not be seen in their traditional Thursday slot; PBS has been testing a new schedule in several cities that has “Mystery!” airing at 10 p.m. Tuesdays.

Among the remaining “Mystery!” shows this season are the just-started, highly praised “Touching Evil,” a dark three-part series about an obsessed cop’s efforts to find a serial killer; a return of “Second Sight,” the story of a maverick cop who is slowly going blind; and a final episode of “Inspector Morse.”

The fall includes six new adventures of handbag-toting sleuth “Hetty Wainthropp” and four new episodes of the popular Sherlock Holmes series “Murder Rooms,” as well as a new series based on books by Elizabeth George.

After next season, depending on how negotiations proceed and the success of fund-raising, “Mystery!” may disappear as a weekly series until enough new episodes can be built up, although Mitchell said she expects it to have a regular presence on the PBS schedule.

Although the new format would be more expensive and require finding international partners, Mitchell would like to see the program feature stories from American writers, including Latinos, Native Americans and African-Americans.

“We know the material is there,” she said, adding, “One thing our schedule really doesn’t have, especially in fiction, is diversity of voice.”

This season, in a change that was made even before Mitchell came on board, “Masterpiece Theater,” which itself spawned “Mystery!,” started including more American drama.