PBS 'Masterpiece' Executive Producer Rebecca Eaton on Great Adaptations

For more than 25 years, Rebecca Eaton has run PBS's Masterpiece — which makes her, quietly, one of the most influential figures in the history of literary adaptation. The Colin Firth Pride and Prejudice, Downton Abbey, Sherlock: her desk. With her memoir Making Masterpiece due next month, she talked shop with us.

Her first rule of adaptation: 'Cast the book, not the market.' The 1995 Pride and Prejudice worked, she argues, because Firth and Jennifer Ehle were the characters rather than stars wearing them — the wet-shirt scene became iconic precisely because the six hours around it were so faithful.

Her second rule: length is honesty. Film compresses novels into gestures; the serial — television's native form since Dickens published in installments — lets a book breathe at its own pace. It's why, she says, the current golden age of TV is really a golden age of adaptation.

Asked for the white whale she never landed, Eaton doesn't hesitate: a definitive Middlemarch for a new generation. Producers, take note. The 1995 benchmark she set is cataloged here.