Former television producer and Jaffrey Library Trustee Carol Greenwald spoke about the connections between children’s literacy and children’s programming in public television during the most recent Amos Fortune Forum.
The Amos Fortune Forum is a free lecture series featuring speakers with ties to Jaffrey and the Monadnock region, hosted every Friday evening during the summer months.
Friday’s speaker, Carol Greenwald of Jaffrey, spent more than 40 years at GBH/Boston, where she worked on some of the best-known children’s television, including as co-developer and executive producer for “Arthur,” “Curious George,” “Martha Speaks,” “Postcards From Buster” and “The Time Warp Trio.”
Greenwald said the work “brought together two of my greatest passions: children’s books and television.”
Greenwald explained that studies showed children who saw books adapted into television were more likely to read those books, calling it “a gateway drug for reading, and if prompted appropriately, for library use.”
That research prompted GBH to see if it could bring more classic book adaptations to the small screen under the program “Long Ago and Far Away,” which Greenwald called her “dream come true” project.
But, Greenwald said, children weren’t as interested in a show that adapted various stories — they wanted a consistent cast of characters they could connect to. Greenwald said GBH started looking for that kind of project to adapt. As these things sometimes do, Greenwald said, the perfect book fell into her lap, given by a neighbor to her son. That book was Marc Brown’s “Arthur’s Tooth,” about a young aardvark dealing with a loose tooth.
Brown agreed to let GBH and PBS adapt his book series, and the project was off. Greenwald described efforts to create characters children could identify with in a nuanced way — characters who were blind, or had asthma, or a beloved lunch lady who deals with cancer.
“Though ‘Arthur’ continued to reinforce literacy by embedding subtle or not-so-subtle content about reading and writing — his name is Arthur Read, after all — our primary focus became social-emotional learning: coping with challenges, getting along with each other, and becoming empathetic,” Greenwald said. The characters were not made to be perfect — they bickered with each other and made mistakes — but Greenwald said that was meant to show how to learn from those mistakes.
“Postcards From Buster” was a spinoff series that featured Arthur’s best friend, Buster, exploring the United States to visit different people and learn about their lives. The idea was to showcase how people were different but remained, at their core, the same. Despite that being the entire point of the show, Greenwald said the premise was somewhat controversial. She said the show received letters of protest about episodes featuring a Muslim girl, a Jewish Orthodox family, someone who specialized in building lowriders, and one featuring a child explaining photos of her family, which included a same-sex couple.
Greenwald also worked on “Curious George,” an opportunity she said came about in part because of the success of the “Arthur” adaptation. The show featured the monkey George exploring science and engineering concepts, accompanied by a short live-action segment that showed children how they could put some of the concepts into action themselves with at-home experiments.
“Martha Speaks,” based on the books by Susan Meddaugh about a dog that learns to talk after eating alphabet soup, focused on vocabulary learning.
“I think ‘Martha Speaks’ was a great example of the many ways public television can support children and families,” Greenwald said. However, she said, since her days working in the field, she has seen some of those resources fall by the wayside. Greenwald pointed to some of the innovative and important programming still being produced by PBS Kids on television and its app.
“These resources are especially important as the media landscape is changing at a tremendously fast rate,” Greenwald said.
The next Amos Fortune Forum, “The Future of Local News” by Monadnock Ledger-Transcript Publisher Heather McKernan, will be Friday at 7 p.m. at the Jaffrey Meetinghouse. All Amos Fortune Forum lectures are free and open to the public.