There is more than one science show on TV, but not so many when it comes to a 35-year lifespan. This is the case for NOVA, one of the most successful science documentary series in public television. As NOVA’s senior series producer, Melanie Wallace leads the group that makes new shows possible. After her recent visit to The Rockefeller University, we talked to her about how to succeed in television while enjoying science.

Image by Rossana Henriques

Melanie Wallace (MW): Essentially it has been one-hour science documentary and single-subject stories since it started. NOVA started in 1973 by Michael Ambrosino, who was working at WGBH in Boston, a PBS station. In his 40th year, he wanted to take a sabbatical—go to England and work for the BBC to see what they did. That’s how he got exposed to the science series on the BBC, which is called Horizon, and he thought, “Wow, it is a good idea. I’m going to come back to WGBH and start science documentaries on public TV in the United States.” When he came back, they said, “You’re crazy. Nobody watches science on TV.” Science wasn’t on TV; science was in the classroom. Then he said, “no, we can do it. We can turn it into stories that will appeal to curious people.” That’s what he did. He got a small grant from the National Science Foundation and pharma corporations. They had money for one year, and it took them two years to prepare. They brought BBC producers over from England to train the Americans because our people in the US didn’t know how to do this.

NS: How did you end up being a NOVA producer?

MW: I started out studying anthropology, and I wanted to make ethnographic films. After I got a master’s degree and became a Ph.D. candidate, I left to see if I could break into television. There was a new series being created at PBS called Odyssey, which was devoted to anthropology and archeology (it was in the early 80s). I started out as a production assistant. After two years that series lost its funding and I decided I wasn’t going back to become a professor of anthropology, but I would continue being a filmmaker. I got into NOVA after that.

NS: What are the paths to make a successful show?

MW: NOVA tries to have variety, so people don’t necessarily know what will be on every week, but they know there will be something that would be interesting, that will satisfy their curiosity. Therefore, we try to pick stories that cover a wide range of scientific disciplines. We have the editorial team, and we look at proposals and ideas and meet regularly and look for the strongest stories that are about new science. Why does NOVA telecast the story now? There has to be a good reason. It has to be something new; it has to be cutting edge; it has to be exclusive access. It’s not just a story about fat people. If there is a cutting-edge understanding about what makes people fat and you can follow some kind of unfolded mystery that enhances our understanding about obesity, then maybe there is a story there. So we’re always pushing the producers to come up with the story: you need a quest, you need obstacles to overcome, important science, good characters, and you need to know if there will be attractive visuals.

NS: Do you need scientists in NOVA? How do you get in touch with them?

MW: I would say that people who work at NOVA generally come from a background of journalism or filmmaking. Occasionally, we have scientists with Ph.D. working with us, but mostly they are consultants and advisors. We look for the people who are top in their field and who care about communicating and popularizing what they do. Not everybody does. But we have been fortunate. When we do a research the producer goes and calls all the top people and starts finding out what they are doing, and slowly we identify the people who are the best ones to participate in a program.

NS: Who decides how successful a certain show is?

MW: Public TV in the US is lucky in that we don’t live or die on ratings like commercial television does. We have a variety of yardsticks that we use that tell us whether or not shows are successful. It includes the ratings, the press clipping, and the e-mails that we get from viewers. For a while, NOVA was up against American Idol, which was watched by 33% of all Americans on Tuesdays at 8 p.m. Well, that had a big impact on us. Our audience is not exactly the same audience that watches American Idol, but in the winter there was an overlap and we could see a dip in our ratings. Sometimes you can’t just go by ratings. We always try to think about what shows will be popular. You look back through history and you see, “oh, dinosaurs did very well,” so you think that you will do a dinosaur show, but suddenly it doesn’t do that well in terms of the ratings. Why? Because every cable channel has had a billion shows on dinosaurs, so you’ve got to come up with a different angle that will attract people to NOVA. For example, when we did the film about Percy Julian, the African American chemist, that was our classic NOVA subject. We had to pay for all the original research; there was no book that had been written about him. We did all the original research, we went back to the original sources, we met the witnesses, we talked to his family. We actually paid a researcher who spent six weeks in the garage of his son, going through boxes of photographs, cataloguing, digitizing, and making them available to the film and also to his son and his family. Who else would put on prime time television the story of a black chemist who is dead and nobody has ever heard of? But it was hugely successful. We got a lot of positive print reviews and e-mails. You know, it’s a great opportunity for the people in the black community to see themselves as scientists. So NOVA sees that it is part of our mission to provide positive role models.

NOVA runs every Tuesday at 8 p.m. on public television, channel 13 in New York.