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 is set in Pittsburgh in 1939, focusing 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 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.

Meltzer happened to be friends with Rupert Holmes, the Tony Award-winning composer and playwright (“Drood” ) and pop singer (“The Pina Colada Song”). Holmes has written every episode of the monthly series. “I have always been addicted to radio,” he says.

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.”

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.”

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” airs Wednesday, Jan. 24 at 5 and 10 p.m. on AMC.