Who Is Walter of 'Walter Presents'? Pulling Back the Curtain on Walter Iuzzolino
Our coverage mandate here at Telly Visions – “The Very Best of British TV and Culture” – gives us the latitude to consider not only the cultural output of the entire United Kingdom but also TV series and films better described as British-ish. Australian films? Sure! A Canadian miniseries? Why not? Literally anything Irish? Absolutely – it’s on the same island as Northern Ireland! Commonwealth Nations and former colonies are an easy yes, but what about the superior series from Denmark? Germany? France? The answer is “yes” more times than you might imagine, all thanks to Walter Iuzzolino and the TV series he selects each year for the U.K.’s Channel 4’s anthology franchise Walter Presents, which PBS Passport has adopted as a unique feature, focused entirely on international TV series in their original languages, with English subtitles.
Iuzzolino is a TV producer — his production company, Eagle Eye Drama, is behind PBS mainstays, including Hotel Portofino and English language remakes like the Belgian hit Professor T — but in his capacity as the chief selector for Walter Presents, he’s first and foremost an erudite fan of and enthusiastic evangelist for European TV. As he explained in a 2017 conversation with Interview magazine, his taste development in TV and film began very early, thanks to parents who loved “beautiful, clever, interesting, sophisticated filmmaking” and grandmothers who were “quite addicted to serialized drama” and learned early on that great TV isn’t dependent on its genre but on the quality of its storytelling, characters, and production value.
When he moved to London to apply to film school about 25 years ago, Iuzzolino was disappointed to find little in the way of continental shows, unlike in mainland Europe, where series from across the continent and in various languages find keen viewers thanks to dubbing. Although dubbing is “comically bad” from an artistic perspective, it also means that “language is not a barrier to the appreciation of content.” Consequently, across Europe, imported series from all over the world are, in Iuzzolino’s telling, “all mainstream; you, the audience, don’t think of them as foreign,” providing viewers with far more variety in terms of “styles and textures: different ways of photographic, different actors, different writing, different paces.”
