Walter Presents' Producer on What Makes 'Hotel Portofino' Different

When PBS Passport launched in 2019, it only had two shows: Rick Steves' Europe and The Great British Baking Show. However, it wasn't long before a brand new anthology series brought new content to PBS members: Walter's Choice, which in 2023 rechristened itself back to its original U.K. name, Walter Presents. Like WGBH's homegrown Masterpiece, which has been importing the best of British programming to American viewers since 1970, Walter Presents brings the best of foreign language programming to the U.K. on Channel 4 and now to Americans via PBS Passport and the PBS Masterpiece Prime Video Channel.

However, like any successful program, Walter Presents has grown, spawning a second production company, EagleEye Drama Ltd. EagleEye started as a company that remade these foreign dramas in English and reset them in the U.K. for Channel 4 viewers. Almost all of them have now found their way to the U.S. via PBS or streaming services like BritBox. Their success convinced the producers to branch out and make their own original series, the first of which, Hotel Portofino, is now in its third season and a massive sleeper hit on PBS.

Co-producer Jo McGrath, who is part of the brain trust behind both companies, sat down with us as Hotel Portofino's third season heated up to explain how what was initially a project to bring the shows they loved to their home country turned into such a massive machine. "My background is in production, as is Walter's [Iuzzolino, who's the curator of Walter Presents], and Jason [Thorpe, the company's third partner]. So, we always felt that we'd love to make drama at some point, but we were learning about the drama market right from the ground up."