Ghostwriter | |
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Genre |
Children's Mystery |
Created by | Liz Nealon |
Starring | |
Country of origin | United States |
Original language(s) | English |
No. of seasons | 3 |
No. of episodes | 74 (18 story arcs, with four or five episodes to each arc) (list of episodes) |
Production | |
Running time | 30 minutes |
Production company(s) | Children's Television Workshop (1992-1995) BBC Television (1992-1994) Sesame Workshop BBC One Original Productions |
Release | |
Original network |
Fox Kids (first episode only) PBS BBC 1 |
Original release | October 4, 1992 | – February 12, 1995
Chronology | |
Followed by | The New Ghostwriter Mysteries |
The New Ghostwriter Mysteries | |
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Created by | Liz Nelson |
Starring |
Charlotte Sullivan Erica Luttrell Kristian Ayre |
Country of origin | Canada United States |
Original language(s) | English |
No. of seasons | 1 |
No. of episodes | 13 |
Production | |
Running time | 30 minutes |
Production company(s) | Decode Entertainment, Inc. (1997) Children's Television Workshop (1997) Sesame Workshop |
Release | |
Original network | CBS |
Original release | September 13 – December 6, 1997 |
Chronology | |
Preceded by | Ghostwriter |
Ghostwriter is an American children's mystery television series created by Liz Nealon and produced by the Children's Television Workshop (now known as Sesame Workshop) and BBC One. It began airing on PBS on October 4, 1992, and the final episode aired on February 12, 1995. The series revolves around a close-knit circle of friends from Brooklyn who solve neighborhood crimes and mysteries as a team of young detectives with the help of an invisible ghost named Ghostwriter. Ghostwriter can communicate with the kids only by manipulating whatever text and letters he can find and using them to form words and sentences. The series was filmed on location in Fort Greene, Brooklyn.
The series was designed to teach reading and writing skills to elementary and middle school children. Each mystery was presented as a case, covering four or five thirty-minute episodes; children were encouraged to follow each mystery, and use the reading and writing clues given to attempt to solve them just as the Ghostwriter team does in the show.
Ghostwriter was critically acclaimed and honored for presenting a realistic, racially diverse world in its two-hour mystery stories. By the end of its third season, Ghostwriter ranked in the top five of all children's shows on American television. The program was canceled after the third season due to a lack of funding. Ghostwriter has been broadcast in 24 countries worldwide, and generated a number of foreign-language adaptations, including a dubbed-over version on Discovery Kids Latin America marketed as Fantasma Escritor.
Created as an integrated, branded, multi-media project, the Ghostwriter brand included magazines and teacher's guides, software (Microsoft), home video, games/licensed product, and other outreach materials that reached over a million children each month. There were many Ghostwriter books released, both novelizations of the TV episodes and new stories. They were released by Bantam Books.