Ghostwriter (1992 TV series)

Ghostwriter is an educational children's mystery television series produced by Children's Television Workshop (now known as Sesame Workshop) and BBC Television. The series revolves around a multiethnic group of friends from Brooklyn who solve neighborhood crimes and mysteries as a team of youth detectives with the help of a ghost named Ghostwriter. Ghostwriter can communicate with children 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. It began airing on PBS on October 4, 1992, and the last episode aired on February 12, 1995. It reran on Noggin, a channel co-founded by the Children's Television Workshop, from 1999 to 2003.

Premise

The series is designed to teach reading, writing, and critical thinking skills to schoolchildren. Each mystery is presented as a case, covering four 30-minute episodes (except for the first and fifth story arc, where there are five 30 minute episodes); children are encouraged to follow each mystery and use the reading and writing clues given to attempt to solve them just as the Ghostwriter team does. Supervising producer Miranda Barry recalled arguing strongly for filming the series on location in the real setting of Fort Greene, Brooklyn, and noted that there was a year long gap between the pilot and the filming of the rest of the episodes.

Episodes

Cast

Sheldon Turnipseed as Jamal Jenkins

Blaze Berdahl as Lenni Frazier

David López as Alex Fernández

Mayteana Morales as Gaby Fernández (1992–1994)

Tram-Anh Tran as Tina Nguyen

Todd Alexander as Rob Baker (1992–1993)

William Hernandez as Héctor Carrero (1993–1995)

Melissa Gonzalez as Gaby Fernández (1994–1995)

Lateaka Vinson as Casey Austin (1994–1995)

Marcella Lowery as Grandma CeCe Jenkins

Critics and merchandise

Ghostwriter was critically acclaimed and honored for presenting a realistic, ethnically diverse world in its two-hour mystery stories.