- published: 24 Apr 2013
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Ghostwriter is an American television program 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 13, 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. The ghost 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 cancelled 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. The show was originally funded by Nike, Sega, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the Pew Charitable Trusts, the U.S. Department of Education, the Arthur Vining Davis Foundations, the National Endowment for Children's Educational Television, and PBS viewers.[citation needed]