Heard about a TV show on the radio

 “[BBC America's] viewing audience for ‘Broadchurch’ represents really, truly less than one percent of the American television viewing population. We’re not particularly worried about the overlap,” said executive producer Carolyn Bernstein at the Television Critics Assn. press tour Sunday. “We think those people who do overlap will be really into it and really enjoy the show.”

“My mom is right down the alley of the BBC America audience, and she started watching it, and she’s like, ‘I can’t understand a word they’re saying,'” agreed EP Dan Futterman. “And I think that was a common experience… There are some devoted viewers and cultured viewers who watched that whole show and loved it. We watched the whole show and loved it.”

A critic who has seen the first two episodes of “Gracepoint” noted that the show replicates “Broadchurch’s” first two installments almost beat for beat, without offering much in the way of originality.

“We did consider different starting places, different ideas for the first episode,” Bernstein conceded. “I think we kept coming back to [the first episode of 'Broadchurch'], not shot for shot, but the way that the story was told was so well done that why would we contort ourselves to figure out a different way to tell the story, when that was the smartest, most compelling way to launch this particular story?”

The producer did promise that “as the series progresses, it really diverges in pretty big large ways from the original. But particularly in that first episode, it felt like the smartest, best launching pad. We didn’t want to try to fix something that we all thought was excellent.”