John McGivern was born and raised on Milwaukee’s East Side in the 1950s. Having appeared in multiple movies and plays, he decided to change things up a bit in 2011, when he and his producer friend Lois Maurer approached PBS about a show where they would visit and highlight both rural and urban communities all across Wisconsin. Seven years later, “Around the Corner with John McGivern” has been receiving national accolades, having been picked up by PBS World and receiving the highest ratings on any PBS station in the country on Thursday nights at 7 p.m. The mission of the show is to discover where a particular community lives, works and plays. “Around the Corner” is now filming its eighth season and rapidly approaching its 100th episode.
How do you and the “Around the Corner” team select what cities or towns to focus on?
We were foolish in the beginning. If you watch season one or season two, we thought we could do Racine or Kenosha [in a single episode] … you can’t do a city of that size in 28 minutes. So now we’ve decided we will do areas in these towns so that we can go back and cover more. We’ve done real specific Milwaukee neighborhoods, like Bay View or Riverwest. And we decide at the end of every season, we all sit together praying that there’s a next season with funding, and we decide where on the map we are going to go. We have pins all over our producer’s Wisconsin map of where we have been and where we should go.
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What is the general shooting process of the show?
Our process is we show up, we meet someone at their home or their business, or wherever they want to meet, and we spend a good two hours with these subjects. We chat and we walk around and we look at where we should talk and we put a microphone on and we talk for a good 15 minutes with the camera in front of us. Whoever takes the time with us gets a part of what we are doing. I love those who have no clue about why we are there. They are so incredibly wide open to do whatever they need to do.
What is your favorite part of shooting the show?
I love that they allow us into these huge factories that make widgets that connect the world … it’s kind of unbelievable that they allow us in. That’s my favorite part of the show, that we can go into this big hot factory and we can see how things are made. Who else gets a hard hat and the glasses and the gloves to walk through all of this stuff? In truth, I would never be doing this, so to look at how it’s done is really the best.
What would you say to younger people who might view Wisconsin as being boring or uneventful?
They need to move…. No matter where I lived, I compared those places to where I lived in my neighborhood in Milwaukee, and where I grew up on the East Side, and when I came back I learned that anyone who complains about this city needs to move back. It’s so manageable, it’s so loveable. I’m an actor by trade, and when we look at what we have theater-wise in this city, people who have lived here their whole lives don’t understand that in a one-block radius, we have nine stages. So, I always say move away, so in the end you can move back and realize that home is always so much better.
You are also an actor, hosting local shows and appearing in movies. How does being an actor compare to being the host of “Around the Corner”?
It’s weird. It’s completely different. What I love about it is neither one takes away from the other one. The audience around TV is much greater. No matter where I go across the state, people say “I like your show.” It helps feed what I do on the stage. In TV, I love that there’s a crew of us that get into a van every day at 8 a.m., and it’s the same crew that’s been together for eight years. We know each other. It’s really a gift, working together for so long. Here, I’m part of a group.
How do you feel when you realize you have finished seven seasons of the show, and are working on the eighth?
I’m 63, and I wish I was 40, because I would love to do it longer. We thought, when we got this, we hoped we could do five, and at five we hoped we could do 10. There are so many more communities to cover. There are more people who watch it now. We could do it for another 10 years. It’s not a hard job and I love it.
To learn more about John McGivern and “Around the Corner,” visit johnmcgivern.com.
