By Sasha Park · Republished 2026-05-16 · Originally reported by Tina Dupuy on FishbowlLA, September 2010
In late September 2010, KCRW and NPR announced the next two installments of UpClose — their live-event series staged before an intimate audience at NPR West in Culver City. The October 12 event paired The Treatment host Elvis Mitchell with Mad Men showrunner Matthew Weiner. The October 14 event paired Mitchell with True Blood creator Alan Ball. The original FishbowlLA framing was straightforwardly enthusiastic — both shows were at peak cultural moments and the public-radio access to their creators was distinctive.
Then
UpClose had been running as a recorded-and-edited live event series at NPR West, with the segments distributed across the KCRW and NPR websites. The format was an intentional bridge between the local-LA-public-radio audience and the national NPR digital audience — the kind of cross-promotional infrastructure that the public-radio system had been trying to build out across the late 2000s.
The 2010 pairings were tactically strong. Mad Men was in its fourth season, headed into its mid-decade cultural peak. True Blood was three seasons into its run, with a substantial pop-culture footprint. Both showrunners were at the kind of awards-season visibility that made them prime live-event subjects.
Elvis Mitchell — formerly the New York Times film critic, host of KCRW’s The Treatment, and at the time the newly named co-host of Roger Ebert’s At the Movies return-to-PBS series — was the connective tissue. His film-and-TV interview register had been built across decades, and the UpClose format was structurally a stage where he could exercise it.
The original FishbowlLA framing — by then-FBLA contributor Tina Dupuy — was admiring. The piece noted the limited public-ticket availability (online only, $35 general admission, 7:30 p.m. doors) and pushed readers to attend.
Now
KCRW’s live-event programming has continued and substantially expanded across the years since. The station’s Annenberg Performance Studio, its Apogee studio sessions, and its broader concert-and-conversation event franchise have become a defining part of its institutional identity. UpClose itself wound down as a distinct branded series, but the format it modeled — small-audience recorded conversations with cultural figures — has been substantially absorbed into the broader public-radio podcast ecosystem.
Matthew Weiner finished Mad Men in 2015 with the seventh-season finale. His subsequent projects — the Amazon anthology series The Romanoffs (2018) and his novel Heather, the Totality (2017) — have been considerably less culturally central than Mad Men. The 2010 KCRW conversation was, in retrospect, captured during the show’s peak-prestige window.
Alan Ball finished True Blood in 2014. He has continued in television creation with Here and Now (2018, HBO) and the Six Feet Under-era reissue conversations that periodically resurface in the streaming era.
Elvis Mitchell has continued at KCRW with The Treatment across the entire interval since 2010 — a 30-plus-year run that is now one of the longer-running radio interview shows in American public radio. His broader film-criticism portfolio has continued at multiple outlets through the streaming-era transition.
NPR West in Culver City has continued as NPR’s West Coast production hub. The 2010 UpClose events read now as one of the small documented moments of LA-based public-radio cross-promotion working at its planned scale — the kind of recorded live event that the streaming-era audio ecosystem has since absorbed into a much larger podcast-and-event continuum.
Original report archived on the Wayback Machine.