A film crew shoots “The Good Road” second season premiere episode, which features Richmond locations including the Lumpkin’s Jail site in Shockoe Bottom. (Photos courtesy of The Good Road)
Richmond’s resident “philanthropologist” is back on TV, this time with his lens focused squarely on his hometown.
Craig Martin, along with co-host and co-creator Earl Bridges, has returned to public television with the second season of their docuseries “The Good Road,” which is partially produced – and this season partially filmed – in Richmond.
The latest batch of eight half-hour episodes started airing in January on VPM and other public TV stations across the country, picking up where the show left off with its initial season, which garnered a national Daytime Emmy Award nomination for multiple-camera editing among lifestyle programs.
While they missed that award, Martin and Bridges and their team are trying for another with this season, which continues their exploration of the business side of global philanthropy. It includes two episodes focused on efforts in Richmond, where Martin is based.
“We’re submitting right now for season two,” Martin said. “We didn’t win last year, but we were up against HBO and Food Network. So, just to be even nominated, for a travel show like ours, was huge for us.”
Where the initial eight episodes took Martin and Bridges from African nations such as Kenya and Tanzania to locales in U.S. states such as Alabama and Tennessee, this season kicked off with the first of the two segments filmed in Richmond. The premiere episode highlighted racial reconciliatory efforts in the city amid the unrest of 2020 that followed the murder of George Floyd.
The episode starts off with a tense exchange at the base of the defaced Robert E. Lee Monument between Martin and a man whitewashing some of the graffiti. The unidentified man chides Martin when he approaches him about it along with local film director Ace Callwood and Zane Gibbs, CEO of management consulting firm Zada Strategy.
The episode also features an interview with curator Valerie Cassel Oliver about the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts’ Kehinde Wiley exhibit and his “Rumors of War” statue that’s now a fixture along Arthur Ashe Boulevard. And it highlights the homegrown Hidden In Plain Site project that uses virtual reality to interpret black history in the city.
The premiere episode includes Hidden In Plain Site’s Dontrese Brown.
Dontrese Brown, who created Hidden In Plain Site with Dean Browell and David Waltenbaugh, is interviewed inside Jackson Ward’s Hippodrome. The full episode, which premiered at the Richmond International Film Festival last fall, can be viewed on PBS’s website here.
Acknowledging the different tone that starts off what is typically a more upbeat adventure show, Martin said of the series, “It’s ‘The Good Road,’ not the Cynical Road or the Dark Road. It’s meant to be positive.
“The tough episode we did about racial reconciliation had some conflict in the first part of it, but it’s not meant to be negative about Richmond,” he said. “It’s meant to show the world that Richmond, like every other community, is changing and evolving and growing up in some ways, and we don’t want our history to define our future.”
Warm reception
Since the first season aired, Martin said it has received a warm reception from viewers, as well as advertisers. Toyota and semiconductor company AMD are advertisers this season, and Martin said both have signed on for the show’s third season, currently in production.
Earl Bridges, left, and Craig Martin co-created and co-host the series.
“We get a lot of feedback that people love the show because they feel like there’s a voice now for stories for people who wouldn’t normally get a platform. You may never have known that there’s this place called Rassawek,” he said, referring to the capital of the Monacan Indian Nation that’s a focus of the other episode that was filmed in the Richmond area.
“We have been excavating Jamestown and going through it archaeologically for centuries, but the Monacan tribal nation was bigger, people-wise, than Jamestown as a colony. We feel like we’re giving voice to people, and we’re getting a lot of positive feedback,” Martin said.
A multicity production, The Good Road is partially produced in Richmond as well as in Nashville, Tennessee, and in Charleston, South Carolina, where Bridges is based. The show features music and engineering by Richmond’s In Your Ear Studios and virtual reality effects by VArtisans, a production company housed at In Your Ear’s Shockoe Bottom complex.
Martin, who lives in Carytown, settled in Richmond in the mid-1990s through his involvement with International Mission Board, a locally based missionary association. He and Bridges met when they were high schoolers in Bangkok, Thailand, where Martin was born and where their parents were missionaries.
They reconnected a few years ago when Bridges enlisted Martin to do some film work for Good Done Great, a charitable giving-focused software firm that Bridges co-founded and sold in 2017.
Martin with Richmonders Ace Callwood and Zane Gibbs beside the Robert E. Lee Monument in the season’s premiere episode.
They got The Good Road, initially called Good All Over, off the ground using funds from that sale, and ultimately struck a deal with WETA, the Arlington-based station behind PBS NewsHour and Ken Burns’ documentaries.
American Public Television distributes The Good Road nationally, and production is handled partly in Nashville, where show director Andy Duensing and other crew members are based.
Magazine in the mix
Since the first season aired, Martin and Bridges have continued additional pursuits, including the show’s “Philanthropology” podcast supplement that’s recorded at In Your Ear.
The pair also have revived Philanthropy Journal, a digital magazine previously owned by N.C. State University that was shelved in 2020 after three decades. Martin said the university agreed to sell them the property, which they restarted with a soft launch in early January.
“In all honesty, they gave it to us for free,” said Martin, who shares ownership of the magazine with Bridges and its managing editor. “It’s a digital service, but there will also be a quarterly magazine that people can have. Earl says, and I love this phrase: we want to be the Rolling Stone of philanthropy journals.”
Bridges and Martin talking with VMFA curator Valerie Cassel Oliver in front of the ‘Rumors of War’ statue.
Martin added, “He and I from the very beginnings of this wanted to start a much larger media company based around this idea of people doing good in the world. What was to be the title of our show, Good All Over, is now a parent company, and The Good Road is one of the pieces of that.”
Martin said the third season will include an episode featuring the locally based James River Association. He said local wholesaler Evergreen Enterprises’s Plow & Hearth brand is also signed on as a sponsor.
Meanwhile, Martin is upping his local involvements as well, working with The Poe Museum on promotional activities and participating in XR Virginia, a local group promoting virtual reality and related technologies that also includes Hidden In Plain Site’s Waltenbaugh and VArtisans’ Mark Lambert.
Martin said his busy local schedule is making up for lost time when he was calling Richmond home but traveling elsewhere for work.
“I spent most of my years in Richmond concentrated outside of Richmond, so one of the joys for me personally is to be involved,” he said. “I’m just loving the idea, specifically in arts and education, that we can make Richmond a place that is competitive in some ways with all the other cities of this size, or even bigger, in a way that starts to change the narrative.”
The Good Road currently airs on VPM on Sundays at 1 p.m. and on Mondays at 12:30 a.m. All episodes from both seasons can also be viewed online via PBS’s website.
A film crew shoots “The Good Road” second season premiere episode, which features Richmond locations including the Lumpkin’s Jail site in Shockoe Bottom. (Photos courtesy of The Good Road)
Richmond’s resident “philanthropologist” is back on TV, this time with his lens focused squarely on his hometown.
Craig Martin, along with co-host and co-creator Earl Bridges, has returned to public television with the second season of their docuseries “The Good Road,” which is partially produced – and this season partially filmed – in Richmond.
The latest batch of eight half-hour episodes started airing in January on VPM and other public TV stations across the country, picking up where the show left off with its initial season, which garnered a national Daytime Emmy Award nomination for multiple-camera editing among lifestyle programs.
While they missed that award, Martin and Bridges and their team are trying for another with this season, which continues their exploration of the business side of global philanthropy. It includes two episodes focused on efforts in Richmond, where Martin is based.
“We’re submitting right now for season two,” Martin said. “We didn’t win last year, but we were up against HBO and Food Network. So, just to be even nominated, for a travel show like ours, was huge for us.”
Where the initial eight episodes took Martin and Bridges from African nations such as Kenya and Tanzania to locales in U.S. states such as Alabama and Tennessee, this season kicked off with the first of the two segments filmed in Richmond. The premiere episode highlighted racial reconciliatory efforts in the city amid the unrest of 2020 that followed the murder of George Floyd.
The episode starts off with a tense exchange at the base of the defaced Robert E. Lee Monument between Martin and a man whitewashing some of the graffiti. The unidentified man chides Martin when he approaches him about it along with local film director Ace Callwood and Zane Gibbs, CEO of management consulting firm Zada Strategy.
The episode also features an interview with curator Valerie Cassel Oliver about the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts’ Kehinde Wiley exhibit and his “Rumors of War” statue that’s now a fixture along Arthur Ashe Boulevard. And it highlights the homegrown Hidden In Plain Site project that uses virtual reality to interpret black history in the city.
The premiere episode includes Hidden In Plain Site’s Dontrese Brown.
Dontrese Brown, who created Hidden In Plain Site with Dean Browell and David Waltenbaugh, is interviewed inside Jackson Ward’s Hippodrome. The full episode, which premiered at the Richmond International Film Festival last fall, can be viewed on PBS’s website here.
Acknowledging the different tone that starts off what is typically a more upbeat adventure show, Martin said of the series, “It’s ‘The Good Road,’ not the Cynical Road or the Dark Road. It’s meant to be positive.
“The tough episode we did about racial reconciliation had some conflict in the first part of it, but it’s not meant to be negative about Richmond,” he said. “It’s meant to show the world that Richmond, like every other community, is changing and evolving and growing up in some ways, and we don’t want our history to define our future.”
Warm reception
Since the first season aired, Martin said it has received a warm reception from viewers, as well as advertisers. Toyota and semiconductor company AMD are advertisers this season, and Martin said both have signed on for the show’s third season, currently in production.
Earl Bridges, left, and Craig Martin co-created and co-host the series.
“We get a lot of feedback that people love the show because they feel like there’s a voice now for stories for people who wouldn’t normally get a platform. You may never have known that there’s this place called Rassawek,” he said, referring to the capital of the Monacan Indian Nation that’s a focus of the other episode that was filmed in the Richmond area.
“We have been excavating Jamestown and going through it archaeologically for centuries, but the Monacan tribal nation was bigger, people-wise, than Jamestown as a colony. We feel like we’re giving voice to people, and we’re getting a lot of positive feedback,” Martin said.
A multicity production, The Good Road is partially produced in Richmond as well as in Nashville, Tennessee, and in Charleston, South Carolina, where Bridges is based. The show features music and engineering by Richmond’s In Your Ear Studios and virtual reality effects by VArtisans, a production company housed at In Your Ear’s Shockoe Bottom complex.
Martin, who lives in Carytown, settled in Richmond in the mid-1990s through his involvement with International Mission Board, a locally based missionary association. He and Bridges met when they were high schoolers in Bangkok, Thailand, where Martin was born and where their parents were missionaries.
They reconnected a few years ago when Bridges enlisted Martin to do some film work for Good Done Great, a charitable giving-focused software firm that Bridges co-founded and sold in 2017.
Martin with Richmonders Ace Callwood and Zane Gibbs beside the Robert E. Lee Monument in the season’s premiere episode.
They got The Good Road, initially called Good All Over, off the ground using funds from that sale, and ultimately struck a deal with WETA, the Arlington-based station behind PBS NewsHour and Ken Burns’ documentaries.
American Public Television distributes The Good Road nationally, and production is handled partly in Nashville, where show director Andy Duensing and other crew members are based.
Magazine in the mix
Since the first season aired, Martin and Bridges have continued additional pursuits, including the show’s “Philanthropology” podcast supplement that’s recorded at In Your Ear.
The pair also have revived Philanthropy Journal, a digital magazine previously owned by N.C. State University that was shelved in 2020 after three decades. Martin said the university agreed to sell them the property, which they restarted with a soft launch in early January.
“In all honesty, they gave it to us for free,” said Martin, who shares ownership of the magazine with Bridges and its managing editor. “It’s a digital service, but there will also be a quarterly magazine that people can have. Earl says, and I love this phrase: we want to be the Rolling Stone of philanthropy journals.”
Bridges and Martin talking with VMFA curator Valerie Cassel Oliver in front of the ‘Rumors of War’ statue.
Martin added, “He and I from the very beginnings of this wanted to start a much larger media company based around this idea of people doing good in the world. What was to be the title of our show, Good All Over, is now a parent company, and The Good Road is one of the pieces of that.”
Martin said the third season will include an episode featuring the locally based James River Association. He said local wholesaler Evergreen Enterprises’s Plow & Hearth brand is also signed on as a sponsor.
Meanwhile, Martin is upping his local involvements as well, working with The Poe Museum on promotional activities and participating in XR Virginia, a local group promoting virtual reality and related technologies that also includes Hidden In Plain Site’s Waltenbaugh and VArtisans’ Mark Lambert.
Martin said his busy local schedule is making up for lost time when he was calling Richmond home but traveling elsewhere for work.
“I spent most of my years in Richmond concentrated outside of Richmond, so one of the joys for me personally is to be involved,” he said. “I’m just loving the idea, specifically in arts and education, that we can make Richmond a place that is competitive in some ways with all the other cities of this size, or even bigger, in a way that starts to change the narrative.”
The Good Road currently airs on VPM on Sundays at 1 p.m. and on Mondays at 12:30 a.m. All episodes from both seasons can also be viewed online via PBS’s website.
It’s been a pleasure having Craig serve as the secretary of the Virginia Production Alliance the last two years. He elevates every organization he’s a part of.