Page Turner

Bringing the pages of an iconic magazine to the screen for a 10-part series was a dream job for Kahane Cooperman.

She had just ended another one — a lengthy stint as a producer of The Daily Show with Jon Stewart — to take on the showrunner reins of Amazon Studios' The New Yorker Presents.

The centerpiece of each episode is a short film, with topics ranging from the CIA withholding information from the FBI before 9/11 to a comic take on the caffeine habit of 19th-century French author Honoré de Balzac (brought to life by Paul Giamatti) to an examination of police violence in Albuquerque.

The works are from such prominent directors as Shari Springer Berman (American Splendor), Steve James (Hoop Dreams) and Alex Gibney (Steve Jobs: The Man in the Machine), whose production company Jigsaw oversees TNYP.

"My thought was, incredibly diverse subjects shot by different filmmakers," Cooperman says. "The filmmakers trusted us that their films would be part of something beautiful and powerful, which we hope it is. Even though they are so different, they feel like they're from the same universe, and they became connective tissue."

Other well-known features from the magazine appear in the show, including "Shouts & Murmurs" and naturally, the publication's famous cartoons, along with essays, letters and poems.

Conde Nast Entertainment initially approached Amazon about a collaboration, and the studio suggested a program based on The New Yorker. The series premiered February 16, with a release schedule of two 30-minute episodes per week through March 15.

The producers had an almost embarrassingly large treasure trove of material from which to curate stories that they aimed to tell in a visually compelling manner. They were given access to the magazine's archives going back to 1925.

"Part of my job is taking in all these notes, including from The New Yorker editor David Remnick, while honoring the writers' original intent," says Cooperman, who led a staff of about 40, including four in-house teams of directors, producers and researchers who created all of the shorter content. "It's a big juggling and diplomacy act to keep my eye on the bigger picture of how everything fits in."