I don’t get Plum TV,” a friend opined a couple of years ago. Being a teenager, she said this with an unnecessary sneer, but her point was well taken. Though this cable station, then a year old, was ostensibly for and about Martha’s Vineyard, it devoted most of its air time to subjects as un-Vineyard as, say, the Tuscany Valley or helicopter skiing. Coverage of the Island amounted to high school football – the same games over and over again – and a single talk program called The Morning Show, hosted by people who spoke of the Vineyard as if they’d just landed in Oz.

Plum, the brainchild of Nantucket Nectars co-founder Tom Scott, is now in its fourth season of televising in the resort communities of America. And yes, the name of the network is streamlined to “Plum” now. Bolstered by a recent infusion of $20 million from some add-on investors, Plum is building its brand through Comcast’s video-on-demand service and with plans for beefing up its web presence at www.plumtv.com. (Alas, plum-dot-com was already taken.) In addition to airing in Tom Scott’s own Nantucket, Plum reaches the Hamptons and Martha’s Vineyard in the east; Aspen, Vail, and Telluride in the west. Coming soon to the fold are Miami Beach and Sun Valley.

Are you following the money?

Still, this is independent television, and resources for the development of local programming go only so far – which is why, on the Vineyard and elsewhere, Plum airs its mystifying array of fillers. In Plum’s earliest days, most of the fillers came straight out of left field. Some still do. Three years on, they also include fifteen original programs of the network’s own making, including a political talk show, a yoga class, and interviews with corporate titans at leisure. Plum stations also share programming among themselves. Hence, a Vineyard viewer might find herself stargazing at the Telluride film festival or ogling squash at a farm store in the Hamptons.

Nevertheless, Plum on the Vineyard gets more Vineyard-like – and satisfying – from season to season. Since the station went live on June 27, 2004, productions made here have grown to account for about 45 percent of air time. Ten Island programs are on the lineup, and the production values have shed most of their taped-in-the-basement effect – not counting a bit of fuzz in the sound that’s become so familiar, it’s part of the station’s shtick. Plum estimates that as many as 12,000 Island televisions are tuning in. Even a teenager could get Plum now.

The Vineyard market is arguably a breed apart from Plum’s other resorts. “Martha’s Vineyard is really sensitive about selling its soul,” observes MacDara Bohan, the Plum Vineyard general manager and executive producer, who arrived on-Island from New York just ten frantic weeks before hitting the airwaves. “This community has more of a life of its own without the tourism. It’s known for its diversity – in backgrounds, thought, race, landscape. Other resorts are more like one-trick ponies. People here tend to be forward-thinking and progressive. They’re largely sympathetic with the [political] left. Famous people tend to be academics, authors, and musicians, more so than movie stars. They come to the Vineyard to relax and get away rather than to be seen.”

Plum Vineyard best captures that crazy-quilt spirit in its original flagship program. Re-dubbed The Morning, Noon and Night Show for its twice-daily rebroadcasts, it’s gotten smoother over its short lifespan without getting slick. From Plum’s spare, little studio in the Mansion House, MNN airs live once a week during the off-season. In high season, the show airs mostly outdoors from the narrow beach along Vineyard Haven harbor. This season, MNN expands from four live shows a week to seven.

MNN works because it’s homespun, sincere, and, well, Vineyard. It’s so Vineyard that, despite the name, it seems never to air at noon. Granted, the broadcasts of government meetings on MVTV are equally homespun, sincere, and Vineyard. But they don’t open with MNN’s B-roll of Island beauty shots – sailboats, pumpkins, snow-frosted barns, wee children. Nor are they accompanied by the mellow musical stylings of Wyclef Jean or Ben Taylor. And, frankly, they can be as dull as dirt.

Nor are all those government meetings convened by the likes of John Clese and Guinevere Cramer, the same team the show started with three years ago, minus the Vineyard naiveté. Their chemistry is spectacular. John, age 43, is the quintessential smarty-pants. Apple-cheeked Guinevere, 31, is sugar and spice and everything devilish. Together on set – and off – they’re Regis and Kelly on too much free coffee from The Black Dog, bantering about the most banal of stuff.

Guinevere: “Oh look, you’ve got on short white socks today, and so do I!”

John: “That’s because I’m getting ready to work out. Did you work out this morning?”

As any regular MNN viewer knows, John and Guinevere resolved at the start of this year to work out every morning. Viewers feel they know everything that’s going on in their lives: John finally sold his house. Someone ran into Guinevere’s car. They goad each other assiduously: Guinevere carps about John’s repetitious appearances in his pink shirt. John affirms to Guinevere that, yes, she looks fat in that sweater.

“A man can’t attack a woman unless she attacks him first,” says John on co-host etiquette. If John gave a dollar to the Island YMCA every time he broke that rule, the future basketball court could be paved with gold. In his more sober line of work, he happens to be the Y’s executive director.

Prior to Plum, the duo’s on-air experience ranged from precious little, for John, to zilch, for Guinevere. Plum hired them on instinct. “We cast a wide net and waited to see who came in the door,” says MacDara.

In came John, a Maryland native turned Bostonian who’d recently moved to the Island. His career track had roamed from nonprofits to high finance and back. John was growing weary of commuting to work in Boston and was looking for a gig here. Guinevere, a confessed Today show junkie, was a tag-along spouse from Philadelphia whose husband had just joined a Vineyard architectural firm. The former fashion retailer was eager to make social connections. Her husband saw the newspaper ad for a television host and convinced her to give it a shot. Three years later, John and Guinevere are the longest lasting team of hosts in the Plum diaspora.

“I wasn’t necessarily looking for inexperience in a host,” says MacDara, “but I definitely wanted our show to be the antithesis of pre-packaged, disingenuous, formulaic TV.” MacDara wasn’t necessarily looking for wide-eyed wash-ashores either. “John and Guinevere have a healthy, outside-in perspective. Yet they’re committed to living a year-round life here. That’s what gives them legitimacy – but with fresh eyes.” Following a breakup with a long-time partner, it took John many months to sell his house, find a rental, and move, with all the usual Vineyard challenges. That’s legitimacy.

And what could be more legitimate than holding down multiple jobs? While John works the one additional gig, Guinevere works two – as part-time wait staff at Offshore Ale Company and as full-time development director for the Island Affordable Housing Fund. Not coincidentally, Plum will air a live fundraising telethon – “Houses on the Tube” – for IAHF at the end of July.

According to Guinevere, the 24/7-ish work cycle that she and John are into is driven by personality as well as economics. “We’re similar types in that we both like being very involved in the community. Whether I’m helping someone who needs housing or bringing someone the perfect damn hamburger, it makes me feel good. At the same time, I want to get to the point where I can raise children here – it’s really the best place – and have my house be the kind of home I’d really like to be in.”

Their Vineyard roots have grown fast. “It was difficult doing Plum in the beginning,” says Guine-vere. “We didn’t know the hot spots or the hot-button issues.”

 “But neither of us took the position that we did know,” adds John.

Today they know, for the most part, but they’re hardly jaded.

Guinevere: Did you hear about the breach at Norton Point after the last nor’easter?

John: Yes, and thank goodness, because you know who’s going to be protected now? The piping plover!

Guinevere: Oh. My. God. They are so cute.

John: It’s like a gift from the heavens.

Guinevere: Clyde tries to eat them.

John: Clyde your dog? Isn’t that like a federal crime? He’s going to be locked up in jail.

Guinevere: Maybe he’ll go to the Edgartown jail.

John: That’s the jail to go to.

“It takes talent to talk about nothing for twenty minutes and get away with it,” says John.

After the opening host-to-host badinage on Island news and personal adventures, MNN gets down to business with the day’s lineup of guests, discussing topics ranging from the service-oriented (e.g., small business loans) to the entertaining (high school theater) to the civic-minded (conservation issues, town elections), all with a Vineyard bent. For Guinevere, making a difference is what resonates most. After Cynthia Hatt appeared on the show with some orphaned pets from the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, “she called to report that all the animals on the show had been adopted,” says animal-lover Guinevere. “It’s nice to know your show can make an impact like that.”

Gone are the days when MNN had to hunt and beg for guests; now plenty of would-be guests and topics come to MNN. The show has gradually honed a cadre of regular editors: Richard Paradise of the Martha’s Vineyard Film Society previews movies coming to the Island; Matthew Stackpole of the Martha’s Vineyard Museum brings in the “artifact of the week”; veteran realtor Alan Schweikert assesses the ebb and flow of the housing market; mild-mannered garden center proprietor Paul Mahoney offers seasonal gardening ideas, struggling valiantly to keep pace with interviewer John, who flits from shrub to shrub like a crazed bee.

“People love to see people on TV that they know and places they can reference,” says Guinevere.

Much as MNN aims to shine its biggest light on everyday Islanders and their interests, the show would love to coax celebrities of wider renown out of their Island hideouts and onto the airwaves. Thus far, MNN has hosted the likes of best-selling author Linda Fairstein and journalist Charlayne Hunter-Gault. The late Art Buchwald twice allowed Plum’s cameras into his home, and Plum occasionally snags interviews with visiting notables like actor Richard Dreyfuss, for example. John will be lucky if he ever gets a second interview with actress Patricia Neal, after introducing her on air as Patricia O’Neal.

“She told me, ‘You obviously don’t know my name!’” says John, affecting a reasonable impression of Neal’s signature voice.

John and Guinevere have become world-famous-on-the-Vineyard in their own right, and they enjoy being greeted in the street by MNN fans. The downside is: “You have to be nice all the time,” says John. “You can’t get angry in the grocery store. Someone’s always watching you.” And maybe catching you: Soon after making an on-air commitment to a twenty-one-day juice fast, Guinevere was spotted in front of Leslie’s Drug Store, eating a bagel.

“I’m not sure the two of us would ‘work’ in Nantucket,” says John. “People put on their bow ties over there. And we’re not glamorous and gorgeous enough for Miami.”

While MNN has expanded its summer season broadcasts from four to seven original shows a week, it has streamlined each segment from ninety to sixty minutes. On Mondays, Tuesdays, and Wednesdays, the show now airs from the courtyard of Edgartown’s Colonial Inn, steered by a second team of hosts – new hires Alex Friedman, an educator, angler, and lifelong Vineyarder, and Jane Loutzenhiser, a landscaper and WMVY deejay who moved to the Island two years ago. “But we’ve kept prime time,” boasts John. “The new people will be after our slots! They’ll want to be us!”

In Plum’s early days, Vineyard advertisers hardly stampeded through the door to embrace the new media outlet. That wouldn’t have been “Vineyard.” But now the list of Plum sponsors and “partners” reads almost like the membership roster of the Chamber of Commerce. Network sponsors, for their part, gravitated to Plum from the start. They include wealth management services and dealers in private jets, heeding the blatant call of the network to “America’s most affluent and influential audience.” MacDara nevertheless grimaces at media characterizations of the network as television for the rich.

“There are a couple of ways to look at the Plum concept,” says the former CNN producer, ad man, and web developer. “Plum is a smart and intriguing business proposition, aggregating high-net-worth individuals where they congregate, when they’re relaxing and more receptive to new ideas. Yet in a broader sense, technology costs less than it did five or ten years ago, and that simply means it’s easier to create local, independent stations that can compete with the big networks for advertising dollars.”

“Our goal is to celebrate the community, not just hedge to the rich,” says Plum Vineyard producer Kelly Elverson. MNN appeals to the masses, she says. Island Guide slants toward tourists. Plum Life, which features up-close-and-personal interviews with consummate Vineyarders like author Cynthia Riggs and Justice of the Peace John Alley, is intended mainly for Islanders “or those who consider themselves thus.” That’s Entertaining, a new show on
how to play host with the most, seems a natural for seasonal residents.

The funny thing is, Plum’s various audiences haven’t been limiting themselves to “their” programs. There’s much more crossover viewing than Plum people ever anticipated. “A local guy in a restaurant told me he likes to watch the Guide show,” says Kelly, a Nantucket native. “He says he tends to forget all that the Island has to offer.”

Snapshots sends Plum correspondents out and about to cover Island happenings, off-season and on. “Even if you live here, you still get excited about the Ag Fair,” says Guinevere. “People say they live vicariously through us.”

Plum is still finding itself. An announcement about applications for affordable housing recently ran on the ticker beneath footage of imposing wine chateaux in France. Come fall, the station will surely air endless hours of football reruns again. And occasionally, the day’s weather forecast is accidentally yesterday’s weather forecast. But one day, Paul Mahoney will outwit his nemesis John Clese. On another day, a viewer will see her neighbor on Plum Life.

And sooner or later, someone will spot his own car coming down State Road, caught by Plum cameras at the Mansion House. For these reasons and then some, Vineyarders of every stripe are likely to stay tuned.