Adapting to Survivors
Australian series The Survivors blends a murder mystery with character drama to explore the fallout from a past tragedy within a small coastal town. Exec producers Tony Ayres and Andrea Denholm open the book on this Netflix adaptation of Jane Harper’s novel.
After just three days on Netflix, Australian drama The Survivors drew 5.3 million views and crashed into the Top 10 lists of 76 countries around the world. Just don’t count executive producer Tony Ayres among the viewers.
“I’m excited and happy that people are watching it – and it puts my viewing habits to shame, because when a new show drops, I never watch it straightaway,” he laughs. “It usually takes me about six months to get to a new show, so the fact that so many people are watching it within days of its release is both gratifying and shaming. You never know, when you make a work, how it’s going to be received, or whether it’s going to be read the way you intend it to be read. So far, so good.”
Of course, Ayres is already well versed with the six-part series, which debuted globally on June 6 and transports audiences down under to Evelyn Bay, where the close-knit community is still reeling from a past tragedy.
The story centres on Kieran Elliott, whose life changed forever when his brother, Finn Elliott, and Toby Gilroy drowned and a young girl, Gabby Birch, went missing. Fifteen years later, his guilt resurfaces as he returns to his hometown with his young family. But when the body of a Bronte Laidler is found on the beach, the town is once again rocked, and the investigation into her death threatens to reveal long-held secrets, the truth about the missing girl, and a killer among them.
Based on the novel of the same name by ‘Queen of Crime’ Jane Harper (The Dry), the series comes from Ayres’ own Tony Ayres Productions (TAP – Fires, Clickbait, Stateless) and boasts a cast including Charlie Vickers (The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power), Yerin Ha (Bridgerton), Robyn Malcolm (After the Party), Damien Garvey (Nautilus) and Jessica De Gouw (The Couple Next Door).
When he read Harper’s “clever” novel, Ayres loved its twists and turns, and found the storytelling “incredibly engaging.” Yet there was one immediate problem. “There was probably about 90 minutes of screentime in the book. Its natural form would be as a feature film,” he tells DQ. “But because I was invited on to this project as a writer to turn it into a six-episode TV series, it became clear to me very early on that we would have to invent plot.”
He also wanted to honour the source material, “so a lot of the plot we came up with was a natural consequence of an idea of Jane’s in the book. We just ended up spinning it out further.”
Originally developed by Matchbox Pictures, part of the Universal International Studios group that also backs TAP, it was adopted by Ayres’ company once he came on board and responded to the project. He then set to work with fellow executive producer Andrea Denholm to build a characterful family drama with a murder mystery that propels viewers through the story.
One of the challenges of making the series was balancing the mystery aspects, the red herrings and the elements you need to have in a murder mystery with the character drama. “You have to get people in at the start, but the work Tony and the writers have done in developing those characters, they’re just so rich and layered and complicated and evoke so many feelings in the audience,” Denholm says. “A lot of people are bingeing the whole series, which is testament that Tony and the writers got that balance right.”
“The thing about murder mysteries,” adds Ayres, “is that like any genre, you have a basic promise of what’s going to be in the packet. Then what you can do as an artist is add value to that. Our main concerns were that we got the murder mystery right and that we had something to offer the audience. Andrea and I both like character stories, that’s our taste and our sensibilities, so we wanted to bring that into it.”
Reading the novel, Ayres was particularly struck by the relationship between Kieran (Vickers) and his mother Verity (Malcolm), which he describes as quite “cool” in the book. So when it came to the adaptation, he wanted to “amp it up,” and Verity becomes a forceful presence in the show as she continues to grieve for the loss of Kieran’s brother and fume at Kieran’s own disappearance in the wake of the tragedy.
“In the book, you can understand Kieran’s survivor’s guilt because you have the advantage of prose. You have the internal monologue. Whereas in the drama, you need someone to dramatise his survivor guilt. That’s certainly what Verity does,” Ayres notes. “She’s almost like the antagonist in the story.
“The other thing that really resonated for me was this idea of these parents who were all living with this grief. These parents have all lost kids and are all trying to process it in their different ways. The kinds of stories we tell ourselves when we’re dealing with big emotions and big upheavals were interesting. Andrea and I and the writers had really great discussions about all the themes. The job of the show was to try to knit those things together.”
Those themes include loss and grief, specifically parental grief, as well as family. “Realised so beautifully in the series as well is this idea of young men being valorised when they die and young women being forgotten, and that speaks to themes around gender violence and the conditions we maybe have come to accept that create that situation,” Denholm says.
“It forces us to have a look at that. What is it about how we treat young men versus how we treat young women that allows for that to happen? That was really important to us from the beginning, and again realised so beautifully.”
The series is also populated by ghosts. “Keeping Bronte [Shannon Berry] alive through the show, even though she’s the victim of the murder, and making Gabby [Eloise Rothfield] a full character through Mia [Ha] and through Trish [her mum, played by Catherine McClements], those things mattered a lot to us in the development and the making of the show.”
“We didn’t want to make a ‘dead girl’ murder mystery, where the death of the girl was purely for entertainment value,” Ayres adds. “We wanted to actually reflect upon it.”
Ayres was joined in the writers room by Belinda Chayko (Fires), Christian White (Clickbait), Peter Templeman and Alberto Di Troia, who co-wrote episode two with him.
Filming then took place across Tasmania, the island located 150 miles south of mainland Australia, with Evelyn Bay recreated in the coastal town Eaglehawk Neck, close to the state capital of Hobart.
Arguably the toughest scenes were saved for last, as footage of Finn and Toby’s fateful boat trip to the towering caves that border the bay, amid a treacherous storm, were captured at the end of the shoot. But rather than send cast and crew out to sea for real – a health and safety nightmare – the cave system was recreated inside a studio. The caves were constructed out of concrete and soft padding and placed inside a water tank, while a hydraulic system was incorporated to mimic tides and ensure the waves continually crashed against the rocks – and the actors.
“We always knew the caves were a massive part of the story and we would have to be able to create those caves in some way,” Denholm says. “We looked at lots of different options and we knew we had Netflix with us on that journey. That was the biggest production challenge, building massive caves to create storm scenes.
“It was pretty amazing watching the build. There were special water tanks built that the caves sat in, and then hundreds of thousands of litres of water would be sent down these enormous shoots to create the waves. It was phenomenal.”
“I’ve never done anything like that,” says Ayres. “Most of the things I’ve done in the past involve people sitting at dinner parties. So this was next level. Even on Clickbait, we didn’t do anything like these caves. It was exciting to do.”
With a number of internationally recognisable actors leading the cast, The Survivors certainly has an audience appeal. But for the producers, it was also important that the ensemble cast worked well together and complemented each other’s acting styles.
“They’re all truth-seeking actors,” says Ayres, “so they work really well together because they’re all actors who are very much in the moment and who listen to each other. We managed to put together a group who were incredibly generous with each other as well, because every actor at some point in the show had to do something. They all had their big moments and they all supported each other through it.”
Those big moments arrive as secrets are revealed about what really happened 15 years ago, and relationships are repaired or irrevocably broken. It’s all part of the character drama that spills out of a story that is ostensibly a murder mystery, or at least that’s what Ayres and Denholm would have you believe.
“Both Andrea and my taste is in the drama space, but these days you have to Trojan Horse your interests into a form that is more easily consumed,” Ayres says. “The thing about the murder mystery is that, as long as you can lay down the foundations and fulfil the promise, you can actually occupy the space in between with lots of other things. For us, it was always about making a really rich, complicated family soap.”
“The crew was just exceptional,” adds Denholm. “Everything was always dealt with so graciously, because everyone was so invested in the show and each other. It was a really good production in that sense. There were some cold, challenging nights, but that’s all part of the delight of making a show with big production values and big ambitions.”
Like that? Watch this! Suggested by AI, selected by DQ
Top of the Lake: Jane Campion’s drama set in a remote New Zealand town follows a detective investigating the disappearance of a pregnant teenager, delving into dark secrets and community tensions.
Mare of Easttown: Kate Winslet stars as a small-town US detective investigating a local murder while grappling with personal trauma and community secrets.
Deadwater Fell: This British series follows the aftermath of a tragedy in Scotland, as secrets and suspicions emerge and the truth about a seemingly perfect family starts to unravel.
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tagged in: Andrea Denholm, Jane Harper, Matchbox Pictures, Netflix, The Survivors, Tony Ayres, Tony Ayres Productions, Universal International Studios