All write now
Writers Victoria Asare-Archer, Daf James, Georgia Lee, Sydney Sybilia and Danielle Ward reflect on making their breakout series – including shows like Daddy Issues and Missing You – and reveal how they balance their own ideas with audience tastes.
While the television industry continues to navigate numerous challenges in the post-Peak TV era, the demand for original, authentic and globally appealing content remains. For writers breaking out with their first major series, it’s one challenge to work out what commissioners are looking for, but it’s quite another to predict the tastes of viewers.
“As a writer, you’re always speaking to your own emotional truth. What is the story you want to tell?” says Victoria Asare-Archer, the writer behind Missing You, Netflix’s most recent English-language Harlan Coben adaptation. “Therefore, I’m not writing a story for the audience. It’s the most honest, truthful and interesting way for that character’s journey to be told.
“I don’t think most writers write to the audience, but you know what they want and what they expect. You are really making sure you’ve got the truth at the heart of it. If I’m going to spend three years working on a series, what is the thing I want to spend three years writing and thinking and talking about? It’s finding the right fit for your world.”
“You’re going to be working on it for four or five years, so if I’m going to embark on something, I have to absolutely feel like this is the most important story for me to tell. Otherwise it’s not worth it for me,” says Daf James, who wrote BBC drama Lost Boys & Fairies. “In a way, that Lost Boys got made is a minor miracle, because it’s not genre. There’s none of the dead bodies you would usually expect in dramas.
“People are talking about wanting crime, and where do I, as a writer, fit into that? I want to write stories about love, and that is all I want to do, because we live in a really bloody dark world at the moment. But it’s interesting because audiences seem to lap up the dark as well. But I can’t sit in the dark as a writer. So I want to write stories that go to the darkness, but ultimately come out into the light.”
Lost Boys & Fairies, which debuted in June last year, tells the story of Gabriel and his partner Andy as they embark on a difficult and emotional journey to adoption. But though it uses magical realism and music to elevate the story, that it is a relationship drama at its heart makes the three-parter an example of the way James seeks to use genre as a Trojan horse to tell the stories he really wants to tell. The show is produced by Duck Soup Films and distributed by All3Media International.
“To be in a procedural space or in a genre space and then to try to say something original there is great,” says Georgia Lee, a co-creator and co-writer of Welsh drama Ar y Ffin (Mudtown). “Actually, and it’s kind of an obvious thing to say, but people really just want quality as well. And everyone’s on the hunt for authenticity. But the way that authenticity really enters art is through people who can make something really good quality.”
“Of course we have to think about the audience,” adds Sydney Sibilia, an Italian filmmaker who has moved into TV with series Hanno ucciso l’Uomo Ragno: La leggendaria storia degli 883 (Accidentally Famous). “But it’s easy for me because I’m the audience too. So if I like this stuff, I think someone else will like that stuff. But when you think about a show or a movie, it is not about what the people like in that moment but what people will like three years from now. That’s the hardest thing. But if you follow the art, for me, that’s always the solution.”
“Don’t look backwards at the last [successful] thing. What’s the next thing? What’s the new thing?” Lee says. “There’s a tendency to say, ‘This worked before, so let’s just try to do 10 different versions of this.’ That’s not how you’re going to make something really exciting.”
A stand-up comedian who has written on shows including Brassic and In The Long Run, Danielle Ward’s first original series came in the shape of BBC comedy Daddy Issues, which debuted last year. It centres on Gemma (Aimee Lou Wood), whose life is turned upside down when she discovers she is pregnant, while simultaneously dealing with her sad dad Malcolm (David Morrissey) following the collapse of his marriage.
Distributed by Fremantle, the Fudge Park-produced series was subsequently renewed for a second season, and while Ward is striving to make the show more ambitious this time around, she says she won’t be influenced by the audience when it comes to penning the new episodes – or what she thinks they might find funny.
“There are lots of comedians who very much write to their audience want, typically stand-up comedians. I doggedly refuse to write any joke that I don’t find funny,” Ward says. “Some of them I find funnier than others. But I will not put any comedy in my show that I don’t personally find funny. That’s a route to ruin as a comedy.
“A lot of the time it’s just my taste. But it’s less about whether a joke’s funny or not because it’s so subjective that there’s no point really arguing. That’s where I think it is really good to have other brains involved. But if someone on the team gave me a joke that wasn’t funny, I wouldn’t put it in the script.”
“My series made people nervous,” jokes Asare-Archer, who had partnered with producer Quay Street Productions and head writer Danny Brocklehurst on another Coben adaptation, Stay Close, before taking the lead on Missing You. “It was the first time we did a love story. The challenge is that audiences don’t have a problem with being nervous with new ideas – they like risks and different things. It’s commissioners. The audience want anything; they just want an exciting idea. They really want love stories. It’s that commissioning layer [at the broadcasters] where maybe there is more nervousness and reluctance to take risks. But artists want to do it and the audience wants to watch it.”
At a time when budgets are tightening, commissioners could be forgiven for showing caution when ordering new projects, preferring to adapt existing material with a built-in audience or refreshing, rebooting and reimagining classic series.
When James was trying to pitch a film more than a decade ago, he got so “fed up” with rejection that he decided to turn it into a novel. When it then won some awards, “the people who weren’t interested in the film were like, ‘Oh, we want to turn it into a film now.’ [IP] is like that concrete, tangible thing that someone can go, ‘Oh, it exists already, so I don’t have to fear it.’”
Mudtown may not have been based on any IP, but it was inspired by Lee’s own experience as a magistrate. Commissioned by Welsh-language broadcaster S4C and UKTV’s U&Alibi, it was shot back-to-back in Welsh and English and is produced by Severn and distributed by All3Media International.
It stars Erin Richards as experienced magistrate Claire Lewis Jones, who faces personal turmoil while presiding over cases at Newport Magistrates’ Court. When Ned Humphries, a childhood friend of Claire’s daughter Beca (Lauren Morais), faces arson charges, Claire’s loyalty to her community is put to the test. Matters are made worse when Saint Pete (Tom Cullen) – a man who shares a close personal history with Claire – appears on the scene. As she delves deeper into the case, and suspicions grow around Beca’s bad-boy boyfriend Sonny (Lloyd Meredith), Claire uncovers a web of criminality that could put her and her family at risk, with the lines between her maternal instincts and her commitment to the rule of law becoming blurred.
“Obviously there’s a massive preference for IP, franchises and things that already have a built-in audience,” says Lee, who wrote the series with Hannah Daniel. “But from the writer’s point of view, it’s fantastic to be free to just take your story where it wants to go.”
“Sometimes IP is restrictive if you actually don’t really want that IP but you just want to be a little bit assured that something exists already,” Asare-Archer says. “We’re all continually wrestling with what it actually wants to be. Do you really want that product or should I just do a brand new one originally and allow it to be its own thing?”
Sibilia’s Accidentally Famous also takes its inspiration from real life, in this case the formation of band 883, as teenagers Max and Mauro embrace their shared love of music to compose their first songs. Sibilia is the creator, writer and director on the project, which is produced by his own Groenlandia production company and distributed by Banijay Rights.
“It’s my first TV show. It’s a real story about this very famous Italian band [making] their first album,” he explains. “It’s a true story. But it’s a story about friendship, and it’s about following dreams.”
Sibilia is now working on season two of the series, just as Ward is also making season two of Daddy Issues at a time when comedy is a particularly difficult genre to find success in.
“It’s tough because there have been some good things that have been cancelled after one season,” she acknowledges. “The BBC make fewer things but they seem to back them a bit more, like Such Brave Girls and Things I Should Have Done, both of which were brilliant but probably aren’t hitting that big audience. So there is a will there to bring stuff back and let it have a bit of breathing space.”
Writers, like everybody in the industry, find themselves in a “tough” moment, Ward adds, but she recognises how fortunate she has been to continue to work in television over the past few years. She will also make her directing debut with the first episode of Daddy Issues season two.
“I’m in a really lucky position that I’ve had this work. I’ve been in a position where I’m always working, which is great. Especially on this season of Daddy Issues, I’ve just been head down, sat in an office or sat on some steps in the kitchen. I just need to get it done. But I am aware it’s very difficult at the moment, and hopefully it’ll pick up.
“Having a career where you are constantly chasing work is really difficult. But also, we chose this career. It’s quite a privileged career to have, so I’m not going to sit there and say, ‘Why isn’t anybody listening to me?’”
Lee also feels lucky to have made an original series in the past 12 months. “It just goes back to that thing of trying to do your best work and trying to do something truthful. As an artist, you can’t really control the contraction or these big, meta things, so you just have to keep doing your best work,” she says.
The challenge for writers, as ever, is to continue developing multiple projects in the hope that one will land a series order. “It’s hard, because everything you’re working on is the do or die, it’s your dream project, but you can’t have one of those. You’ve got to have multiple ones,” Asare-Archer says. “It’s really about finding that space and balance so you’ve got as many irons in the fire as you can handle.”
As a result, “I feel strongly that you need an agent,” she continues. “It’s such a tough job and you need as much protection around you [as possible]. There are ways to get in without agents and there are schemes but, because it’s a big job, the more support you have, it’s worth getting an agent first. It’s going to be five years of your life, so the more support you can have before entering that process, the better.”
James secured his agent through his theatre work. “But I was able to get my tone and my artistic voice out in front of audiences,” he says. “Then because audiences were watching my work, it was gaining interest and I could get an agent from it.”
Training schemes can also open the door to a screenwriting career. But his most valuable piece of advice to aspiring writers is to get a spec script ready. “That’s the main thing,” he says. “Get your spec script, the thing that is your voice and goes, ‘This is who I am.’”
This article is based in part on interviews and sessions from Content London 2024.
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tagged in: Accidentally Famous, Ar y Ffin, Daddy Issues, Daf James, Danielle Ward, Georgia Lee, Hanno ucciso l’Uomo Ragno: La leggendaria storia degli 883, Lost Boys & Fairies, Missing You, Mudtown, Sydney Sybilia, Victoria Asare-Archer