Here’s the trailer for season two of Northern Ireland-set police drama Blue Lights, launching on BBC One and BBC iPlayer on April 15.
Described as an authentic, gripping and darkly funny drama about ordinary people doing an extraordinary job, season one followed three new PSNI probationary recruits as they navigated their way through their first few months in a uniquely complex place to be a response police officer.
The season two cast includes Siân Brooke, Martin McCann, Katherine Devlin, Nathan Braniff, Joanne Crawford, Andi Osho and Hannah McClean.
Blue Lights is co-created, written and directed by Declan Lawn and Adam Patterson, co-created and produced by Stephen Wright of Two Cities Television and co-created and co-produced by Louise Gallagher of Gallagher Films with support from Northern Ireland Screen.
The executive producers are Stephen Wright (Two Cities Television), Louise Gallagher (Gallagher Films), Declan Lawn and Adam Patterson and the BBC executive producer is Nick Lambon.
BBC Studios distributes the series internationally.
Renegade Nell is the swashbuckling Disney+ series from Happy Valley and Gentleman Jack creator Sally Wainwright. Star Louisa Harland and director Ben Taylor lift the lid on teaming up for a show that blends action and drama with humour and a sprinkling of magic.
From crime dramas Happy Valley and Scott & Bailey to period series Gentleman Jack and comedy-tinged Last Tango in Halifax, award-winning writer Sally Wainwright isn’t afraid to jump between genres. But for her latest series, Renegade Nell, she’s breaking the boundaries of action, drama, comedy and fantasy to tell the story of an 18th century highwaywoman.
“I am a long-standing Sally Wainwright mega-fan, so when I got pitched this project with a top-line elevator pitch of ‘period highwaywoman with superpowers, action-fantasy for Disney,’ and it’s written by Sally Wainwright, that combination of words was so extraordinary that I was just desperate to read it,” lead director Ben Taylor tells DQ. “It isn’t a genre or really a tone you’d imagine her exploring.
“But at the same time, there are elements within it and how these characters speak and operate that is quintessential Sally Wainwright. Nell as a hero is the logical next extension from Catherine Cawood in Happy Valley and Anne Lister in Gentleman Jack. It’s amazing how it’s several centuries apart from Happy Valley, but it feels like it’s from the same voice.”
The eight-part series blends a murder mystery and family drama with a historical setting and Wainwright’s familiar sense of humour. It’s also a “swashbuckling romp,” says Louisa Harland, who plays Nell, while a fantastical element appears in the shape of Nick Mohammed’s magical spirit Billy Blind.
“It’s largely about family and family responsibility, and love and pressure with siblings,” says Taylor. “It is a fairly clear feminist piece in terms of how Nell is challenging and pushing and pulling at institutions and the patriarchy. It’s also anarchic, which I think Sally writes well. There’s an anarchic punk quality to Nell that is potentially out of place in this time period but, because of that, it feels incredibly fresh and new.”
Debuting tomorrow on Disney+ worldwide, the Lookout Point-produced show stars Harland as Nell Jackson, a quick-witted and courageous young woman who finds herself framed for murder and unexpectedly becomes the most notorious highwaywoman in 18th century England. But when Billy appears – giving her seemingly superhuman powers – Nell realises her destiny is bigger than she ever imagined.
Frank Dillane also stars as Nell’s fickle friend and sometime adversary Charles Debereux, a charming rogue with a dangerous alter ego, while Adrian Lester plays the Earl of Poynton, a master political schemer and manipulator who joins forces against Nell with Sofia Wilmot (Alice Kremelberg), a young widow who wants power and independence at any cost.
Joely Richardson plays eccentric newspaper magnate Lady Eularia Moggerhanger, while Pip Torrens is Lord Blancheford, the father of Sofia and her feckless, bullying brother Thomas (Jake Dunn). Ényì Okoronkwo is Rasselas, a spirited stable boy who joins Nell and her sisters on the run in his own bid for freedom, with Bo Bragason and Florence Keen as Nell’s two younger sisters Roxy and George. Craig Parkinson plays Nell’s kind-hearted father Sam, the owner of The Talbot inn.
The series marks the first leading role for Irish actor Harland, who is best known for her appearances in comedies such as Derry Girls, Big Boys and drama The Deceived. “Louisa has been such a trooper,” Taylor says of the star. “Like me, she’s come from a background where this feels like a departure for her, but she was a north star to the cast and crew around her because she got it and she was a brilliant partner with me in terms of finding the tone and maintaining it.
“The character of Nell was on the page, but she was like a bag of contradictions. She had to be tough and brusque, empathetic and physical but vulnerable. When you’re the titular character like this, you need to find somebody who embodies that – and she embodies the spirit of it. She’s gifted comically, very gifted dramatically, and people haven’t seen that before. And then in terms of physicality, she got put through the wringer on it.”
Before the cameras were rolling, Harland endured three months of training that involved-wire work, conditioning, horse riding and sword fighting. “And she just threw herself into it,” Taylor says. “She didn’t have many days off during shooting, but the stunt crew really took her in. She was one of their gang, and that really paid dividends because then you got another family on set that really had your back.”
Harland was filming the final season of Derry Girls when she auditioned, and jokes that being unable to fly to London for a recall “made me look unavailable.” But she was delighted to land the role, even though she might not have seemed the obvious choice.
“I couldn’t ride a horse. I’m not from Tottenham. You won’t find me in a gym,” she says. “My parents were like, ‘What a random choice. They went for you?’ I’m so pleased they did. And it was even more fun because it was such a challenge but yet, in that same breath, even more terrifying. I was terrified, I cried every day, but I loved every second. I don’t think I had a bad day on set.”
In a series blending folklore with elements of “Pirates of the Caribbean, The Favourite and The Goonies,” Harland says Nell is “absolutely a force,” a stubborn and flawed woman who is hungry to provide a better life for herself and her sisters. “Sally writes such real, raw, flawed women and adding the fantasy element on top of that is just magic.
“She goes through a series of unfortunate events, but all in pursuit of justice. Class is at the centre of this, and Sally’s written that so beautifully. Then towards the end of the series, the press is being introduced and it’s just a fascinating comment on all things in society. Obviously it’s a period piece, 1704, but it comments a lot on today.”
During rehearsals, Harland worked closely with stunt coordinators James Embree, Abbi Collins and her stunt double Melissa Humler, honing her conditioning and horse-riding skills every day. “They’re unbelievable people, and I have such a newfound respect for that side of our industry. I don’t think I would be anything without them,” she says. “I can’t ride a bike and I can now ride a horse.
“Filming was incredibly vigorous because it was long days, long hours. It was brutal. There were a lot of outdoor and night shoots. I spent two weeks with my face in a puddle in the middle of the night, but I loved every second of it.
The most frustrating part for Harland was not being able to work with Mohammed – a “genius and brilliant” actor who filmed separately in front of a green screen so Billy Blind could appear tiny next to Nell – while she was also restricted in the number of stunts she could do on screen. “But my stunt double was so incredible,” she says. “So if you ever see me do something incredibly cool, it probably wasn’t me. It was Melissa. She is Renegade Nell. She’s the real deal.”
Taylor is best known as the lead director and an executive producer of Netflix’s British series Sex Education, which is notable for its blend of Welsh scenery, 80s-inspired costumes and US high school aesthetics. He was instrumental in creating the unique world of that series, and Renegade Nell called on him to perform a similar task.
“It is definitely the hardest, most labour-intensive part of it, but it is also the biggest joy of this,” Taylor says. “I’ve been spoilt with Sex Education and this, where to come in and design and build a world with your heads of department and your designers is just easily the most fun part of it.”
Part of the appeal of signing on for Renegade Nell was that the prospect scared him. “It’s everything I’d ever dreamt of as a kid to be involved in,” he says. “It was action, fantasy, VFX, wire work. I’ve always been a big Disney fan, I get the Disney DNA, and this is definitely a progression. Louisa as Nell is also leaps ahead in terms of what an expected Disney hero is. That’s hugely thanks to Sally’s writing, obviously, but I knew what I would want to watch on Disney and it felt like an opportunity to have a play with some really exciting material.”
Taylor describes himself as an “odd” partner for a period adventure, admitting he might not have been the first director thought of to lead the series. But when he pitched his vision for the show, he remarked how funny it is – a common yet understated element of Wainwright’s work – and he subsequently landed the job.
“It’s a really funny show, and she was so happy to hear that,” he says. “A lot of people don’t tend to use that word as a way to describe stuff that she has done, because people tend to lean towards the dramatic elements of Sally’s writing. But because I come from a comedy background, I always need a way in via humour. When I read scripts that are dry and devoid of humour, I’m at a loss – and this knew its comic tone.
“Everybody uses the word ‘grounded’ when they pitch, but doing grounded with fantasy and action, and essentially superhero lore, is difficult. Probably the thing that I’m most proud of is that it makes sense. It feels like all the answers are leading to the same show. Because there are so many elements and aspects to it, it could easily be a bit of a sort of smorgasbord. And I think it feels cohesive and it’s certainly mad – it definitely has a mad streak within it, but it feels like it knows what it wants to be.”
With ambitions to ensure British-made Renegade Nell didn’t feel like a “poor cousin” compared with US series on the Disney+ platform, Taylor sought “big visuals and confident design” for the show, which is unusual in that it isn’t based on any prior IP, such as a book or graphic novel.
That meant costume designer Tom Pye, production designer Anna Pritchard and DOP Oli Russell were all encouraged to be “bold” in their work, which is set against a backdrop of natural landscapes including Epping Forest, Ivinghoe Beacon and Windsor Park, studio-built sets such as the interior of The Talbot, and shoots on location at Hampton Court Palace, Hatfield House and the Old Royal Naval College.
Filming at numerous stately homes across the UK, Taylor had to find a new way to shoot historic buildings that had often been seen on screen before. But the discovery of one previously unknown property, a private residence, enabled them to build the entire Tottenham set that features in episode one.
Yet with Renegade Nell also doubling as a road movie, the nature of the show’s dynamic storyline meant many sets and locations weren’t used more than once. Fight choreographer Embree was also hugely influential when it came to the way the show moves in terms of the action sequences, which include street fights, brawls on the roof of horse-drawn carriages and numerous chases involving the actors on horseback.
“One of the toughest things, but the most fun, is we were inventing our own rules for the physics of these superpowers, and it was a real head-scratcher,” says Taylor. “Can Nell jump high? Yes. Can she jump on top of this stagecoach? Yes. Does she get any injuries? Yes. So you design this superhero who takes the knocks but, as soon as the power of Billy exits, she’s fucked. She feels every punch she’s just received.
“We were always very wary of a ‘Tinkerbell effect’ where we’re on Disney and they’ve got a 100-year history of magical things. We wanted to find a blunt, heavy, real-world version of this. And part of that was mine and Sally’s anxiety of doing a fantasy show for the first time. We wanted to make it feel as real to us as possible, and that did influence the way we shot it.”
But working for Disney, Taylor was minded of creating a series accessible for family viewing and says the production was “on a tight leash” in terms of hitting a UK 12A rating, meaning a film screening in cinemas is appropriate for those 12 and over, while those under 12 are permitted if accompanied by an adult.
“When you’re dealing in horror and action, we were trying to push to the hardest end of a 12 we could, but they were good with us and gave us some room in certain places,” he says. “They want a show you can watch and share with your family, and one of my favourite things is that it feels like family viewing fare.
“It’s going to shock you and it’s going to scare you in places. But I’ve got two young boys and to know that I’ve made a show I can finally watch with them that isn’t about sex and teenagers is a really big thing for me. It’s hard to categorise, but it’s a lot of fun.”
US streamer MGM+ has ordered an adaptation of George R Stewart’s sci-fi novel Earth Abides, with Alexander Ludwig (Vikings) set to star.
Ludwig plays Ish, a brilliant but solitary young geologist living a semi-isolated life who awakens from a coma only to find that there is no one left alive but him.
A plague of unprecedented virulence has swept the globe, and though there are a few scattered survivors, there are no rules. His journey is to learn the difference between sanctuary and survival and to open his heart to love if he is to find meaning in his life after the great machine of civilisation has broken down.
Created by Todd Komarnicki (Sully), the series comes from MGM+ Studios and executive producers Kearie Peak and Lighthouse Productions’ Michael Phillips and Juliana Maio.
Komarnicki is the writer and showrunner. Additional writers include Karen Janszen, Tony Spiridakis, Evan Hart and Kyle Stephen. Bronwen Hughes is set to direct the pilot and episode two. Rachel Leiterman will direct episodes three and four, and Stephen Campanelli will direct episodes five and six.
Production is set to begin in Vancouver on April 8, with the series slated to premiere on MGM+ in late 2024.
Stanislavs Tokalovs and Teodora Markova, showrunners of Latvian comedy-drama Padomju džinsi (Soviet Jeans), discuss crossing borders with comedy for this story of a rock music fan who starts an illegal clothing line inside a psychiatric hospital.
While communist agencies were naturally concerned with spies and nuclear weapons during the Cold War, the encroachment of Western culture, such as denim jeans and rock music, proved equally problematic.
Latvian comedy-drama Padomju dzinsi (Soviet Jeans) now takes that idea and runs with it, telling the story of a young rock music fan, Renars Rubenis (Karlis Arnolds Avots), who is sent to a psychiatric hospital for political reasons – and begins illegally producing US-style jeans with his inmates. But as Renars floods the black market with his new clothing line, the KGB sets about trying to discover the people behind the business.
An eight-part series set in Latvia’s capital, Riga, in the late 1970s, the show takes its cue from true stories from the time to blend absurdist humour with drama and a love story. Showrunners Stanislavs Tokalovs (What Nobody Can See) and Teodora Markova (Under Cover) wrote the series with Waldemar Kalinowski (What Nobody Can See), while Tokalovs also directs with Juris Kursietis (Modris).
“It was our primary goal to make the series international, and the second thing was to try to explore this period in a different tone,” Markova tells DQ in Berlin, where Soviet Jeans was screened during the Berlinale Series Market ahead of its international premiere at Series Mania in Lille. “The theme is really absurd because we have the jeans and the rock ‘n’ roll versus communism. At the time, propaganda against Western culture wasn’t about nuclear weapons or spies, it was about a pair of pants, so we decided to take this absurdity and try to project it over every situation and detail.
“Most of these asylums were used for political prisoners, and at some point you start thinking that all the people there are perfectly healthy and sane. We were trying to research how the normality is inside the mental institution while the craziness is outside, because the world is crazy.”
Tokalovs picks up: “For people who haven’t experienced the Soviet Union or, like Latvia, occupation by the Soviet Union, it’s very hard to imagine the atrocities, but grounding the tone allows you to be truthful. Then the humour can rise. First of all, you need to trust the story. Only then can you have fun with it.”
The project’s origins stretch back about 10 years, when Tokalovs found inspiration in stories of people who attempted to escape Soviet rule, only to be caught and adjudged by courts to be “crazy,” he says. In one case, an individual was admitted to a psychiatric asylum where illegal goods were being produced in secret.
Tokalovs pitched his story idea to producers, and partnered with co-writer and co-showrunner Markova after they met on a Scripteast course for screenwriters from Central and Eastern Europe. But Markova initially turned him down. “I liked the idea but I had no time,” she says. “It was on the second call I agreed.”
“I was running around with ideas,” Tokalovs says. “But when Teodora came on, she said, ‘Listen guys, what the hell? This is the best idea by far, let’s just work on this.’ It was the one about jeans produced in a mental asylum, but it needed additional work on the main conflict and the character’s journey.”
Mapping out the story together, they worked over numerous Zoom calls as development ran into the Covid lockdowns. “Teodora brings the structure to writing with all of her experience. My process is a little bit more suited to feature films, where I just sit and dwell on my writer’s block and the meaning of life,” Tokalovs jokes. “Teodora is more structured in the writing and brought good structure to the work.”
However, that structure meant that the moment described in the show’s premise – where Renars begins his denim production line – doesn’t occur until episode two. Furthermore, it’s not until the conclusion of episode one that he is whisked away by hospital staff, but that gave the writers the chance to establish the trickster Renars and his theatre group, where he meets and falls for Finnish actress Tina (Aamu Milonoff).
“We wanted to have more time with the love story before they get separated,” Markova explains. “To believe this love story and for it to become really powerful, and to trust Tina is going to stay and work with the gang to save him, we needed space to develop it, and we needed the viewers to want very much for them to be together and for the separation to be painful. In the first draft, we tried to build the setup into the first episode, but it didn’t work. It was very superficial.”
The realisation that the love story was the “backbone” of the series was key to working out how the rest of the drama would unfold. “Before that, we tried playing around with when the hospital is introduced, and it became clear the characters would have to be built up for a full episode,” Tokalovs says.
“It was also to establish the arena,” Markova adds, “because it might be quite unknown for viewers who come from different countries or for younger viewers who know nothing about communism.”
The pair conducted an “enormous” amount of research that fed into the KGB side of the story, as well as the asylum scenes and events within the theatre group – an approach that resonated with their ambition for the series to be truthful and authentic at every pass. Tokalovs’ co-director Kursietis was also an active part of this process, helping to localise the drama in its setting and further supporting the writing process with co-writer Kalinowski.
“We avoided explanatory scenes,” Markova says, “and right from the start, we are into the action, using details as tools to tell the story. We also decided to avoid all kinds of generic information we have seen from other shows or films. For example, in prisons, the currency is usually booze or cigarettes. For our asylum, it was toilet paper, because they had to use newspaper, so trying to find these very specific elements helped us.”
Once Renars enters the medical facility, the story explores how his incarceration turns a trickster and a scammer into a rebel. “It’s the system,” says Markova. “It tries to put him down, but it has the opposite effect.”
With Tina on the outside, the couple also become a target for KGB agents, who hope that Tina might reveal too much about Renars’ jeans operation.
“When Renars goes into the psychiatric institute, there are two clear choices for Tina – go away or stay – and she makes the decision to stay and fight,” Tokalovs says. “You see in the series how the fight happens.”
When it came to shooting, Tokalovs and Kursietis were confident there would be plenty of period-appropriate backdrops to film against, with Latvia under Soviet occupation for around 50 years until the early 1990s
“But it turns out the world is changing very quickly and actually there are not a lot of suitable places, so it was much harder to find something,” Tokalovs says. “Of course, the casting and acting for Juris and me is the most important, and we really devoted time to rehearsing. This is the only way the show can become international, because the level of acting needs to be on par with big shows from Europe and America, where the acting is usually brilliant.
“Coming from this small Eastern European country with a big theatre background, which sometimes really overcooks the acting, the actors need all your attention and time to free themselves from what they think they should do for it to be good. This was the main goal, and it always is when making a film from my country.”
Some locations that do feature in the series include the Laima Clock and the nearby Freedom Monument in central Riga, an area that used to be home to trolley buses but is now pedestrianised.
“On the last shooting day, our base was at the monument. We had the whole square to ourselves with cars and some stuff. I thought, ‘What a cool place to have the last shooting day,’ because it connects everything. Here is the freedom the show is talking about,” says Tokalovs, who also chose to use a “free and active” camera style to film the series. “It’s different from the classic period piece shows. It brings air to it, combined with the writing and the possibility of the humour.”
Produced by Tasse Film and co-financed by Go3 and TV3, Soviet Jeans debuted locally in cinemas – split into three parts – ahead of arriving on television later this spring. Beta Film is handling world sales.
Tokalovs credits Markova with bringing an international flavour to a show that is already a festival favourite. “Having Teodora is the reason. If we’d stayed inside our local bubble, it would have been darker with less humour,” he says.
“Waldemar is born in Poland and lives in US, I’m from Bulgaria and [Tokalovs] is from Latvia,” Markova adds, “so people ask, ‘How are you trying to do comedy that travels? It’s impossible, everyone laughs at different things.’ But this was best for the show because if the three of us found something funny, that meant it had a chance to be understood by an international audience.”
After Albert Camus’ seminal 1947 novel La Peste (The Plague) topped reading charts during the pandemic, writer George-Marc Benamou and director Antoine Garceau reveal why they wanted to adapt it for television and how they have updated the story for modern audiences.
Before La Peste (The Plague) debuted earlier this month on France 2, there was only one opinion director Antoine Garceau wanted to hear. The series is a dystopian retelling of Albert Camus’ classic novel about a plague that sweeps through a city, and Garceau was keen to hear the thoughts of the author’s daughter, Catherine, before it went on general release.
“She’s 78 and living in the South of France in the same house where Albert lived at the end of his life. So I went there to this little city in Provence and showed her the four episodes,” he tells DQ. “She saw one, two, we had a break, no comments. Third episode, fourth episode and, at the end, she applauded and said it was fantastic. She said, ‘Everything you have added, I think my father would have loved.’ For me, it was the best reward.”
The 1947 novel charts a plague that sweeps through the French Algerian city of Oran in 1940, a story that has since been read as an allegory of French resistance to Nazi occupation during the Second World War.
In the series adaptation, the story is transposed to a dystopian future in 2030 and set in an anonymous Mediterranean location in the South of France where a group of residents attempt to save their city as it falls into the grip of a devastating virus outbreak.
It opens as Doctor Bernard Rieux finds the corpse of a rat on his landing, and is then contacted by journalist Sylvain Rambert, who is investigating a series of strange disappearances. Rieux suggests he take a closer look at the mayor, who is willing to do anything to save the summer season – while a mysterious illness begins to spread through the town.
Frédéric Pierrot stars as Rieux, with Hugo Becker as Rambert, Judith Chemla as Lucie Ferrières, Johan Heldenberg as Jean Tarrou and Sofia Essaïdi as Laurence Molinier. Bruno Raddaelli plays the mayor, Pierre Cariou.
For writer Georges-Marc Benamou, who wrote the scripts with Gilles Taurand, the project was a chance to reconnect with a novel that had a profound effect on him during his teenage years.
“The Plague deeply resonated with me, captivating me with its characters and the depiction of an isolated city, alongside its allegory of resistance against Nazism,” he says. “The documentary I made in 2020, The Lives of Albert Camus, surprisingly struck a chord and attracted a vast audience. The feedback from the documentary seemed to align with a period where both society and France were reassessing their perception of Albert Camus. This inspired me to pursue the challenge of adapting The Plague and securing the rights for it.”
The novel has previously been adapted for cinema, but Benamou recognised a serialised approach might better suit the story, a view that also secured the blessing of Catherine Camus. Believing it was “essential for the series to be captivating,” the writers pushed the story into a contemporary setting where it could better reflect “current issues of totalitarianism, distinct from those of 1940.”
Importantly, this decision also meant the story would resonate more strongly with viewers who are less than five years removed from the Covid pandemic – a period of time that pushed Camus’ novel back to the top of the reading charts similarly to how audiences were drawn to watch 2011 film Contagion.
“Consequently, we changed the storyline to a slightly dystopian 2030, situated within a totalitarian regime in a French Riviera city,” Benamou says. “This series’ world has totalitarian – occasionally Putin-like – traits, mirroring a society under extensive surveillance.”
Writing the four-part series, their main focus was on the human aspect, particularly the medical team, and those few key characters who stand out – Rieux, the adventurer Jean Tarrou, Rambert and Father Paneloux. “The plague serves as a lens through which we see various responses to crisis, including bravery, fear, cowardice and monstrosity,” Benamou notes. “It reveals true natures and acts as a metaphor. While some individuals stand firm against the plague, others give in. Yet the threat of the plague always remains.”
The approach he and Taurand chose was one that was never too literal. “The pandemic inspired in us a certain boldness by venturing into dystopian themes to explore impending threats: widespread surveillance, the danger of natural selection and emerging forms of totalitarianism,” he continues. “We felt it was essential to include these elements in our adaptation, given its modern context. They subtly exist in the original novel like lurking shadows, but we felt compelled to highlight and expand their influence. This was particularly important because it added depth to the character interactions, uncovered internal struggles and brought out subtle distinctions. By focusing on the women characters, we aimed to infuse the adaptation with a more human touch.”
Understandably, Benamou says ignoring the real-world pandemic was not an option, and it informed the decision to explore the concepts of Camus’ novel in a dystopian setting. But starting the project during the pandemic, the writers faced intense competition from rival bidders for the rights to the novel.
Benamou and Taurand triumphed, backed by France TV and supported by Catherine Camus. They then sought out Garceau to direct the miniseries, after he previously partnered with Taurand on another adaptation for France 2, Michel Houellebecq’s The Elementary Particles.
“The channel already trusted him, and so did we, of course,” Benamou says. “Therefore, we gave him a lot of freedom in his directorial choices and casting – except for Frédéric Pierrot, who was suggested by Catherine Camus.”
When he was approached about the project, Garceau didn’t hesitate to accept the offer. But other people questioned his decision to work on the series, which is produced by Siècle Productions in coproduction with Umedia and distributed by Oble. “When I started working on the project, everyone said to me, ‘Why are you working on the adaptation of a masterpiece? How are you going to do it?’ I was like, ‘I don’t know. Let’s see.’ I had the shadow of the big man on my back but at some point I said, ‘Albert Camus is behind me; I will try not to betray him but I have to move on.’”
By that point, the scripts had already been written, placing Camus’ novel in a modern surveillance state led by an authoritarian government, though the name of the city is never mentioned, lending credibility to the idea that events in the series could happen anywhere.
In fact, the fictional setting is a jigsaw of locations from across the South of France, including Marseille, Nice and Aix-en-Provence. It also features a mixture of architectural settings, blending the old and the ultra-modern.
“We picked locations that haven’t changed for many years, like where the doctor lives, his office and city hall – locations that are very similar to what they looked like in the 1940s – and also mixed them with very modern locations like the theatre or the surveillance centre,” Garceau says. “It was the same for the outfits of the actors, to be classical and modern, just to keep the idea that we don’t know when it happens.”
The director also wanted to bring additional energy to the brightly coloured, vivid series through his camerawork, using two cameras to capture the large ensemble of characters that have been lifted from the pages of the novel – including new female characters not present in the book.
“We have to move quite fast to move from one to another, but we never to lose them on the way,” he says. “It was a bit tricky. We shot a lot – we had a lot of material.”
His preparations with the actors included a script readthrough with the main cast before breaking them down into workshop groups of two and three. “It’s very important in the preparation process to have time before [filming] because, on the set, if they start asking, ‘When do I say this? What is my motivation?’ you’ve fucked up,” the director says. “You don’t have time for that, so everything has to be clear for the actors before starting the shoot. Once we start, they always have questions, but the idea is to have small questions, not big questions.
“It was really like a theatre troupe. They were happy to work together and liked working together. It’s not always the case, even if the director’s always saying it was a real pleasure shooting everyone. That’s not always the case, but in this case it was really true.”
His greatest challenge was filming the entire series in 42 days, while many scenes feature numerous actors and moments of action. “Every scene was important,” he says. “I’ve done a lot of episodes of Call My Agent and, when we were shooting comedy scenes, people talking in episodes, walking and talking, it was always pleasant to shoot. In The Plague, it was very intense. It was also a bit stressful because of Albert Camus and the responsibility of doing this work, but challenges are meant to be taken.”
That four million viewers tuned into the first two episodes on linear and catch-up is proof it was a challenge worth taking, and that Camus’ novel still resonates with audiences today despite what the world has lived through in recent years.
“I’ve often reflected on the very strong and quite universal sensitivity to the work of Camus,” Benamou says. “Albert Camus stands out as a seminal intellectual figure of the 20th century for his opposition to both Nazi and Stalinist forms of tyranny, setting him apart from contemporaries like Sartre, who had endorsed the Soviet regime and communism. Camus is the man who was right and there is something in his music, in his words, in his approach, in his life story that makes him a brother to mankind.”
Actor and producer Alexandra Rapaport tells DQ about her love of crime series and why she was attracted to playing the protagonist in Swedish supernatural thriller Veronika, in which the title character is haunted by visions that might relate to a recent murder.
Alexandra Rapaport loves crime drama, whether she’s playing a mother drawn into the criminal underworld in Gåsmamman, a lawyer fighting for the victims of sex crimes in Heder (Honour) or a prosecutor called on to solve crimes in picturesque mystery-drama The Sandhamm Murders.
So when the Swedish star and her partners at production company Bigster were presented with the idea behind her latest project, Veronika, she was immediately taken by the idea of a series that blends crime with elements of the supernatural.
Rapaport plays police officer Veronika Gren, a mother-of-two who is struggling with her complicated family life and a secret pill addiction. When strange things start to happen and a dead boy appears in front of her, she thinks she’s lost her mind.
Reluctantly, she is forced to accept the boy is not an illusion – and soon finds herself involved in a murder investigation that goes deeper than anyone in town would like to believe when she learns about the murder of two teenage girls. She then determines to find the link between the two cases before the killer can strike again, but will anyone believe her?
Norwegian actor Tobias Santelmann (Exit) co-stars as Veronika’s husband Tomas, with other cast members including Arvin Kananian, Olle Sarri, Isac Calmroth, Per Graffman, Sarah Rhodin, Wilma Lidén and Eddie Eriksson Dominguez.
“It’s a magnificent crime story and it has a smartness to it, and when you see how everything is put together in the end, it’s a really smart plot,” Rapaport tells DQ. “I really love that kind of crime. Crime is my speciality, and different genres around crime. This is obviously different to Heder, Gåsmamman or The Sandhamm Murders, but it is personal to my life.
“I have lost a lot of people from my childhood and, as a young girl, I had a secret dream that I would have an ability to somehow get in contact with them, so I fell in love with it because I had this wish as a child. I also saw this opportunity for us to make a really high-end production for Bigster. It’s very visual and very beautiful.”
Rapaport is keen to play down the supernatural elements of the series, instead describing it as a psychological drama that starts as a slow-burning story before accelerating towards its conclusion. “But what I like is that we actually don’t know what’s happening. Is it in her head or is it really happening? Is she becoming crazy or not? Does she have this sixth sense, this power? Or she just losing it?
“It’s not like Stranger Things; it’s very real and it’s creepy in another way. I like it when you suspect everyone in the little town she lives in. It’s a murder mystery.”
As an executive producer on the show, Rapaport was a key figure in bringing Veronika to air – but it hasn’t been a straightforward journey. Creators and writers Katja Juras and Anna Ströman first approached Bigster more than five years ago with three ideas for a potential series, and Rapaport “fell in love” with Veronika. A first attempt to secure a broadcast partner fell through when attempts to turn the story into an episodic, case-of-the-week procedural didn’t work. Nordic streamer Viaplay then came on board and commissioned the eight-part serialised story.
But when Viaplay changed strategy last year and pulled back on most of its scripted output, Veronika found a new home at SkyShowtime following a deal with Viaplay Content Distribution. It will now debut in 22 markets across Europe on March 22.
“It was a bumpy road developing the script,” Rapaport admits, “and as an executive producer and lead actor, I have a lot of opinions. That’s sometimes hard for the writers, but I think through this rocky road, we’re all happy in the end. Creative work is hard, it always is, whether you’re on stage or in the script room, but in the end I’m really proud of this. I love it. It’s breathtaking, and I’m not talking about my particular part. The whole show is different, it’s a different type of crime drama.”
That Rapaport would star in the series wasn’t a guarantee either, but as development progressed, “I was like, ‘Yes, I really want to do this because the role is so different from other roles,’” she says. “I always get to play powerful women who are verbally outgoing, and she’s different. She is more silent, more fragile. She keeps her words and thoughts to herself.
“She’s more of an underdog character and she has this history of mental illness. She grew up being different and I think she has like a heart for people who are outcasts in some way because of that.”
The actor then channelled Veronika’s withdrawn personality as she started “searching” for the character and the way she would play her once the cameras started rolling. “I was quiet – but I’m never quiet,” she says. Working with director Jonas Alexander Arnby (War of the Worlds), she found she was better able to get into character when surrounded by the rest of the cast.
“I know some directors make you act off camera, but I like working together with others, and you become someone else through other actors,” she says. “Here I have this character who relates really strongly to other people, who’s highly sensitive, so I really enjoyed it. It felt so good, actually, being this poor woman, this broken woman, because it didn’t affect me so much. I’ve never felt so good. It was really strange.
“She didn’t take anything from me. It was healing to portray her. There are a lot of sorrows in my life and it was healing to express that in front of the camera. Then I was a bit relieved when the camera turned off. I felt lighter, and I love working with Jonas.”
Filmed on location in Dannemora, Gimo and Österbybruk, the show’s rural and forest locations complement its otherworldly, often dreamlike style that helps Veronika stand apart from darker, broodier Nordic Noir mysteries.
Rapaport says she has never seen anything like it in Sweden. “It has this autumnal feeling and these wonderful dream sequences. We’re in this bubble and we’re telling a story about this small town in a different way.
“It was a lovely shoot. We lived in these old buildings and someone in the crew slept in the car because he was convinced there were ghosts. He was waking up with nightmares. There was a special feeling about it. We were like this touring circus in different ways. We were in this strange bubble for four or five months. It was magical.”
When she’s on set, Rapaport is careful to leave behind her producer role and focus on acting. “If I were to be a producer on set, that would be unbearable and I really want to be part of the team,” she says. “I have no ambition to become a director. I really want Jonas to be the boss on set. I don’t like the hierarchy.”
Where she does want to be involved is in the scriptwriting process. “I’ve been in this business for almost 30 years, so I know something about storytelling and I can come from another perspective,” she says. “I think I’m quite good at dramaturgy. I can see it from a helicopter perspective and [I can see] the psychological journeys the characters make. So I come from that perspective when I work with scripts and I think that’s quite good to have as a tool. But in my mind I’m primarily an actor because that’s my big love in life. I love it.”
Rapaport’s hope is to now see Veronika return for more seasons in the future. “Let’s hope people like it in the first place, but there are more things to explore in her world,” she says. “It’s tough to make a really smart plot. It’s hard work but we did it once and the authors did it magnificently so I would trust them to do it again.”
FIRST LOOK: Here’s André Holland (The Eddy) as Huey P Newton in The Big Cigar, a biopic of the Black Panther leader launching on Apple TV+ in May.
The limited series chronicles the story of how Newton avoided the FBI by escaping to Cuba, with the assistance of famed producer Bert Schneider in an impossibly elaborate plan – involving a fake movie production – that goes wrong every way it possibly can. “And somehow, it’s all true. Mostly,” the series description says.
The cast also includes Alessandro Nivola, Tiffany Boone, PJ Byrne, Marc Menchaca, Moses Ingram, Rebecca Dalton, Olli Haaskivi, Jordane Christie and Glynn Turman.
Debuting on May 17, the series is based on the magazine article by Joshuah Bearman (Argo), who is an executive producer on the show. The showrunner is Janine Sherman Barrois (Claws, The Kings of Napa) and Winning Time‘s Jim Hecht penned the show’s first episode.
The series is produced by Warner Bros Television, where Barrois and her Folding Chair Productions are under an overall deal. Barrois and Hecht are executive producing alongside Bearman, Joshua Davis and Arthur Spector (Little America) through their production company Epic.
Award-winning actor, producer and director Don Cheadle is the director and executive producer on the first two episodes.
FIRST LOOK: Ida Engvoll (Love & Anarchy) takes the lead in Prime Video’s Swedish drama Blind Spot, an adaptation of Anne Holt’s crime novel 1222 that features detective Hanne Wilhelmsen.
Produced by Nordic Drama Queens and Amazon MGM Studios, the series is being filmed Stockholm ahead of its anticipated 2025 release on Prime Video in the Nordics.
During a heavy snowstorm, a train travelling from Stockholm to Narvik collides with an avalanche. All passengers must take shelter in an old, isolated hotel in the mountains nearby. Among them is the sharp and dark-minded police officer, Hanne Wilhelmsen (Engvoll) and when mysterious murders start taking place at the hotel – despite being temporarily suspended from the police – Hanne begins to investigate.
The ensemble cast includes Pål Sverre Hagen (Exit), Kjell Bergqvist (Bäckström) and Sissela Kyle (Fröken Frimans krig).
The script is written by Sara Heldt (Sandhamn Murders) together with writer/director Erik Skjoldberg (Occupied). Skjoldberg is also directing all four episodes.
The producer is Nordic Drama Queens’ Sandra Harms and executive producers are Line Winther Skyum Funch, Josefine Tengblad, Anne Holt and Niclas Salomonsson.
Fifth Season is handling global distribution outside of the Nordics.
Channel 5 has ordered a second season of its 2022 drama The Teacher, featuring a different story and a new cast led by Kara Tointon, Will Mellor and Emmett J Scanlan.
The Teacher II follows the story of Dani (Tointon), a teacher who loves her job. She’s a real mentor and inspiration to her students, but what she lacks is a properly functioning marriage with real intimacy and mutual desire.
This leads her into an impulsive affair with a fellow colleague that at first answers all her needs, but soon spirals out of control. When a pupil goes missing on a school trip, Dani rightly blames herself for being too easily distracted. When things start to take a sinister turn she is forced to lie, and quickly finds her life falling to pieces. She risks everything to right the wrongs that she has, in part, been responsible for.
Mellor will play Jimmy and Scanlan is Tim.
Michael Crompton (The Catch) will pen the series with Rebecca Wojciechowski (Silent Witness). Dominic Leclerc (The A Word) will direct.
The four-part drama, produced by Clapperboard, will be executive produced by rachel Gesua (The Catch), Suzi McIntosh (Silent Witness) and Mike Benson.
Emma Foley and Tamryn Reinecke (It Is In Us All) are producers for Pale Rebel Productions. The Teacher II is produced in association with Newen Connect, who will distribute the series internationally.
Extraktoři (The Extractors) director Roman Kašparovský opens up about the challenges of filming the Czech spy drama overseas and why he chose to ground the series in reality.
Even the most ambitious television series are rarely able to compete with the budgets afforded to big-screen action franchises like James Bond, Jason Bourne and Mission: Impossible.
So when director Roman Kašparovský boarded Czech spy thriller Extraktoři (The Extractors), he knew he had to push the boundaries of what he could achieve with more modest means.
His solution was to create a realistic, naturalistic aesthetic for a story that is set between Prague and Pakistan, where two kidnapped women are being held hostage. With the help of the US Army, the members of a covert Czech intelligence team set about rescuing them while unofficial diplomatic efforts are conducted through a Turkish humanitarian charity.
“Czech James Bonds are different from usual James Bonds, so we tried to do as much as we could to show how it really works,” Kašparovský tells DQ. “Even smaller countries have their own agencies, and one of their main purposes is to take care of their citizens abroad in need. If somebody gets into trouble abroad, your country is able to go there and help them.”
At the centre of the series is Leona Váchová (played by Pavla Gajdošíková), an intelligence officer in the department of international relations and information. The leader of a newly created extraction team, she is charged with supporting Czech nationals who find themselves in danger abroad, but when her personal life takes a turn for the worse, she must face up to a deep trauma she has long suppressed.
Joining Leona are Petr (Jan Révai) and Ted (Jakub Štáfek), secret service operatives with military training, while Viktor Suk (Ján Koleník) is a public prosecutor who is facing up to his own dilemmas.
Kašparovský was first approached to direct the six-part series by producer Adam Dvorák, and after reading four scripts and an outline for the whole show, the director quickly signed on with a vision to shoot large parts of the drama overseas – something the director describes as a rare opportunity in Czech television.
But unable to film the hostage scenes in Pakistan or Afghanistan, where some of the story is set, three alternatives were put forward: Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and Turkey. The latter eventually won out.
“I’ve been to Pakistan and Afghanistan, so I have this experience of what it looks like. When I spoke to my producer, I realised we couldn’t go back and shoot there, and Turkey came out as the best solution,” he says. “We went to Turkey, we searched for these locations and I saw what I had in my mind when I thought of Pakistan and Afghanistan. When you watch those locations, you don’t have a feeling it was shot there [in Turkey].”
To emphasise the Turkish scenery, a small filming crew utilised natural light and a documentary-style approach to the visuals, which also helped to differentiate that part of the story from scenes set and shot in Prague.
“We tried to use more colours in Europe, more lighting, and what we went for abroad was naturalistic lighting and a little bit more documentary-style shooting and not so many colours, not so saturated,” he explains. “That was the main difference, so when you start watching the show, you know where you are.”
On set, Kašparovský also alternated between two types of camera to distinguish the types of shots he wanted. One was used to capture the environment and atmosphere, while another was used during faster-paced action sequences.
Perhaps his most important decision, however, was to shoot all the Turkey scenes first, before returning to Prague to complete scenes where Leona is dealing with more domestic matters – at work and at home.
“On the last project I did in Afghanistan, we shot the movie and then went to Afghanistan [for additional footage]. But when we got there, I couldn’t match it with the stuff I already had from the Czech Republic,” he says. “It’s much easier to adapt in the Czech Republic. So I said, ‘Please, let’s go there first and shoot there, and let’s see what we come up with. Then if we lose something, we can fill it in the Czech Republic, but we’ll have more possibilities.’ So that’s what we did.”
Notably, that decision – backed by producer Movie – also allowed him to shoot the storyline involving the two kidnapped girls in largely chronological order.
“If you go chronologically, you evolve,” he says. “For the actors, it’s much better because they’re getting closer and going inside their characters. They get the chance to live through their characters.
“What was also fantastic was we had the chance to shoot on locations where there was no [mobile] signal. You had to wake up at 5am or 6am and then you sit in the car or van for an hour-and-a-half to the location and there was nothing there. The actors, all of a sudden, feel like being abandoned, being separated from their social life.
“Sometimes you have great actors who drink coffee in their trailer and then they go to the set and all of a sudden they can completely break down. That’s the way it is, that’s why actors are amazing. But somehow this helped them to go deeper into the characters. It helped them get there faster. That’s how we approached it – a naturalistic way of shooting, a small crew and a very realistic locations.”
To connect the two seemingly disparate parts of the story, Kašparovský decided to link the plight of the hostages with Leona’s own circumstances, presenting her as a woman in a male-dominated world.
“That seemed pretty interesting and it was something new to the Czech public because I had never seen anything like that,” he says. “She is also a mother and has some skeletons in her closet. She has to face them and somehow compensate for the things she maybe did wrong in her past.
“Then it was about finding the right actress who we could follow through her life as an officer in Czech Republic who then goes abroad to save those girls. That was something really interesting for me, thinking about connecting these two parts [of the story]. We separated the visual style so everyone could see immediately this is Prague and now we are here in Pakistan, but something has to connect it, and that was in the power of the actress.”
Gajdošíková proved to be the perfect choice, filming scenes in Turkey before returning to Prague to fill in the gaps.
“That was not such a big deal, and in the Czech Republic I tried to accommodate the schedule so we would also have some of the lines chronologically,” the director notes. “We had to go according to location, so we shot in the Extractors den chronologically to have the development of the characters, so the actors would feel closer to their characters. If you shoot every day on different locations, you lose more. It’s much better if you have one location and film from beginning to end. That was the idea.”
Shooting abroad and filming a spy drama on a modest budget meant Kašparovský had to overcome several challenges to make the series, which debuted on European streamer Voyo last year and was screened as part of Berlinale Series last month. Keshet International is the distributor.
“We’re not able to shoot Mission: Impossible. We’re not able to shoot James Bond or Jason Bourne movies. We don’t have the budget for it. The reality is the budget is what it is, and I thought it was a good thing,” he says. “In this case, I thought it would be much better if we go for reality.”
That meant balancing scenes of characters sitting behind desks with more exciting prison scenes or foot chases. “But whatever you see is reality,” Kašparovský adds. “If you see this, that’s because it really happens this way.”
ITV cold case drama Unforgotten is back in production, with stars Sinéad Keenan and Sanjeev Bhaskar reuniting for the show’s sixth season.
Keenan and Bhaskar (pictured at the script readthrough) reprise their roles as DCI Jess James and DI Sunil ‘Sunny’ Khan as their dynamic on-screen partnership returns to investigate emotionally charged cold cases from the past, unravelling secrets and unearthing buried truths along the way.
It marks Keenan’s second season of Unforgotten, following the departure of original star Nicola Walker at the end of season four.
Joining the cast this season are Victoria Hamilton (Cobra), MyAnna Buring (The Responder), Jan Francis, Damien Maloney and acting newcomers Max Fairley and Elham Elas. Returning cast include Andrew Lancel (Bolan’s Shoes) as Jess’s husband Steve and Kate Robbins (Unforgotten) as her mother Kate.
Jess and Sunny’s loyal and hard-working police team are also back, including Jordan Long as DS Murray Boulting, Carolina Main as DC Fran Lingley and Pippa Nixon as DC Kaz Willets. Georgia Mackenzie plays Pathologist Dr Leanne Balcombe.
When suspected human remains are discovered on Whitney Marsh, Jess and Sunny are called to the scene, ditching their respective plans for the evening much to Jess’s husband Steve’s chagrin. With Dr Balcombe’s expert analysis of the human spine, it’s evident the remains are relatively recent and her guess is the body was put there already dismembered. With this knowledge Jess and Sunny begin to search the area believing other body parts may not be too far away.
Meanwhile, viewers will be introduced to outspoken television commentator Melinda Ricci (Buring) who is based in Ireland and renowned for her forthright views; Martin ‘Marty’ Baines (Fairley), an autistic man who lives with his mother, Dot, in Deal, Kent; Asif Syed (Elas), an Afghan who speaks fluent English and is training for his UK citizenship test; and Juliet Cooper (Hamilton) who is a history lecturer and faculty head at a central London University.
Each of these characters live separate lives, yet they are intrinsically linked by their past and it’s for Jess, Sunny and their team to unravel these connections in search of the truth, and ultimately, who perpetrated the cold case murder.
Created and written by Chris Lang, the six-part drama is produced by Mainstreet Pictures. The new season will be directed by Andy Wilson (Ripper Street), who has been the sole director responsible for directing each of the previous 30 episodes across five seasons.
Laura Mackie and Sally Haynes, on behalf of Mainstreet Pictures, return to executive produce alongside Chris Lang, Guy de Glanville (Unforgotten) and Andy Wilson. Carmel Maloney (Time) produces the series.
Unforgotten is co-produced with Masterpiece PBS in association with BBC Studios, who distribute all six seasons of the series internationally.
Game of Thrones star Natalie Dormer speaks nothing but the truth about the fortuitous circumstances that led her to star in South African crime drama White Lies and how she is building her experience behind the camera as an executive producer.
After returning to work following the birth of her daughter, British star Natalie Dormer has three new projects coming along in quick succession. Feature films Audrey’s Children and The Wasp are both in post-production, while South African audiences can now watch her latest leading television role in crime drama White Lies.
Dormer is also an executive producer on the series, which debuted on M-Net last week, as she continues to expand her interest in bringing shows to air behind the scenes, as well as developing a slate of original projects through her own company Dog Rose Productions.
That she joined White Lies in the first place is rather serendipitous. Dormer first worked with global production group Fremantle when she starred in 2018 Australian drama Picnic at Hanging Rock, and subsequently set up a first-look deal there with Dog Rose.
Then around the end of 2021, White Lies producer Quizzical Pictures sent Dormer a pitch proposal to star in the series, at the same time that she was asking Fremantle about the company after being impressed by Quizzical’s previous series, Reyka – a show distributed internationally by Fremantle.
“I trusted the Fremantle global drama team because I had been developing stuff with them since I had such a wonderful experience with them on Picnic, and almost by coincidence Quizzical sent me White Lies – and they didn’t know that I was as close to Fremantle as I was,” the actor tells DQ.
“[White Lies] wasn’t one of my babies. But when the pitch came in, I turned to Fremantle and said, ‘I’m in if you’re in,’ and they were like, ‘Well, we’re in if you’re in.’ So Fremantle and I were able to come together, give some extra finance and give some confidence in terms of international sales because of the good experience they’d had with Reyka. It was just the perfect storm coming together.”
Dormer also sought another valuable opinion on the prospect of working with Quizzical – from Reyka star Iain Glen, who worked with her on HBO juggernaut Game of Thrones. “So I texted Iain and said, ‘What are they like?’ And he was like, ‘Go!’”
The show stars Dormer as investigative journalist Edie Hansen, who gets caught up in the ugly underbelly of Cape Town’s wealthy Bishopscourt neighbourhood, leading her to face up to her turbulent past.
Following her estranged brother’s murder in his luxury home, Edie’s world plunges further into chaos when her brother’s teenage children become prime suspects for the crime. As Edie investigates, she comes up against veteran detective Forty Bell (Brendon Daniels) and a crumbling police force, a corrupt political system and the secretive world of extreme Cape wealth.
“It’s not an original story that comes from me and my slate, but I am passionate about it. I fell for it for other reasons,” Dormer says. “When the pitch came in, I was fascinated by this journalist and the contradiction, one dares to say hypocrisy, of a woman who is obsessed with the truth and yet cannot face her own truth. As a protagonist, she was just a wonderful thing to delve into.”
White Lies also offered the star the chance to shoot in South Africa for the first time, and revisit a country she had been to several times during her childhood.
“There’s a Dormer contingent in South Africa. I’d been out when I was 10 and 12; we’re talking the early 90s here. The second time I went was the year Nelson Mandela was elected and, as a child, obviously that passes you by, but the textures, the colours and the cultural impact it has on your senses was so expansive for me. So much [film and television] shoots in South Africa, especially in Cape Town, that it was absurd I hadn’t gone back in all that time to visit my family.”
In that sense, Dormer’s return to South Africa is similar to Edie’s own “homecoming,” as the character left the country nearly 16 years ago and reinvented herself as a UK-based journalist in order to shed the dark memories of her past.
The actor was also fascinated by delving into the show’s depiction of social issues. Created by Sean Steinberg and written by Darrel Bristow-Bovey, White Lies is described as an urgent exploration of race and privilege, inequality and identity, all wrapped up in a murder mystery.
“At the end of the day, it’s a great whodunit – and who doesn’t love a great whodunit?” she says. “But for me, it’s refreshing for British and American audiences to watch racial or class tensions, or corruption or disappointment in government, in a fresh microcosm. These are themes that speak to us, this frustration with the powers that be, when we feel society’s going sideways. But when you watch it in this fresh environment, it feels curious and interesting.
“Darrel is good at making those uniquely South African tensions accessible to an international audience. I really came in and just asked lots of questions because I’m the outsider. I then also pushed very hard on Edie’s background story, like what actually happened? Why did she leave? How did she become a journalist in Britain? It’s not there [in the series], but Darrel and I know and you need that. The characterisations have to hold water, else it doesn’t feel real.”
On screen, most of Dormer’s sparring took place with Daniels (Trackers), whose cop character previously clashed with Edie on another case and isn’t thrilled to find she has a personal connection to his latest investigation.
“The unlikely friendship is always such a strong choice in a script, the enemies that slowly find their way to friendship,” Dormer says. “I can’t say enough wonderful things about Brendon, I really can’t, and it was a great to be exposed to a wealth of talented South African actors. Brendon’s right there leading that brigade, holding the torch. He’s fantastic.
“They’re really two heroes who are both obsessed with justice and truth and, in our social media-dependent world, there’s that push-pull of what is the role of journalism and reporting and is it just another kind of storytelling? And for the police, what kind of stories do they tell to get their job done? There’s a lot there thematically in this show.”
As an exec producer on the series, Dormer’s role went beyond being number one on the call sheet. She joined at a time when “money was still being refined and talent being secured,” and she had a “real input” in a process that brought in John Trengove (The Wound), Thati Pele (Lerato), Catharine Cooke (Reyka) and Christiaan Olwagen (Poppie Nongena) to direct the drama.
She also spent time with Bristow-Bovey breaking down the script. “To have that opportunity to really get under the car bonnet of a script with the writer, and as an EP help be part of the comradeship that hones the journey, was a wonderful opportunity for me to hone those skills,” she says.
Dormer, whose credits also include Penny Dreadful: City of Angels, Elementary and The Tudors, previously exec produced 2018 feature film In Darkness, on which she was also co-writer.
“It’s a very interesting experience as an actor because, especially if you’re leading [the cast], you have to compartmentalise and turn off the part of your brain that knows what the issues are with tomorrow’s location because you’re privy to those conversations,” she says. “But at the same time, it’s wonderful to be a gun-for-hire actor and just come and do your turn, have no responsibility and leave. That’s obviously a beautiful, very rewarding thing in its own way, and it’s a different beast when you come in and you’re literally part of the team. It scratches a different kind of itch.”
Establishing her own company at a time when much of the television industry is in flux – Dog Rose still has an “unofficial” relationship with Fremantle – the actor says she tries not to read too much about the challenging climate facing broadcasters and, subsequently, programme makers.
“You can obsess about it. It is ever thus that people are scared. I don’t think that’s new,” she notes. “Commissioners have always been nervous, but you really have to fight for your space now and be offering something unique or a really fresh take on something.
“The three projects I have done since having my maternity leave, I worked 10 months in a row without catching a breath. But I believe in all those three projects so wholeheartedly, for different reasons. As a professional trying to hone her EP skills, I was fascinated by what Quizzical were proposing and trying to achieve with Reyka and then White Lies. Their ambition to grow and the perfect storm of my relationship with Fremantle made this a unique experience and made me pick up my family and go to South Africa for four months.”
In particular Dormer “gets a kick” out of breaking down story and looking for a fresh angle or perspective on what might otherwise be a familiar theme or genre. Dog Rose is developing “two or three” such projects, though she is reluctant to discuss them too much lest she jinx their path through development.
Going forward, whether she will exec produce a series or not will be decided on a case-by-case basis. “It’s always going to depend on the project, isn’t it? Being an EP gives you a wonderful influence, but also there are those beautiful pieces, like The Wasp that I just did with Guillem Morales, where as an actor you just come in, do the craft and not worry about anything else,” she says. “It’s good to flex both those muscles [as an actor and producer], but having the experience of knowing the conversations on the other side of the camera makes you a more compassionate actor to the nature of the production. How any of us get anything made is a miracle.”
Through White Lies, which Fremantle is distributing worldwide, she is now inviting viewers to immerse themselves in a crime thriller set against the backdrop of a “beautiful tapestry of cultures and communities.”
“This diverse, vibrant country has deep, profound issues but also has so much going for it,” she says. “It will be exciting for an international audience to watch a good old-fashioned, traditional whodunit, but get an insight into the beauty and the troubles of the Cape because it’s such a unique place to experience, and hopefully they’ll find it curious and exciting. It’s refreshing to watch those themes – and to have a good old family drama as well – but in the context of this very vibrant, beautiful city and country.”
FIRST LOOK: Daniel Brühl plays German fashion designer Karl Lagerfeld in Disney+ six-part drama Becoming Karl Lagerfeld, which will debut on June 7.
In 1972, Karl Lagerfeld (Brühl) is 38 and not yet wearing his iconic hairstyle. He is a ready-to-wear designer, unknown to the general public. While he meets and falls in love with the sultry Jacques de Bascher (Théodore Pellerin), an ambitious and troubling young dandy, the most mysterious of fashion designers dares to take on his friend (and rival) Yves Saint Laurent (Arnaud Valois), a genius of haute couture backed by the redoubtable businessman Pierre Bergé (Alex Lutz).
Set against the backdrop of 70s Paris, Monaco and Rome, the series will follow the formidable blossoming of this complex and iconic personality of Parisian couture, already driven by the ambition to become the Emperor of fashion.
Produced by Gaumont and Jour Premier, it is adapted from the book Kaiser Karl by Raphaëlle Bacqué. The cast also includes Alex Lutz as Pierre Bergé and Agnès Jaoui plays Gabrielle Aghion, the founder of the Chloé fashion house who made a major contribution to Lagerfeld’s fame.
Jeanne Damas plays Paloma Picasso, and Claire Laffut is Loulou de La Falaise. Marlene Dietrich is played by Sunnyi Melles, while Andy Warhol is played by Paul Spera. Lisa Kreuzer appears as Karl’s mother, Elisabeth Lagerfeld.
Jérôme Salle (Kompromat) directs episodes 1, 2 and 6. He is also an executive producer with Jour Premier producer Arnaud de Crémiers.
Episodes 3, 4 and 5 are directed by Audrey Estrougo (Everything’s Fine). Isaure Pisani-Ferry (Ganglands) is the creator of the series, with Jennifer Have (Unfaithful) and Raphaëlle Bacqué. Isaure Pisani-Ferry is also the series’ lead writer, co-writing all episodes with Dominique Baumard (Le Jeune imam), Jennifer Have and Nathalie Hertzberg (The Goldman Case).
Music for the series comes from Evgueni and Sacha Galperine (Oussekine).
It will air on Disney+ internationally and Hulu in the US.
Paramount+ has ordered a new UK drama, The Crow Girl, with stars Eve Myles, Katherine Kelly and Dougray Scott now filming the six-part series in Bristol.
From Buccaneer (Crime, Marcella), the contemporary psychological thriller is based on the trilogy of novels by Erik Axl Sund.
The story begins with the gruesome discovery of a teenage boy’s body discarded in plain sight. Determined to find who is responsible, DCI Jeanette Kirkland (Myles) joins forces with psychotherapist Sophia Craven (Kelly) to hunt the killer despite opposition from her superiors including confidant DI Lou Stanley (Scott).
The investigation takes them into a dangerous world of historic abuse and murder. Together they uncover a chain of shocking events that have gone overlooked for decades, as well as evidence of police corruption. As the body count rises and the two women are dragged into the depths of the murders, an intimacy starts to form between them, and so begins a complex, twisted love story. All the while, the killer is inching ever closer to home.
The cast also includes Clara Rugaard as Victoria Burkeman, Victoria Hamilton as Superintendent Verity Pound, Elliot Edusah is DC Mike Dilliston, Chloe Sweetlove plays Madeleine Burkeman and Lee Boardman is David White.
Tony Wood and Richard Tulk-Hart are executive producers for Buccaneer along with Milly Thomas, who adapted the series for the screen. Charles Martin and Rebecca Rycroft both direct, with Andy Mosse as producer. ITV Studios will distribute The Crow Girl internationally.
DQ visits Dublin to meet the cast of The Dry as they reunite to film the second season of the ITVX and RTÉ comedy-drama about a family’s battle with addiction – and each other.
Like most families, the Sheridans treat their garage as a mixture of storage shed and dumping ground. But it also doubles as a workshop for the crew of ITVX and RTÉ’s The Dry, who are busy picking up or dropping off technical equipment needed by director Paddy Breathnach (Viva, Rosie), who is shooting in the main house next door.
Shelves are stacked with jam jars full of paint brushes, above large painted canvasses and model figures. Standing next to various monitors and tripods, one member of the props team is preparing a fake roast chicken, which is about to be delivered to the front door by two visitors in an upcoming scene. “We brought a roast chicken,” they announce. “We didn’t cook it.”
This detached house in the leafy Dublin suburb of Foxrock once again doubles for the Sheridan family home as DQ arrives in the Irish capital to watch filming for the comedy-drama’s second season. Written by Nancy Harris (Dates), it picks up the story of Shiv (Roisin Gallagher), who in season one returns home from London sober, after years of partying. But as she faces this new phase of her life, her family must also come to terms with her new lifestyle – and confront their own issues.
Now seven months later, Shiv is sober, celibate and solvent; little brother Ant has hung on to his job at the estate agents and his relationship with Max; and sister Caroline is making up for lost time on the dating scene after her failed engagement.
Yet while everything appears to be normal, how normal is it for three grown adults to still be living at home with their parents? With Shiv determined to get sobriety right this time, she must cut the toxic influences out of her life for good. But what if the biggest threat to Shiv’s stability turns out to be closer to home?
“Although Shiv is the heart and the centre of it, the family dynamic and the survival of the family is crucial to the show,” says executive producer Emma Norton, from producer Element Pictures (Normal People). “This family is all living under one roof and it’s just a petri dish of dysfunction. Shiv coming home is one thing, but they’re all there now.”
Inside her trailer at the production’s unit base, a short drive from the house location, Gallagher is preparing for a day on set, with scenes from episodes seven and eight on the schedule.
“Coming back to something that’s already in existence, which you were part of creating, is really special,” she says. “There’s an ease and a fluidity in returning to something you know works. That gives you confidence and there’s less nerves, certainly for me anyway.
“I was a little bit nervous about finding Shiv again. Was I going to be able to slip back into her energy, her complexities and all of her quirks? But actually, coming back on to set in the Sheridan house, working with Paddy… The first time I felt really connected to Shiv was Paddy and I having a phone call and talking through some of the scenes. His observations and perception of the story was what made me feel, ‘There she is, we’re back again, ready to go.’”
After Shiv falls spectacularly off the wagon in the season one finale, and is then surprised to be joined by her mother Bernie (Pom Boyd) at an AA meeting, she’s now “relearning how to live in the world, with no toxic highs,” while also reconnecting with her passion for art, solving the mystery of who owns the canvasses in the garage. But she’s also frustrated to live within the barriers she has built for herself to avoid repeating her mistakes.
“It’s the fear that your life will be on one level, and Shiv isn’t on one level,” Gallagher explains. “She’s an artist, she’s creative. She sees colour and adventure and she wants to be vital and feel alive and she has to find a way to do that that’s not going to lead her back to drink. We’re following that kind of journey with her, while she’s still living in an environment of chaos with her mum and dad, which is just a brilliant storyline, and a sister who’s going through her own thing, Ant’s got his things going on. Interestingly, Shiv starts off being the most put-together character.”
With Shiv, Caroline (Siobhán Cullen) and Ant (Adam Richardson) all living together at the family home, matter are complicated further by Bernie’s new companion, Finabar (Michael McElhatton), whose presence has forced their father Tom (Ciarán Hinds) to live in the garden shed as the cracks in their open marriage become wider.
“It’s just so funny, it’s so well observed,” Gallagher says. “It’s kind of reflective of the world we’re in, where younger people are living with their parents well into their 20s or 30s. The family has moved into a whole other realm of chaos. I can’t give anything away with how we finish, but they find each other somehow, through the chaos, which is pretty special and astounding.”
With a new man on her arm and seemingly confronting her own alcohol addiction, Bernie, like Shiv, is in a happy place at the start of season two. However, tensions are likely to simmer from her ambition to “do AA better” than Shiv, with Bernie seemingly treating it like a popularity contest.
That’s also where she met Finbar. “She’s been sad for so long,” Boyd says of her character. “She and Tom have had this open marriage, which is a lonely place for her. So she’s really in a great place at the start of this season. She’s going great guns in AA, she’s got lots of friends, she’s popular, she’s got a new man and life is fun and exciting.”
Boyd is also a writer, and says one of the reasons she started penning her own scripts was because there are fewer “really good parts” for women of her age. That’s also why, when she first read The Dry, Bernie “jumped off the page.” The actor then had to complete several rounds of auditions before winning the part.
“She was just such a meaty character, and Nancy understood a woman like her, the drinking thing and the humour,” she says. “That’s always what I would be looking for – humour alongside tragedy.”
Fate almost conspired against Boyd, however, when she broke her wrist just weeks before filming was due to start on season one. “I was on holiday and I slipped in a river, cooling the dog down,” she says. “I thought, ‘Oh, that’s it.’ I called my agent and said, ‘You’ll have to tell them,’ but it was so nice when they just wrote back and said, ‘No, they’ll take you whatever way you rock up.”
Her injury was then written into the script, with Bernie wearing a splint on one arm. “Then the splint comes off in episode four and I get hit by a car.”
Cullen, who was recently seen leading the cast of Irish drama Obituary, says The Dry “felt like a small show that really packed a punch,” so she was delighted when season two was confirmed. “It’s hilarious, but also incredibly moving. It just feels quite relatable.”
She describes Caroline as an amalgamation of lots of people she knows, and some parts of herself too. “I hope I’m not as uptight as she is,” she jokes, “but I just thought she was so well written and so hilariously observed by Nancy. She’s really nuanced and capable of cutting someone down with a look, but also clearly has a heart as well. Immediately it was a project that I really wanted to be on board.”
Now “very single and mingling,” Caroline is looking for a man who can fit into her five-year plan for marriage and children. “She’s on the hunt. She’s downloaded all the apps and she’s testing out everything Dublin has to offer – and it’s been relatively unsuccessful thus far. But she’s totally OK with it.”
It’s The Dry’s balance of comedy and drama that Cullen believes is the magic of the series – which is distributed by ITV Studios – with characters just as likely to be laughing or crying, or both, in the same scene.
“That’s the special thing about our show,” she says. “Now season two is following these characters we’ve got to know really well and saying, ‘Well, what happens next for them? And how does Caroline cope with her world falling apart? How does Shiv cope with seven months of sobriety?’”
Meanwhile, season two of The Dry marks the first time Richardson has returned to the same role. “So that’s been pretty interesting,” he says. “There’s a certain familiarity there within the world. But the exciting part is that there are so many new characters coming in and they all add their own element, which does change what we’ve already created.”
The new episodes find Ant falling deeply in love with boyfriend Max (Emmanuel Okoye), while he has a job and money coming in.
“He’s put in a bit more effort, and Max has been a great influence on Ant in the fact Ant isn’t looking for validation through alcohol or drugs as much,” Richardson says. “In the first season we see Ant reaching for happiness through external stimulus that just isn’t very sustainable. This time he has Max, who is probably his primary source of happiness. That gets him through a lot.”
However, he is also battling with his own relationship with alcohol, while the only thing stopping him from achieving his dreams is himself.
“He hopes Max might be his get-out-of-jail-free card from this mad family, but he’s constantly getting in his own way, whether it be from anxiety, depression or self-doubt, and he doesn’t have the skills he needs to deal with what’s going on in his head,” Richardson adds.
Getting back into character, Richardson was able to draw on ‘Ant’s journal,’ which he created in season one – a “database” to which he can refer for details about Ant’s relationships with different characters. He also zoomorphises Ant, “so the first season he was a fox, because he was living in the shed out the back. He very nocturnal, he’s out all night and a bit cunning and sly. He’s graduated to a deer now – take from that what you will.”
Gallagher likens coming back for the first week of filming to a family reunion, with many of the initial scenes set in the family home. “Paddy and Nancy and the team at Element really worked to make very strong foundations in the first season, so coming back to work where you know you’ve got a strong foundation, and you know you’re grounded in something that really works, means you can evolve more. You can dig deeper, go further.
“But you don’t rest on the success of something that’s already been done because it’s gone. Moving forward, that’s so important, and I never feel as a performer, ‘Right, that’s it, I’ve got it.’ I’m always looking for where this is going to go next.”
From a production perspective, potential problems were avoided when the locations team managed to secure the same house for the Sheridans. “If the owners hadn’t been open to us filming here again, it would have been a big rethink,” Norton notes. “But the challenge [of the series] is we are still quite a low-budget show by modern standards. It’s also a time of drama funding being on a downturn, essentially, and comedy always gets funded at a lower level.
“We also want the best cast that we can have, because that’s one of the great assets of the show. Certainly in Ireland, the first season was very well received so it opened doors for us in terms of casting people who want to work with Paddy, because he’s such a great director. For other cast members, it’s a nice opportunity to work with Ciarán Hinds on something fun.”
The chaos that awaits the Sheridans in season two, which debuts on ITVX on March 14, might still just be the tip of the iceberg. When it came to developing the second run, Norton remembers Harris had already prepared a fully formed outline of storylines – and the exec says there’s plenty more story to come should the show continue to a third season.
“I don’t know how far we’ll go with this one. But Nancy just has so much to tell with these characters,” she says. “It’s not running out. We’re not running out of story yet.”
Prime Video’s Invincible is flipping the script on animated series – and superhero adventures. Executive producers Robert Kirkman and Margaret M Dean tell DQ about adapting the original comics, breaking animation boundaries and why the series doesn’t shy away from ultra-violence.
When billionaire playboy Tony Stark announced himself as Iron Man in the 2008 film of the same name, it heralded the start of an unprecedented run of captivating superhero movies. But after a string of underwhelming projects on both the big and small screens as the demand for quantity eventually overtook quality, studios such as Marvel and DC have been left to reassess their plans as audiences suffer from superhero fatigue.
Yet one masked avenger is bucking the trend. Born on the pages of the title character’s own comic book in 2003, Invincible is the coming-of-age story of Mark Grayson, whose father Nolan also happens to be Omni-Man, the world’s most powerful superhero.
Written by Robert Kirkman (The Walking Dead) and illustrated by Cory Walker and Ryan Ottley, the comic only had 144 issues, completing its run in 2018. But an animated adaptation debuted on Prime Video in 2021 to widespread acclaim and had already been renewed for a third season ahead of the launch of the second half of its eight-episode second season on March 14.
Coproduced by Skybound Animation and Amazon MGM Studios, the series follows the pages of the book to introduce 18-year-old Mark, who is living in the shadow of his father, an extraterrestrial from the planet Viltrum. When he gains his own powers, he becomes Invincible, but he is also dealt a huge blow when he is betrayed by his father in season one.
As season two heads towards its conclusion, Mark struggles to rebuild his life as he faces a host of new threats while battling his greatest fear – that he might become his father.
An all-star cast featuring Steven Yeun, Sandra Oh, Zazie Beetz, Grey DeLisle, Chris Diamantopoulos, Walton Goggins, Gillian Jacobs, Jason Mantzoukas and JK Simmons provide the voices for the show, which stands out among other animated series for its bloody, ultra-violent fight sequences, family drama and an episodic running time that clocks in at around 50 minutes, twice the standard for the genre.
And if superhero fans are feeling a little lethargic right now, they’re exactly who Invincible was created for.
“One thing that works in the comic’s favour is that it was created by three deeply entrenched superhero fans. But we were also a little jaded and a little tired of the tropes,” Kirkman tells DQ. “Invincible as a comic was always designed to be the alternative to Marvel and DC for people who love Marvel and DC. It’s not the alternative for people who don’t like those things.
“We accurately depict what these punches would be like and how these stories would roll out. There’s also a lot of very heartfelt drama that sometimes gets glossed over in those things. So I feel like we became the same alternative for the people that enjoy [superhero] television and movies, that we were for diehard comic book fans.”
Executive producer Margaret M Dean, head of Skybound Animation, admits she’s not a fan of superheroes, but what she loves about Invincible is its real-world setting and its deep family drama, which is most notable in the series-spanning father-son struggle between Nolan and Mark.
“I feel like every step of the way, all of the people involved in creating this have thought about what it would really be like if this were the real world, not just how the punches will really hit and how much blood would actually spurt out, but what are the deep emotional scars people have?” she explains. “Every character is very rich, with those scars and with the drama and trauma they’re experiencing in this world. To me, it measures up there with anything that’s on the air now, any of the big dramatic shows. The sophistication and maturity of the storyline is way beyond anything anybody’s seen in animation before.”
That’s because to Dean and Kirkman, animation is less of a genre than a medium to tell stories that, in the case of Invincible, explore mature themes against an interplanetary backdrop without the barriers or obstacles of making a live-action series. They also rank it alongside shows including Blue Eye Samurai, Arcane and The Legend of Vox Machina where “animation is just an art form.”
“An animated series can have the same appeal as a Sopranos or a Game of Thrones – these shows are really proving that, so it’s a really great time to be doing Invincible and to be considered on the same list as some of those other shows that are being produced right now,” Kirkman says. “It’s a great time to be in animation.”
That Invincible is an animated series also means there is a natural “buffer” between the audience and what they are watching, meaning the series can get away with its more “unbelievably violent, gross or upsetting” moments that viewers might shy away from if it were live action. “Not only can you go to lots of places, and you can do a very broad big scope project or story for less money, but you can also just expand how far you go emotionally, how far you go physically and violently,” Dean notes, “and you keep your audience. You don’t lose them.”
“The only limitation we have is that we always want to be able to top ourselves,” Kirkman adds. “We’re always trying to push the envelope to go as far as possible, to be innovative and new and intriguing and different. It’s really just trying to break new ground and give people something exciting or unexpected.”
Kirkman and his writing team are using the Invincible comics as a “clear roadmap” for the series, taking advantage of the “tremendous gift” of being able to look at all 144 issues and identify where the show will go next. But Kirkman isn’t afraid of tweaking or improving a story that some fans will already know, to ensure they stay as engaged and hyped about the show as he is.
Season one is a good example of Kirkman’s approach to adaptation, in which events of the first and last episode were taken directly from the source material, but the route taken to reach the end was not be exactly the same. “There’s actually a tremendous amount of work the writing team is doing behind the scenes to make everything fit together in a way that it didn’t necessarily fit together before,” he says.
Of course, Kirkman is no stranger to adapting comic books for television, having created the Walking Dead comics that became a mega-franchise for US cable channel AMC. But as that comic was still being written when the television series went into production, he didn’t have the power of hindsight to adapt and adjust the story as it was repurposed for the screen.
“There were times when we didn’t quite know how important certain things were going to become, because I hadn’t written the comic yet,” Kirkman says of The Walking Dead. “That was a very weird, stressful process for me because I had to turn my comic brain on at night and then go back in time five or six years and work on the show during the day. It led to some things that I may not be all that happy with, so it’s great to have the complete series [of Invincible] to be able to be able to pinpoint what is actually important in issue eight because it comes back up in issue 112.”
Taking up her role at Skybound in January 2022, Dean has worked for numerous animation studios, with credits including Robot Chicken, Teen Titans and What’s New, Scooby-Doo?. Joining season two of Invincible, her role includes scheduling, budgeting, planning the production process and building the animation team.
“The other big role for me is just to keep the production going and on track, which is a series of problem solving, from the small minutia, interpersonal issues to the bigger relationship with Amazon and communicating with them,” she notes. “My goal is to facilitate the realisation of Robert’s vision, so I have to do whatever it takes.”
“Marge does hassle me about turning in scripts faster,” jokes Kirkman, who is chairman of Skybound Entertainment, “but that’s probably less than 1% of her job. Marge is building Skybound Animation from the ground up. This show is very much an in-house production that Skybound is delivering. Everybody in the team that Marge has been able to build recognises what we’re trying to accomplish, and that means everybody is putting in an extra level of effort and care. I think it shows in how the show is put together and what the final result of the show is.”
As the pair talk to DQ, season two is in the can, while they are in the late stages of wrapping season three, barring some final ADR and animation tweaks. “Then we’re also behind the scenes working with Amazon to try and figure out what’s next,” Kirkman says.
With more than two years between the release of the season one finale and the first episode of season two, the writer says managing the release of the show is a “constant struggle,” as viewers’ expectations to see their favourite show return every year butt against the demands of producing an animated series – a wait that was softened with the release of a special standalone episode that served to spotlight the backstory of Invincible’s fellow superhero, and one of the show’s most popular characters, Atom Eve.
“Animation is difficult and it does take time,” Kirkman says. “We’re trying to hopefully accomplish a yearly cadence if we’re fortunate enough to continue after season three. We’ll just have to see. Unfortunately, animation is a constantly moving target.”
“The other thing about Invincible, in particular, is the scope of the show is massive,” Dean says. “When we started season two, the one thing Robert asked us to do was continue to improve the animation. We really pushed the envelope to elevate the visuals even further – and I feel like we’ve succeeded.”
“And season three is looking even better,” Kirkman adds. “A lot of people take for granted the fact we’re an hour-long animated drama, but that means our eight-episode season is essentially a 16-episode season. With the number of assets we have to produce for every episode, because of the different locations we go to, the different characters we introduce and the different damaged states of the various characters, the show is a massive undertaking.”
Though comic book fans have widely praised Invincible’s transfer from page to screen, perhaps the show’s greatest achievement is winning over people who might never have watched an animated show.
“I have a lot of friends that have teenage kids who are like, ‘Oh, I saw my son was watching that dumb show you do, and I started watching it and I got hooked.’ We’re definitely hearing no end of stories about people coming to the show who figured they wouldn’t like it,” Kirkman says. The limited audience data released by Prime Video also reveals the series is exceeding its targets.
“If you look at the percentage of the population that doesn’t watch animation, we have way more of those people watching our show,” Dean says. “It’s reaching out beyond the normal animation band, which is why it’s another support for the idea that animation is not niche. It is really a viable artistic expression for any stories to be told, and people will watch it. We’ve proven that.”
FIRST LOOK: The BBC will be the UK home of crime drama Rebus, a new adaptation of the Inspector Rebus novels by Ian Rankin.
Richard Rankin (Outlander, The Replacement) stars in the series, which is in Edinburgh and reimagines John Rebus as a younger Detective Sergeant drawn into a violent criminal conflict that turns personal when his brother Michael, a former soldier, crosses the line into criminality. Rebus finds himself torn between protecting his brother and enforcing the law to bring Michael to justice.
The series also stars Lucie Shorthouse (Line of Duty, Ten Percent), Brian Ferguson (The Ipcress File, Spanish Princess), Amy Manson (The Nevers, The Diplomat), Neshla Caplan (The Rig, Scot Squad), Noof Ousellam (Vigil, Guilt), Stuart Bowman (The Serpent, Bodyguard), Caroline Lee Johnson (Trying, Ridley), Sean Buchanan (Censor, Mary Queen of Scots), Thoren Ferguson (The Midwich Cuckoos) and Michelle Duncan (Baptise, Elizabeth is Missing).
Filming took place in Glasgow and Edinburgh last year.
It is adapted for the screen by Gregory Burke (Six Four) and produced by Eleventh Hour Films for Viaplay. The series will air on BBC Scotland, BBC One and BBC iPlayer this spring after Nordic streamer Viaplay exited the UK.
The six-part series is directed by Niall MacCormick (Complicit, The Victim) and Fiona Walton (Shetland, Annika) and is produced by Angela Murray. Paula Cuddy, Jill Green, Eve Gutierrez, Tomas Axelsson, Isabelle Hultén, Niall MacCormick, Gregory Burke and Ian Rankin are executive producers. Rebus is distributed internationally by Viaplay Content Distribution.
Rebus will air on BBC Scotland, BBC One and BBC iPlayer later this spring.
Death in Paradise creator Robert Thorogood transports DQ to a town in Buckinghamshire for his latest crime drama, The Marlow Murder Club, which is finally hitting the small screen almost a decade after he first tried to sell the idea.
When Robert Thorogood first pitched the idea behind The Marlow Murder Club, it was roundly rejected by broadcasters. The Death in Paradise creator has enjoyed sustained success with the Caribbean-set series, which has aired on BBC One since 2011, but he couldn’t find a buyer for his latest project set in the picturesque English riverside town of its title.
That was in 2015. But so convinced that his idea could be a hit, Thorogood turned to his book publisher – he was also writing Death in Paradise novels at the time – and pitched The Marlow Murder Club to them instead.
The first Marlow Murder Club book was published in 2021 – two more have since been released – and once the idea was a proven success in the book charts, Thorogood found he was able to partner with London production company Monumental (Harlots, Ghosts) and sell a television treatment to UKTV network Drama. The two-part story will now air tomorrow and Thursday, while coproducer Masterpiece in the US will air a four-part version. ITV Studios is handling international distribution.
Samantha Bond (Downton Abbey) stars as Judith Potts, a retired archaeologist who lives alone in a faded mansion in the peaceful town of Marlow, filling her time by setting crosswords for the local paper.
During one of her regular wild swims in the River Thames, Judith hears a gunshot coming from a neighbour’s garden and believes a brutal murder has taken place. But when the police are reluctant to believe her story, Judith finds herself forming an unlikely friendship with local dog-walker and empty-nester Suzie (Doctor Who’s Jo Martin) and unfulfilled vicar’s wife Becks (The Sandman star Cara Horgan) as they start an investigation of their own.
Eventually asked to assist with the official police investigation, headed by newly promoted Tanika (Sandyland’s Natalie Dew), the women must piece together clues, grill suspect witnesses and face down real danger as they work against the clock to stop the killer in their tracks.
Describing the show as a “modern-day Miss Marple” thriller, Thorogood says the ambition for The Marlow Murder Club is to feature a murder-of-the-week story in each episode. But for this opening instalment, one feature-length story plays out over four hours of television.
“The way the first book is structured, it starts off with the three women not knowing each other and it takes three murders to bring them together,” he tells DQ. “I couldn’t see a way of actually serving the story without saying, just for this first season, we’re going to have to do one story so we have time to get to know the women and learn why they meet and how they meet.
“Then by the time they’re together and they’re a gang, it’s real and grounded in a type of reality, because all murder-mystery shows are a bit of a house of cards anyway, and I just wanted to have a bit of truthfulness in how they meet, so at least you get it rather than going, ‘Hang on, they’ve got nothing in common with each other. What are they doing solving crime every week?’”
UKTV initially wanted Thorogood to dive straight into a more traditional episodic format. But he praises the broadcaster for “taking a punt” on his idea for how best to establish the series and its characters.
“I’m just so grateful they broke their rules on what they would commission in order to serve the novel, the story and some of the actors, because the actors get so much more to do than if they were falsely together right from the start,” the writer continues. “They do actually get to know each other. They don’t always get on immediately. It takes some time to realise each other’s strengths and why they’re a brilliant team. Hopefully, fingers crossed, we come back and do it as a series.”
Thorogood describes the trio of female leads as a tribute the women who helped to raise him, as he would spend nights at home during his childhood with his mother and her friends. “They’d smoke and I’d play the piano in the corner and I’d be earwigging, and they seemed so significantly more intelligent, sparky and funny than their husbands – the husbands who had the status, the jobs and the suits. This is the 1970s.
“But these women had so much more to offer, and they were just so much warmer and richer. So I wanted to do a story where they were the central characters.”
Judith, he notes, is based on his grandmother Betty, “who every night at 6pm would have a single glass of scotch, and she kept travel sweets in the glove compartment of her car.” Bex is a “Home Counties” woman who is defined by other people – as a mother, a vicar’s wife – and sets out on a journey to build her own identity.
“Then there’s Suzie, who’s a single mum, and when we were raising our kids, the single mums I knew were just phenomenal people who were able to attend all of the hockey matches and parents evenings’ and also hold down a job and raise their kids,” he says. “When I saw how hard they worked, I thought, ‘I want these people to be heroes of a murder mystery.’ And the fourth person is Tanika, who’s basically my wife and me – the ‘sandwich generation’ raising kids, trying to hold down jobs, looking after our parents and trying to find time for ourselves, to which the answer is there is no time for yourselves.”
When he was creating the story, Thorogood wanted to find a way the amateur sleuths could integrate themselves with Tanika’s official police investigation, rather than having them butt heads as the trio conduct their own enquiries. “I get frustrated when any kind of amateurs are fighting against the police,” he says.
The answer came in the role of civilian advisers, which some police forces have taken to employing to support their work on particular cases. “And I just thought, well, there’s my fig leaf. So once Tanika begins to realise how effective these women are because they know the town, they know what really makes people tick and they know where the bodies are buried, metaphorically, she brings them in.
“Our amateur sleuths are part of the police force, so you don’t have that awful bit where the police find stuff out, the amateur sleuths find stuff out, and then they talk to each other to share the information – and that’s like the third time the audience has heard that information. Hopefully if you can suspend disbelief enough, it’s three amateur women with the police catching multiple murderers all around Marlow, where in reality there’s never been a murder. The whole thing, hopefully, is one big confection.”
As a resident of Marlow himself, Thorogood found the town to be the perfect setting for the series, and he says residents there were hugely welcoming to director Steve Barron (The Durrells, Mrs Sidhu Investigates), the cast and the production team when filming took place.
It also meant the series could utilise real locations, such as the church and the town council building, which doubled for a solicitor’s office. Marlow is also synonymous with rowing – notable members of Marlow Rowing Club include Olympic champions Steve Redgrave, Katherine Grainger and Paralympic gold medallist Naomi Riches – so some scenes were recorded during the Marlow Town Regatta.
“They had to take a big leap of faith to trust us to film the regatta, and we came along, we filmed and they couldn’t have been more welcoming. It went really well,” Thorogood says. “Now the regatta is very briefly in the TV show and adds such authenticity to it all.
“Everything was filmed in Marlow or within a mile up the road. That is the church, that is the regatta, that is the high street. There’s Naomi Riches’ gold post box from when she won gold at the Paralympics. So the town of Marlow, when they see the finished version, I hope will see that the whole thing was a love letter to Marlow right from the start.”
Having written The Marlow Murder Club book on his own, Thorogood admits he was “shocked” at the number of plot holes he discovered while pulling the story apart with Monumental executives as they got to work on the adaptation. But their discussions led to new story beats being added to the show, such as a whole backstory attributed to one particular murder weapon.
“It takes them [Judith, Suzie and Bex] to a really excellent, dark and very funny place. None of that would have happened without Monumental actually pushing and poking at the idea and forcing me to be better than I was on my own,” he says.
But having seen so many murders solved in Death in Paradise over 13 seasons (and counting), how can the genre continue to draw in viewers with so many different detectives on television?
“That’s what keeps me up at night,” the writer jokes. “I have found the way it works most successfully over the years is to think of the world of that story, and then you can come up with a murder within it. For example, I remember doing a Death in Paradise episode where I thought, ‘Let’s do a Caribbean radio station’ – it gives you the world and it gives you the characters and the sorts of people you’d imagine there. And that’s where you hope to generate the story and the murders.
“With The Marlow Murder Club, I very wilfully wanted to have three murders so we could travel around Marlow and introduce a character and a different part of the town per murder. The idea is that by the end of the whole process, you finally get to know these women, you’ve finally been everywhere you need to go in Marlow and everything is locked into place.”
Then when it comes to writing, whether it’s a new book or his latest television script, “I get up really early, like at half five in the morning, and I try to start writing before anyone, myself included, would expect me to have started.
“In TV Land, no one starts ringing you until 10, so if I feel ahead of the curve by seven, eight, nine then I can have a nice day writing. If I get to 9am and I have not written anything, I get into such a panic and funk that I can’t do anything. Another thing that really helps is just deadlines – money and deadlines – but the best thing for a writer is to have a pram in the hallway. When there’s a pram in the hallway, the stakes are really high and I will hit this deadline or we will die. No one eats and the baby dies.”
When you are writing something because you want to watch it on television, however, it’s a considerably easier task. And that’s all Thorogood, a self-declared Agatha Christie fan, says he has ever aimed for.
“This is my jam,” he says. “All I’ve ever tried to do, whether it’s Death in Paradise or anything else, is write the perfect murder mystery. It can’t be done. I know it can’t be done. I’m tilting at windmills, to say the least. But you’re aspiring to make it as fun as possible, as fiendishly clever as possible, as funny as possible, as truthful.”
If viewers respond to The Marlow Murder Club like Thorogood hopes they will, there’s every chance he’ll be plotting more episodes with Judith, Suzie and Bex. And if the series can follow the success of Death in Paradise, there will also be spin-offs (Beyond Paradise), Christmas specials and an Australian adaptation (the upcoming Return to Paradise) in the future.
“I find it overwhelming and humbling in the sense that I genuinely do not feel qualified to have that level of success,” he adds. “For many years I was very unsuccessful. I didn’t have anything on telly until I was 37, and I carry that sense of failure with me in everything I do. So when objectively there appear to be signs of success, I cannot get my head around it, and I have to learn to accept that they are successful. But it feels very un-English.”
Guy Ritchie (Lock, Stock & Two Smoking Barrels) will direct and executive produce The Donovans, a new series loosely based on Ray Donovan.
Ronan Bennett will write all 10 episodes, with the series set to debut on Paramount+ later this year.
With the most powerful clients in Europe, The Donovans will see family fortunes and reputations at risk, odd alliances unfold, and betrayal around every corner; and while the family might be London’s most elite fixers today, the nature of their business means there is no guarantee what’s in store tomorrow.
From Paramount+, Showtime/MTV Entertainment Studios and 101 Studios, the series is executive produced by Guy Richie, Ronan Bennett, David C Glasser, Ron Burkle, Bob Yari, David Hutkin and Ivan Atkinson.
Showtime’s crime drama Ray Donovan, which ran for seven seasons until 2020, starred Liev Schreiber as the title character, a professional fixer who tries to protect his celebrity clients by any means necessary.
Filming is underway on Virdee, a BBC crime thriller set in Bradford and based on AA Dhand’s novels.
Virdee follows Detective Harry Virdee (Staz Nair), a cop disowned by his Sikh family for marrying Saima (Aysha Kala), who is Muslim. Harry struggles with the abandonment and now with his young son, Aaron, growing up and asking questions, thinks it might be time to attempt to reunite with his family. His personal life in chaos, he must now hunt down a serial killer targeting the Asian community.
When the murderer kidnaps a local police chief’s son and holds the entire city to ransom, Harry realises that he is going to need the help of his brother-in-law Riaz, a drugs kingpin who runs the largest cartel in the county. Pulled together in an alliance that could ruin them both, Harry must make a choice: save himself and his family or save his city. He will not be able to do both.
Nina Singh (The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry) plays Tara Virdee, Harry’s niece and a keen crime reporter, with Vikash Bhai (Crossfire) as Harry’s brother-in-law Riaz Hyatt. Kulvinder Ghir (Foundation) and Sudha Bhuchar (Expats) will play Harry Virdee’s parents, Ranjit and Jyoti.
Elizabeth Berrington (Good Omens, The Nevers) also joins the cast as DS Clare Conway and Danyal Ismail (All the Lights Still Burning, The Outrun) will play DS Amin. The Virdee cast also includes Tomi May (Justice League), Andi Jashy (Gangs of London), Hussina Raja (Look at Us), Ashkay Kumar (Double Blind), Madiha Ansari (Home Sick), Jason Patel (Unicorns), Conor Lowson (The Bay) Rupert Procter (Doctors).
The six-part series is adapted for the screen by AA Dhand, pictured top with Nair, and is produced by Magical Society for BBC One and BBC iPlayer.
Hans Zimmer (Interstellar, The Dark Knight) will be composing the Virdee title theme with James Everingham for Bleeding Fingers and will also feature Shashwat Sachdev. Trainees from Screen Academy Bradford will also be joining Bleeding Fingers to get a hands-on experience of composing for screen and to assist with the composing of the series score.
The series is directed by Mark Tonderai (Doctor Who). The series is executive produced by Paul Trijbits (Jane Eyre) for Magical Society, AA Dhand, and Jo McClellan for the BBC.
Cineflix Rights is the exclusive worldwide distribution partner outside of the UK.