Bay of reckoning
The Bay creator and writer Daragh Carville reflects on the fifth season of the ITV crime drama and a pivotal moment in the finale where “truths long unspoken” are finally brought out into the open.
For five seasons, ITV crime drama The Bay has transported viewers to the northern seaside town of Morecambe to solve a murder mystery, with the local force’s Family Liaison Officer (FLO) finding themselves in the centre of the investigation.
Debuting in 2019, the series opened with Detective Sergeant Lisa Armstrong (Morven Christie) being attached as the FLO to a missing persons case. She quickly discovers she has a personal connection to this frightened family – one that could compromise her and the investigation.
Christie returned for season two, before Marsha Thomason took the lead in season three as Morecambe CID’s new FLO, DS Jenn Townsend. Her character is immediately thrown into the deep end when a body is found in the bay on her first day in the job, leading her to the door of a family grieving the death of a young boxer. To make matters more complicated, she has to prove herself as the force’s newest recruit while also trying to settle her family in a new town.
Thomason reprised her role as DS Townsend on The Bay’s fifth outing, which recently concluded on ITV. It sees Jenn return to work following the death of her father, and dealing with a family left bitterly divided by the death of a 23-year-old university student.
The Bay is written by co-creator Daragh Carville and produced by Tall Story Pictures. Distributor ITV Studios has sold the series into more than 140 territories.
Here, Carville, who is represented by Casarotto Ramsay, tells DQ about a climactic scene in the season five finale in which family tensions finally boil over for Jenn when she’s accused of prioritising her work commitments over her family.
Carville: The Bay focuses on a police family liaison officer as she works with the families of victims of crime at the very worst time in their lives, while at the same time dealing with the challenges of her own family life.
It is both a crime drama and a family drama, committed both to the narrative drive and twists and turns of the crime genre, and the messy emotional realities of often complicated family relationships. And in any given episode, it needs to be working on both fronts.
We love a big, action-packed set piece on The Bay, as well as a juicy cliffhanger. Season five’s episode four, for instance, ends with the sudden jolt of a car crash that leaves Dan Ryan’s character, DI Manning, fighting for his life. But it’s often the quieter, more low-key and characterful scenes that are my favourites.
At the start of the season’s sixth (and final) episode, our FLO Jenn Townsend (brilliantly played by Marsha Thomason) finally has the conversation we’ve been waiting for all season – the conversation Jenn’s been waiting her whole life to have – when she stands up at last to her difficult, complicated, judgemental mum Anne (the wonderful Suzanne Packer).
Jenn’s a deeply empathetic person. That’s one reason she’s so good at her job – her ability to connect emotionally with other people, no matter what they’re going through. But she’s much less comfortable opening up about her own emotional life. She has a tendency to bottle things up, to avoid conflict. She’s a people pleaser. The very last thing she wants is to make a scene.
But you can only bottle things up for so long. So when her mum goads her for walking out on a family crisis to head to work, “as usual,” Jenn’s finally had enough: “So we’re doing this, are we?”
And things that have been unsaid for a lifetime are finally said. Truths long unspoken are finally out in the open. “Everything I ever do is to prove myself to you, and to dad. But it was never good enough.” Jenn gets it all off her chest. But nothing is resolved. We’re left with the mess of broken relationships, old hurts, love gone wrong. And as ever, Jenn has to get to work.
“Well,” Anne sniffs. “Don’t let me stand in your way.” It’s only much later, at the end of the episode, that Jenn and Anne are finally able to come to terms with their history and all that they mean to one another.
Balancing the crime drama elements with the underlying emotional family stories is one of the challenges of writing The Bay. It’s a bit like spinning plates, trying to make sure the plot is powering forward while at the same time allowing for moments that are intimate, exploratory and, I hope, emotionally truthful.
But it’s a challenge I relish, and I know that goes for the actors too. Writing for actors as searching, truthful and committed as Marsha Thomason and Suzanne Packer – and, indeed, the rest of our extraordinary cast – has been one of the absolute highlights of my writing life. Writing scenes that actors like these can get their teeth into is the reason I wanted to do this job in the first place.
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