Catching up with Karen
Three years after its debut, Karen Pirie continues to freshen up the crime genre with its unashamedly “normal” title character. Writer Emer Kenny and executive producer Emma Luffingham take DQ inside the series based on Val McDermid’s literary detective.
With a premiere that drew 6.6 million viewers, and each episode averaging 5.9 million, Karen Pirie became one of ITV’s most watched new dramas when it debuted in 2022.
Three years later, Val McDermid’s literary detective has returned for another three-part season that launched in the UK last month and is set to make its bow in the US and Canada on BritBox on October 2.
But despite the show’s initial success, writer and executive producer Emer Kenny took nothing for granted as she put the finishing touches to another cold-case mystery.
“I’m always nervous about something coming out. I never feel like, ‘Oh yeah, this is a surefire hit.’ I’m always doubting myself and whether I can pull it off again,” she tells DQ.
While Kenny wasn’t fazed by the length of time between seasons – preferring to deliver viewers a quality product than one rushed out for the sake of a schedule – things were made somewhat trickier by the fact that she has had a baby since season one.
“That definitely didn’t help the timeline,” she jokes. “Making Karen Pirie with a really young child was kind of crazy, because when we film it, I’m really hands on. I like being on set. I really get involved in everything, and that’s the way I’d done it with the first season. So because I wanted to match what we’d done, I was keen to maintain that level of input on the second season.
“But obviously with a small child, it’s another level of intense. So the past two years have been a big whirlwind. But now I get to look back and be like, ‘Wow, I can’t even believe that happened.’”
Karen Pirie S1 took its cue from McDermid’s novel The Distant Echo, which introduces the titular police officer as a young and fearless Scottish detective tasked with reopening a historic murder investigation after it becomes the subject of a provocative podcast.
Reflecting on making that first instalment, Kenny found the elements that resonated most with the audience were also the things she liked about it, “so that was quite reassuring,” she says. “Whenever it felt like the show was saying something about being a woman in the world, about the struggles of being in your 20s and confidence, work and relationships, that all felt very personal to me and it felt like that is what kind of set her apart as a detective.”
She also enjoyed the show’s humour, which was used delicately to cut between serious discussions about historic police investigations and scenes with dead bodies.
“With the second season, we were just trying to match what we did in the first season and hopefully get it right again,” Kenny adds. “We definitely took some level of confidence into the second season, but then also it was slightly daunting to try to keep that magic alive. Hopefully we pulled it off.”
Kenny and executive producer Emma Luffingham, from producer World Productions, also wanted to move Karen’s own story forward in season two, creating the feeling that as much time has passed off screen as on it.
A new case, taken from McDermid’s second Karen Pirie novel A Darker Domain, further gave the Scotland-set series the chance to expand by becoming more global, with pivotal scenes flimed in Malta.
“Often, shows can come back and they feel like you’ve been paused in time a little bit, and you’re repeating the same things with just a different plot,” Luffingham says. “We were keen all the way through to make sure the show evolved.”
Season two finds Karen promoted to detective inspector after the events of S1, and seemingly with the authority she always wanted. But when she is assigned an infamous unsolved case, she finds herself under intense scrutiny from her boss, the media and sinister forces that would rather the past stayed in the past.
The cold case relates to the 1984 disappearance of oil heiress Catriona and her young son Adam, who were kidnapped at gunpoint outside a fish-and-chip shop in Fife. In the present day, a man’s body has been discovered, with indisputable links to the original kidnap.
Lauren Lyle reprises her role as Karen, alongside returning co-stars Chris Jenks and Zach Wyatt, Steve John Shepherd, Rakhee Thakrar and Kenny herself as Karen’s friend and forensics expert River Wilde. New cast members include James Cosmo, Saskia Ashdown and Julia Brown.
Authority is a key theme in S2, as Karen didn’t have much in S1 and now has a lot more power. But it’s a responsibility that sits slightly uneasy with the detective.
“She doesn’t quite know how to operate in that way,” Kenny says. “She’s used to being under the radar, doing things her way, breaking the rules, and so it’s about her discomfort with that level of responsibility.
“That also felt personal in terms of me stepping up and [executive producing], and also probably becoming a mother. It’s like, ‘Oh God, people rely on me, and I’ve got power. What do I do with it?’ So again, it’s trying to find that truth to the character at all times, trying to find what feels real and interesting without having to invent something for her.”
What Kenny particularly likes about Karen is that “she’s quite normal.” Though she might be eccentric and unique in some ways, she’s also quite down-to-earth and relatable. “She’s not divorced with a drink problem,” notes the writer. “Her problems are, ‘Should I be going out with my boyfriend and working with him at the same time?,’ which hopefully is relatable to the audience, particularly a young audience.”
As the second book in the series, A Darker Domain proved to be a natural choice for the basis of S2 of the drama. Yet because it wasn’t immediately clear to Kenny how to best adapt it for the screen, there were discussions about selecting a different one.
Ultimately it was chosen, and the kidnap and the characters remain the same as the source material. What is different is the opening: the TV show starts with the 1984 kidnapping, rather than the story of a missing miner, which brings an urgency to that opening scene that Kenny and Luffingham felt might have been otherwise missing.
“With these types of shows, your first 10 minutes is everything, because that hook is what powers the entire six hours,” Kenny says. “With the missing miner, it was really difficult because he was never reported missing, and there wasn’t that really grabby, shocking moment that would get the audience. I knew the kidnap had to be that, so in order to get the kidnap at the beginning, we had to do so much taking apart, unravelling and re-ravelling. If you went back and read the book, it would take you a while to see the resemblance between the two, if I’m honest.”
Luffingham picks up: “It started with a missing miner, and there’s a long period in the book where Karen’s investigating a missing miner and a kidnap and doesn’t connect them – in a way that works in a book, because you can meander through these stories. But for TV, it just felt like, well, they’ve got to connect.”
Kenny adds: “Plotting the show is like, ‘Where are our twists? Where are our hooks? How do we get that in the right shape for six hours of TV?’ They are just in completely different places in the book. So that’s the real intricate task of making of the show, and it takes us months to get that right. There are so many different versions of that, but I’m really happy with where we got to because it does feel like we’ve moved forwards in terms of storytelling. The first series felt smaller, with fewer suspects, and this one kind of goes ‘boom.’ We’ve got all these massive twists. You never quite know where we’re heading.”
Returning for a second season of Karen Pirie, which is distributed by ITV Studios, Kenny admits the adaptation process wasn’t any easier this time around. “Whatever I’ve learned from the first time, I just want to push it further and be better every time,” she says. “So I’ll always make it hard for myself, even if it could be easier. I’m like, ‘How can we make this more interesting? How can we be more ambitious with the storytelling?’ It’s worth it in the end.”
As an actor with credits including The Curse and Father Brown, Kenny also enjoys contributing to the casting process on a show that demands two casts in order to depict the same characters 40 years apart. “I really find it very helpful to have a really good match between the two timelines,” she says. “The Scottish talent pool is incredible, so sometimes I’ll see a tape and be like, ‘Oh, that character is not working yet, but that actor has brought that to it, and that’s great. Let’s get them in to do this.’ It’s all part of the process for me.”
It was certainly a challenge to schedule production of a series that goes across two time periods, with two different casts, and with an additional block of shooting in Malta this time around. “The priority of the writing became about where we were shooting rather than where we were in the story,” Luffingham says. “It was like, ‘Yeah, but this is coming up, so we need to get these bits done.’ The timelines do add an extra layer of complexity to things like the scheduling and how it’s made. Period is always going to be something a bit more expensive, and it’s really tricky to get right.”
Moving back and forth through time, they wanted to find a way to ensure the audience felt “safe and secure” at every point in the story, without the need to display the year on screen. To this end, director Gareth Bryn used different lenses and lighting to create alternative looks for each period. “That became an additional challenge that we had to find rules for and ways of solving,” Luffingham says.
Now a bona fide “audience favourite,” according to ITV, Karen Pirie stands out as a fresh entry in the ever-popular detective genre – something that isn’t lost on Kenny.
“It feels like it’s taking the traditional Sunday night detective and introducing her maybe to a newer, younger audience, and ticking the boxes of the classic detective style and then also pushing it into something fresher,” the writer says. “That’s what I always wanted to do, so it feels comforting, but also new and cool. That’s why I think it works. It’s not trying to reinvent the wheel, but it’s giving you something that feels authentic, because I put so much of myself and how I feel into it.”
“It’s really appealed to women as well,” notes Luffingham. “We’ve noticed there is a skew of a female audience, and that’s really exciting because there is something in that character of that relatability. It’s not trauma-filled, it’s a woman doing her best in a world of tiny microaggressions and frustrations, which we all love to watch because we feel it and we see it. That’s evolving her as a character – and we want to continue to evolve her, but ensure that her feet are always firmly on the ground.”
Kenny even imagines the show becoming a brand for ITV – and with eight books in the McDermid series, there’s plenty of room for more Karen.
“It would be wonderful if we could do more,” she says. “You just have to make sure that you’re constantly keeping the quality high and you’ve got something to say with it; that you’re not just making it for the sake of it. That would be my ambition for it, to make sure it always feels relevant.”
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tagged in: Britbox, Emer Kenny, Emma Luffingham, ITV, ITV Studios, Karen Pirie, World Productions