Dead reckoning
Written by Colin Bateman, Dead & Buried tells the story of a woman who comes face to face with the man who murdered her brother. Ben McGrath, head of drama at producer Three Rivers Fiction, explains how it was brought to the screen.
Drawing together partners from across the island of Ireland, four-part psychological drama Dead & Buried stands as a useful case study for how to piece together the jigsaw puzzle of partners needed to finance and make a television series.
With Three Rivers Fiction (Trackers) and Vico Films producing the project, a “letter of intent” from Virgin Media Television was needed to unlock development funding from Northern Ireland Screen, and that then opened up conversations with BBC Northern Ireland, Screen Ireland and Irish media regulator Coimisiún na Meán. All3Media International also came on board as the distribution partner, further bumping up the budget.
“So it was a huge coalition of partners that ultimately came together to finance it,” Three Rivers head of drama Ben McGrath tells DQ. “Certainly for producers that don’t have huge resources at the beginning, you’ve got to really bring people together. That in itself is not easy because you’ve got to find a reason for those people to come together, be that a great story or a great piece of IP.”
But despite the “tricky” challenge of keeping all partners happy and ensuring everybody’s voices were heard, making Dead & Buried actually proved to be “relatively plain sailing.”
“It was a coalition of partners that were very much all on the same team, all wanted the same thing, wanted it to be a success. There were no egos,” McGrath says. “There was nobody who wanted to be the loudest voice in the room.”
Notably, he says the project is the first time broadcasters BBC Northern Ireland and Virgin have come together to work in this way, for a series filmed on the border and set in both Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland. As a result, “it was a bit of a litmus test – and it has really worked,” the exec continues.
“There were a few challenges to do with where the story was set and making sure both audiences felt like this was a show made for them. What we didn’t want to do was cast it all with all Northern Irish actors or with actors from the Republic of Ireland. It was really important to get a balance in every creative element so that both audiences and a wider audience felt fully represented. It often felt like Avengers assembling on these Zoom calls when your screen fills with people, but it was very positive and something I would absolutely do again.”
Debuting on Virgin in the Republic of Ireland, BBC Northern Ireland and BBC iPlayer on Monday, Dead & Buried begins in a supermarket car park, where Cathy (Annabel Scholey) encounters Michael (Colin Morgan), the man convicted of murdering her brother Terry 20 years earlier.
Having previously been unaware of Michael’s release from prison and the fact he is living in the same town, Cathy pays her solicitor a visit – and discovers the killer was released years ago. Taking to social media, she then uncovers the successful career and family life Michael has forged for himself since his early release, all while she grieved for her brother.
Unable to comprehend that Michael is now a free man, teacher Cathy goes against the advice of her best friend Sally (Kerri Quinn) and creates an online alias in order to befriend him, initiating a clandestine relationship with the man she despises and embarking on a campaign of harassment and deceit.
Cathy’s obsession grows, and dark fantasies of revenge and reality blur as she sets out on a campaign of psychological warfare to destroy Michael’s life.
Written by Colin Bateman (Murphy’s Law, Doc Martin) and directed by Laura Way (Maxine, Blood), the show is based on Bateman’s BBC Radio 4 short story The Gaining of Wisdom, which later became a one-woman stage play called Bag for Life.
The biggest creative challenge then became adapting what is quite a contained story for the screen and expanding the world of Cathy in the series. But when he brought the idea to McGrath, Bateman already had an idea for how he would do this, and said as much in a five- or six-line pitch that the exec immediately loved.
“The original play and piece for Radio 4 were based on the Troubles, centred around the Good Friday Agreement, where that was a hugely confronting issue for many people in Northern Ireland,” McGrath says. “That was something that was the bedrock of the play and we adapted it to be slightly different [for TV], though it still retains that key conceit.”
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In particular, the series explores how trauma can reverberate through someone’s life and affect them from childhood into adulthood, leading them to question whether they can ever forgive those who wronged them.
“As all good dramas tend to do, you set it up and then you explore that psychology,” McGrath notes, “and we explore the psychology from both of these characters’ perspectives. So it’s not just about how Cathy can reconcile this seismic event in her life. It’s also about a man who is struggling to reconcile what he once did. It’s about him trying to deal with perhaps the guilt, or just the knowledge of how they’ve done something that has had that cataclysmic effect on someone else.
“It’s a really interesting, twisty-turny psychological exploration of these two people and what’s going on in their heads, which isn’t always easy, and it’s important to do that with real integrity and honesty.”
Cathy and Michael are tied together in more ways than one, with flashbacks giving the audience a window into their shared past, while director Way also uses stylistic visual touches to bring them together in unexpected ways.
“There’s a theme of them both having some sort of flashback nightmares, and in one scene in particular, they almost wake together at the same moment,” McGrath says. “It’s beautifully directed in a way that suggests it was a shared memory, so there’s a number of ways we find a way to echo their histories and reflect that shared experience, but also explore how it’s affecting them now.”
Calling back to that opening scene in the supermarket car park, McGrath believes the key to the series is the fact it is rooted in authenticity and aspires to be relatable and truthful for audiences, despite the extreme situation Cathy finds herself in.
“We want the audience to watch the opening few scenes and be able to put themselves in Cathy’s shoes,” he says. “[Meeting] the man that killed a member of their family is an extreme [situation], but everybody has gone shopping and bumped into somebody they perhaps have some degree of history with, be that personal or professional, so how do you deal with that moment? It just so happens that with our story, we do take it to the extreme and it’s something that had such a cataclysmic impact on Cathy.”
The desire to create a show that was “very real and very normal” is also reflected in the show’s discussion and exploration of mental health. “If I watch something where it feels like it’s gratuitously heightened or it’s provocative in some way, that frustrates me,” McGrath says. “I don’t think that’s a true and fair reflection, especially for a lot of people who deal with those sorts of issues on a daily basis. So I feel that does bring something quite fresh to the piece, because it really does feel like it’s treading that line between true crime and fiction.
“Interestingly, Colin tells a lovely story of a woman who came up to him after one of his play screenings in Derry, and she said she had this happen to her. She was walking down the street and across on the other side of the road was somebody that had killed somebody she was very close to. When you have a story like that, you’ve got a bit of a duty to be respectful of that, just as we are respectful of the psychology and the mental health themes we cover as well.”
In a crowded television landscape where viewers have grown familiar with the tropes of psychological dramas, McGrath hopes this grounded take will make Dead & Buried seem quite fresh.
“Obviously we go to some dark places, we dial it up, and it’s got a fantastic dark humour as well,” he says. “There are a lot of things that are operating in this space that feel quite straight and this actually at times feels very unique because of Colin and Colin’s writing. Anybody who’s read one of Colin’s novels or watched one of and his films or TV shows and is a fan will hopefully really see that in this, and it’ll be quite clearly a Colin Bateman show. I’m really hoping that stands out above other similar offerings.”
tagged in: All3Media International, BBC Northern Ireland, Ben McGrath, Coimisiún na Meán, Coling Bateman, Dead & Buried, Northern Ireland Screen, Screen Ireland, Three Rivers Fiction, Vico Films, Virgin Media Television