Ell raiser
Channel 5 and Acorn TV drama Ellis stars Sharon D Clarke as a top inspector who is parachuted in to solve failing investigations. Executive producer and lead writer Siân Ejiwunmi-Le Berre opens the file on television’s latest detective.
Writer Sian Ejiwunmi-Le Berre landed her first major television script credit with a BBC adaptation of Murder is Easy, Agatha Christie’s 1939 novel, in which a reluctant sleuth sets out to uncover a killer. Now, in her latest series, she introduces an original TV detective who shares a similar reluctance towards her role as a troubleshooter who is brought in to handle faltering investigations.
Three-part drama Ellis stars Sharon D Clarke as the titular DCI Ellis, who in each feature-length episode arrives at a different police station where she must win over the local officers and immerse herself in the cases she has come to solve. As a black woman, Ellis is used to being dismissed and overlooked, yet she is a first-class murder detective with a determination for justice and compassion for those who need it.
“For me, she’s like a character in a high-end western. She’s an older gunslinger and doesn’t really want to do it anymore,” Ejiwunmi-Le Berre tells DQ. “She knows what the cost is and has no illusions or romance about it. But she just happens to be incredibly good at this one thing so, in a way, she can’t withhold her talents from the world.
“Then when she is called in, she brings all her ambivalence. She brings her reluctance, but she’s brought into these towns that each have their own kind of secret sickness that she has to diagnose and cure.”
The writer believes this setup makes Ellis quite different from a lot of British crime series that are more location-specific. Here, the series throws Ellis and her right-hand man, DS Harper (Andrew Hower), into a brand-new community and police service for each episode.
“So the whole world and the team that develops around them is a character,” Ejiwunmi-Le Berre continues. “The town is a character. The police force specific to that town is a character, and that’s the fun stuff. Then it has a certain tone to it. It’s gritty. We don’t want to have the ‘super genius, sophisticated serial killer’ that you might see in True Detective, for example, as much as we admire those kind of shows. There’s a British tone to it. We’re always looking for something that’s incredibly human.
“Quite often it’s about a choice. We’re not really into accidental deaths. We’re into the perpetrator making a specific choice in time, and it’s Ellis’s job to identify what that choice was. What did they choose between? Why did they make that choice?”
Produced by Company Pictures and distributed by All3Media International, the series debuted last night on Channel 5 in the UK with a story about the death of a teenager and his missing girlfriend. Episode two investigates the disappearance of a local detective, while the season finale sees Ellis and Harper become involved in the case of two missing honeymooners.
Each instalment of the drama, which will debut on Acorn TV outside the UK on November 4, also explores a singular theme, from the disconnect between parents and their children to toxic bullying and misogyny. One also investigates the impact and intrusion of social media on police work.
“We’re looking for big things for her to deal with, and all the way through season one, Ellis is also waiting for contact from her daughter Grace, from whom she’s estranged,” Ejiwunmi-Le Berre says of the title character’s personal arc through the series. “That’s why she’s constantly attached to her phone – and her phone has to be attached to a charger. I think a lot of mothers feel like this, the idea that your phone might die and your children won’t be able to contact you.
“How we managed in the 70s I don’t know, but she’s locked into this umbilical cord of this phone charger, waiting for this call to come, and the connection between Ellis’s self-removal from the force and Grace’s self-removal from Ellis is something yet to be revealed.”
The idea behind the show came following discussions between Channel 5 and Company about making a new longform detective series, with a central character who would be a black, middle-aged woman. At that point, Ejiwunmi-Le Berre joined the team and brought her own experiences to the project.
“I had very definite ideas as a middle-aged black woman myself that, being in that kind of profession, she was inevitably going to have a lot of ambivalence about her work,” the writer says. “We’d always had an element of a backstory that she had left the police or been outside the force for some time, so being called back into it was going to be a sacrifice. It was going to be uncomfortable for her, and we wanted to project that level of reluctance.”
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Heading into new police stations after a period of “gardening leave,” Ellis doesn’t always have to win over her new colleagues, some of whom may be more cooperative with her enquiries than others. Importantly, “it’s not the same story every time,” says the writer, who points out that a central conceit of each episode is the question of what is wrong with the place Ellis lands in and how does she fix it.
“It might be quite a general thing – people don’t listen to their kids or it’s misogyny or coercive control or whatever – but it’s something that is specific to that community or that police force that she has to address and amend. And like a western, when she leaves, it’s a little bit better. But when the Lone Ranger leaves town, it’s not all sunshine and giggles.”
The personal elements of the series aren’t restricted to Ellis’s relationship with her estranged daughter. There’s also the effect on Harper of working with someone who is emotionally closed off “because they have to be,” the writer says.
“I felt very strongly that a black woman who advances in the police force is going to have encountered a lot of pushback and resentment and aggression, outward or more surreptitious, hence her ambivalence about it.”
Then there’s Ellis’s first encounter with Harper, who literally overlooks her when he is sent into the police station reception to collect the new visitor. Her arrival is also met with disdain and resentment from those she has come to take over from.
“I certainly didn’t want to get into the world of racial trauma porn, but it’s really obvious that being a black woman – and a brilliant one at that – in a white male institution is really bone-crushingly exhausting. But also she operates with a kind of superpower, to be invisible, to fly under the radar, to be constantly underestimated. That can be powerful.
“On the other hand, people are scared of her as well. She’s imposing. So this flip-flap from people underestimating her to people assuming she’s being aggressive is one that’s very familiar to most black women. It just feeds into her ability to relate to people’s humanity. That’s always the key to the case for her – what is the human motive, not the machinery of it.”
The drama marks the latest leading role for actor Clarke, who can also currently be seen starring opposite Lennie James in BBC drama Mr Loverman. Her other credits include Lost Boys & Fairies, Showtrial, Doctor Who and Informer, all coming after more than 15 years in medical drama Holby City.
“Sharon’s a tour de force,” says Ejiwunmi-Le Berre, who believes Clarke’s ascendency to playing a title character is long overdue. “It’s another example of one of our national-treasure black actors being far more valued in America than they are here. It wouldn’t have taken this long in America for an actor like Sharon to have an eponymous show. We’re very lucky that she wants to be with us and do it, frankly. She will be a household name by the end of the year.”
Ejiwunmi-Le Berre could soon follow suit, developing a slate of new projects after Murder is Easy, Ellis and the Jules Verne-inspired Nautilus, on which she was among the writing team. Nautilus was dropped by original commissioner Disney+ but has since found a home on Prime Video in the UK and Ireland, Stan in Australia and France Télévisions, among others.
“That was my first big, American-style writers room. It was massive, and in lockdown as well,” she says. “A room with 14 people in it on Zoom is quite a thing. It was actually really good fun. It was a fun show to write on and I’m very glad that people are going to get to see it.”
But whether she’s going from Agatha Christie to Verne or an original creation, “it’s all stories,” she says. “So it’s the same process in many ways, which means you just plot your way through and come out the other end with something that makes sense.”
That Ellis is made up of feature-length episodes meant it “very challenging,” not least due to the need to infuse each one with elements of an overriding arc that will help to build up the main character. “A lot of procedurals and murder mysteries come from books, and we made Ellis. That’s a different process from Agatha Christie or some of the other adaptations that I’ve worked on or I’m working on. But it’s fun.”
Ejiwunmi-Le Berre’s hope now is that she can write more mysteries for Ellis to solve. “If she hits a spot for people, there are always going to be sick towns to get sorted. Her own personal story and her relationship with Harper has a long way to go. There’s a lot more for her to do and a lot of challenges, but she’s not always right,” she adds. “It was interesting to watch her mess up as well as being successful. If we’re lucky enough to get a second season, there are all sorts of things I’d like to do with Ellis.”
tagged in: Acorn TV, All3Media International, Channel 5, Company Pictures, Ellis, Sharon D Clarke, Siân Ejiwunmi-Le Berre