Getting the party started

Rivals executive producers Dominic Treadwell-Collins and Alexander Lamb join Missing You EP Richard Fee and directors Kari Skogland and Mohini Herse to consider how to best build TV productions to ensure creativity remains at the heart of the drama.

When it comes to running a television show, producing partners Dominic Treadwell-Collins and Alexander Lamb liken it to hosting a party.

The pair first met working on long-running British soap EastEnders, which celebrates its 40th anniversary next week, and now work together at production company Happy Prince – the company responsible for Disney+’s riotous drama Rivals, set within the world of 1980s UK regional television.

Now they are plotting season two of the Jilly Cooper adaptation, as well as bringing Sarah Phelps’s psychological thriller Daughter to the screen. But whatever project they’re working on, they all have one thing in common.

“We talk about hosting a party. Our job as executive producers is to invite loads of really talented, wonderful people to a great party that we host, and that is making the show,” Lamb says.

That approach aims to ensure not only that everyone enjoys working on their series but also that, as an increasing number of financial or broadcast partners can be involved in building the budget behind a series, those involved in making it feel their voice and talent are valued in the creative decision making.

“Because we’ve run writers rooms on soap operas for so long, we’re used to encouraging writers to feel safe, to share, and that no idea is a silly idea,” Treadwell-Collins says. There were two rooms on Rivals: one to break down the themes of the novel and another to set up the first two scripts.

“We had fun – it’s Jilly Cooper – and we extended that to the crew and the cast. We also had a ‘no arsehole’ rule. It’s a long shoot and we want everyone to get along and to want to come back. We’re very control freaky, but everyone has had a good time on our show and the love comes through the screen.”

While Treadwell-Collins and Lamb served as co-showrunners on the project, the on-set harmony came from the fact they both had the same vision for the show, “which is really good and really lucky,” Lamb notes. “It’s rare that we disagree. And if one of us has a gut instinct about something, they’re right. We’ll always listen to each other.”

There’s a similar partnership behind the scenes of the string of hugely successful English-language Netflix dramas based on the novels by thriller writer Harlan Coben. They include The Stranger, Stay Close and Fool Me Once, which broke records on the streamer when it launched last year.

In each case, the series have been assembled by a team comprising Coben, executive producers Nicola Shindler and Richard Fee and head writer Danny Brocklehurst (Brassic), who all first partnered together on Sky original series The Five before shifting to the streamer with a deal to adapt Coben’s books.

It was at a time before 2013’s breakout sensation Broadchurch, when UK crime dramas were still largely episodic, that The Five emerged from their discussions with then-Sky head of drama Anne Mensah (now leading Netflix’s UK scripted team). Inspired by Danish drama Forbrydelsen (The Killing), they hatched a plan to create a series that would offer audiences the same bingeable quality as the best mystery novels.

“We talked about Harlan, who I’ve been a big fan of for years, and we wrote an email to him and within 15 minutes we had a reply saying, ‘I’ve got an idea, come to New York,’” Fee remembers. “So Nicola and I went to see him and he had pages and pages of an idea. We thought, ‘This is brilliant.’ So we got together with Danny and we just thought there was a really interesting natural fit of tone between Danny’s writing, which is very characterful, very funny, and the way Harlan writes.”

Together, they began developing The Five, in which four school friends must confront the fallout from the disappearance of one of their younger brothers 20 years earlier. That led to another original idea, Safe, which Netflix picked up, leading the same creative team to partner with the streamer on a host of adaptations.

The most recent, Missing You, launched earlier this year, with Brocklehurst handing over head writer duties to Victoria Asare-Archer, who had previously worked with the team on episodes of Stay Close. Production is also underway on the next adaptation, Runaway, with Brocklehurst writing, while the group are also making original series Lazarus for Prime Video, starring Sam Claflin and Bill Nighy.

“We’ve been working together quite a long time now, which is great,” says Fee, who is head of drama at Shindler’s Quay Street Productions. “We’ve got a shorthand in how we work. We talk together all the time, talking to Harlan all day, every day on everything. He’s very involved in all aspects of the show, through script development and casting and production and post as well. It’s just been a really good relationship, and we all get along. It’s a good team.”

Fee describes the dynamics at the top of these shows as a “creative partnership,” where “the best idea wins,” whether that’s in line with Coben’s source material or not.

“Obviously, the books are set in the US. Most of them are set in New Jersey. We’re translating them to a UK setting, so that necessitates a lot of changes,” the exec explains. “We have a lot of conversations about guns, because they’re often very important in the story and obviously we have very different laws here [in the UK], so that’s quite a common discussion.

“But then the character of the Stranger in the book was a man, and for the TV series, it made sense for it to be a woman, and Harlan was really up for that. So it really is a partnership. No one’s in charge, really. We all just talk a lot, all the time.

“Then sometimes you’ll find things that are important not to change. Sometimes there can be hidden reasons why he did something the way he did that aren’t immediately apparent. But when you start going under the bonnet and playing with it, you realise, ‘Oh no, that is why he did that.’ So it’s important not to change everything.”

In Australia, like in the UK and most territories outside the US, the term ‘showrunner’ is rarely given to a single person charged with overseeing all aspects of the creative process. Instead, writers, directors, producers and others can share in hosting the ‘party.’

When creator and director Mohini Herse was making her SBS digital original series Appetite, which skewers convenience culture with a mystery story, “it was very much about inviting the best people to work with,” she says. “Because I was in a space which is very safe and welcoming and open, we were able to bring up emerging writers, emerging talent and emerging directors to give them their first broadcast credit.”

Leading the creative process, working as a producer and also directing, Herse admits she was wearing “too many hats” on Appetite. “I don’t think I’ll do it again, but that’s OK. You live and you learn,” she says. “To just have that experience and to have the knowledge of a producer, that process can only empower you as a creative. Now I have that knowledge, which I’m going to sneakily use at all times.”

On SBS’s romantic drama Four Years Later, which aired last year and told the story of a couple’s long-distance marriage between Australia and India, Herse took a more traditional director’s role, though she was also invested in bringing the best version of creator Mithila Gupta’s story to the screen.

“As a creative showrunner, a writer-producer, you’re inviting people to the party and hoping you have a good party. That’s just your role generally,” she says. “As a director, it’s your responsibility to come to the party with the best dish. You just have to create the vibe so you can let the ‘hosts’ rest, because they’ve just thrown the whole party. So in a strange way, being a director, it felt easier than hosting a huge party.

“There was still a responsibility to creatively be executing exactly what your showrunners want. At the end of the day, it is their vision. They have been with the show for five or 10 years, they have gotten the greenlight and you need to respect that. As a lead director, having worked as a creator, I had the ability to know how to work with the budget and work with the schedule. It was really useful to understand where the producers were coming from so then I could fight the good fight for my showrunner. I was really there as her number-one advocate to make sure we were executing her vision and had a great party.”

Kari Skogland is a director best known for working on US series such as The Handmaid’s Tale, The Loudest Voice and The Falcon & the Winter Soldier, but she is now also credited as an executive producer on every new project.

How involved she will be in the creative process of a series depends on the stage at which she comes on board. That can mean working as a director for hire, where “you’re really there just to set the camera, which isn’t nearly as satisfying,” she says. However, if she’s creating the show with the lead writer or the showrunner – “which is becoming a murkier title for sure” – it’s her role to feed into their vision, interrogate it and help accentuate it.

“But to get the job, I have to pitch,” she remarks. “So I have to say, ‘This is what I would do with it if I were the one you teamed up with.’ As a result of that process of pitching my idea to them, if I’ve been hired, theoretically, they’re hiring me because, ‘OK, great. You got it. You get the idea.’”

These days, on some projects, Skogland gets involved with a creator long before there is a script. “What’s great about that is I’m really on the inside. It’s been very satisfying as we set things up and then start to execute them, because I feel like the writers and I already have a really strong language together. We’re creating together and that’s the collaborative experience, which is really great.

“If I haven’t been part of that and I’ve just been hired [as a director], that can also be very satisfying. But it’s a different part of my brain that’s engaged.”

Building a creative team to support a singular vision also requires a little bit of luck, Treadwell-Collins acknowledges. “Our lead director, Elliot Hegarty, came in [for Rivals] and we were looking for a woman. We wanted a female director. We had a very female writing team, and Elliot came in and was incredible. He got britain in the 1980s and did this incredible pitch. We went, ‘Let’s meet some other people,’ but it was him.”

“He absolutely blew us away, and that’s also what you want when you’re showrunning something,” Lamb adds. “You want someone to come in and totally surprise you and make you go, ‘We could do this.’

“It’s not like there’s one size that fits all. We think the secret is just speaking lots, communicating and talking and talking, so everyone is on the same page because you’ve spoken about it all the time.”

Writing the pilot of Rivals, Treadwell-Collins also says it was important not to be “precious” about the script and to be open to changes and cuts.

“What’s lovely now, going to season two, is knowing Elliot’s back as our lead director. When that chemistry works, it’s really exciting,” he adds. “That’s a huge part of why Rivals has been such a big success. Elliot brought to the table something else as a man who didn’t know Julie Cooper’s novels; he brought a muscular energy to it that also maybe we wouldn’t have had if it wasn’t for him.”

Fee agrees communication is key in sharing the vision for a series and ensuring everyone is working towards the same show.

“We always talk about the fact we’re trying to make entertainment,” he says. “We’re not trying to make an art house movie. We’re not trying to make Scandi noir. We’re trying to make a really thrilling story that’s going to keep you coming back for the next episode, while also making sure it’s really characterful and it’s got lots of heart. If you know what your show is and you keep coming back to it, then that’s hopefully a recipe for success.”

“That excitement and buy-in creatively has to be there at every moment, because if it’s not there on set, it doesn’t translate into the edit most of the time,” says Herse. “You can feel it. That’s all of our jobs, I guess, to keep that very present for as long as possible so hopefully one day it gets seen.”

Often, creative harmony can also come down to being respectful on set, and that responsibility applies to everyone among the cast and crew.

“I don’t want to be a better hairdresser than my hairdresser. I don’t want to be a better costume designer than my costume designer,” Skogland says. “So I rely on them to come with better ideas than I would have, and I have to respect that. I want each person to have their creative juices flowing. Otherwise it’s a lonely place to be, if everyone’s not contributing.

“When you get the electricity on set, everybody feels that it’s been a collaborative experience and, ‘Wow, look what we did together.’”

This article is based in part on interviews and sessions from Content London 2024.

tagged in: Alexander Lamb, Danny Brocklehurst, Disney, Dominic Treadwell-Collins, Happy Prince, Harlan Coben, Jilly Cooper, Kari Skogland, Missing You, Mohini Herse, Netflix, Nicola Shindler, Quay Street Productions, Richard Fee, Rivals