Hot property
After developing her screenwriting career on TV thrillers such as Fool Me Once, Charlotte Coben has created her first original series in Prime Video’s comedic thriller Dead Hot. She tells DQ about blending humour with grief, filming in Liverpool and working with her author father Harlan.
If her surname sounds familiar, that’s probably because you’re read it before. But Charlotte Coben is now stepping out of her author and screenwriter father Harlan’s shadow with her first original television series.
Commissioned by Prime Video, Dead Hot is a six-part drama that sets out to explore themes of family, class, love, trauma and identity through a twisty-turny story set in Liverpool.
It’s here that we meet Elliot (Bilal Hasna) and Jess (Vivian Oparah), best friends who are united in grief following the mysterious disappearance of Peter – Elliot’s boyfriend and Jess’s twin brother – five years earlier, leading them to adopt a hedonistic lifestyle to numb their pain while clinging to the hope that one day they will find out what happened to him.
When Elliot meets Will, he starts to think he can put the past behind him. But just as Elliot discovers Will has his own dark secrets, Jess is contacted by someone claiming to be her brother, leaving the duo determined to find out if Elliot is romantically cursed – or being targeted. The cast also includes Penelope Wilton, Peter Serafinowicz, Rosie Cavaliero, Rebekah Murrell, Alan Turkington, Brandon Fellows and Marcus Hodson.
Coben is writer and creator of the series, which debuted on March 1, having begun to take shape in 2021 when she wrote the first episode. But despite having a famous author as a father, it wasn’t always a given that the younger Coben would end up treading a similar path.
“I think we both tried to fight it a bit,” she tells DQ. “But actually, I was drawn to writing, writing silly little essays when I was a kid. And then there was an era when every night I’d pretend to go to bed at 7pm and just write Draco Malfoy fan fiction for three hours a night. That got me really into writing. Then I was writing some plays for kids in my town and they’d perform it at their camp, and then in college that turned into screenwriting, just as [Harlan] was starting all his TV screenwriting stuff. So we were destined to work together.”
They did work together on three of Harlan’s television series, namely Netflix thrillers Stay Close (2021) and Fool Me Once (2024), and Prime Video’s Shelter (2023). And Coben acknowledges the support she has had to break into the business.
“I know how lucky I am,” she says. “Of course, it’s a leg-up in a business like this, and it would be ignorant to say otherwise. It’s what I love to do and I’m very grateful I get to do it. I never take it for granted. I love my dad’s work and I love getting to work with him. I just don’t ever read stuff online.”
Working on those shows, Coben learned to back her own ideas in the writers room – and to accept other people might have better suggestions. “It’s about not being precious over things you come up with. You’re like, ‘Oh, this is genius. This is it. This is the one,’ and then you’ve got to be willing to adapt and transform that idea and not get locked down on it. But it’s been a great process working with them and learning to write in the tone of an overall show. Danny Brocklehurst, who writes most of the [Netflix] episodes, is so funny, smart and witty, so you’re trying to match that tone and keep it cohesive.”
Dead Hot now sees her stepping out on her own, though the series carries many of the twists and turns that have become hallmarks of her father’s novels and series. It also reunites her with executive producer Nicola Shindler, who is a regular collaborator with Harlan. Shindler’s Quay Street Productions produces the series, with ITV Studios handling international distribution.
The show emerged from “inspiration out of nowhere,” an amalgamation of several different ideas and themes that were drawn together among the various documents full of story ideas that Coben keeps. When she wrote it, she was in her mid-20s – a time when her friends were dating but sometimes wouldn’t get a text back from people they were seeing.
“You want to make them feel better so it’s like, ‘Listen, he’s literally probably dead or he’s arrested, it’s not you. It’s everything else. It couldn’t possibly be you. Maybe you’re not being ghosted because they didn’t like you.’ There might be something else going on that’s a lot darker and more sinister, but really fun and entertaining,” she says.
She and her friends would also watch other TV shows and not recognise the way the characters reacted in similar situations, which influenced how Elliot and Jess react to events in Dead Hot. “I heard this quote once from a teacher saying that the hero should never scream, even if they’re in danger or scared. I just thought that was kind of ridiculous because I’m like, ‘What heroes are we watching?’ I want to watch people that are more like me, and I’m going to be screaming my ass off if I’m being chased by someone who wants to kill me.”
Highlighting Search Party and Girls as two of her favourite series, Coben began developing Dead Hot with Shindler after showing the exec an early script draft, and Quay Street quickly came on board.
“Working with them is the absolute greatest thing in the world,” she says. “Nicola knows good TV and her notes are some of my favourite notes you can get. They’re always thoughtful – there’s never a bad note from Nicola. She’s so trusting and encouraging, and she’s down for anything. The script I had written, I just sent it to her to see what she thought. She was like, ‘Let’s get this made.’ And now it’s literally been made, which is crazy.”
Coben wrote all six episodes but began work with a sparse outline that ensured the story wasn’t locked down, allowing her to go in different directions if she felt it served the characters. Quay Street script executive Charlie Quinn and script editor Hannah Collins were also on hand to provide feedback and help to mould “this big lump of crud into a nice, beautiful, cohesive story.”
“I’ve found if I’m going in with an agenda, it makes it less fun for everyone, including the audience, than if you’re trying to just have fun with that,” she says. “I like to write in big bursts, writing it the way that it’s intended to be consumed, which is kind of bingey.”
That the storyline wasn’t set in stone early in development also meant landing the show’s comedy-thriller tone came more easily to the writer, who wanted something unexpected to happen in each scene. “It’s almost harder to stay within one tone for me for because when you’re experiencing grief and going through a hard time, it’s not like you go outside and everyone’s walking around moping,” she continues.
“You’re still going to have the guy in the corner playing the trombone and singing his songs, and the dog’s still going to be taking a shit in the sewer, you know? Everyone’s still doing their thing. So just balancing all that felt natural for what the story was. Someone goes missing and it’s so heartbreaking and horrible, but then it’s kind of campy because they left a finger behind. But that doesn’t make it any less tragic.”
The most challenging part of writing the series came when it was time to wrap up the mystery and the numerous loose ends, as Coben needed to provide answers to everything she had set up in the beginning. “It was just difficult to make sure you got all the information in a way that feels natural and not just a character being like, ‘This is what happened,’” she says. “It’s a lot harder to have as much free fun with it. But in the end, you end up happy with what you’ve done.”
Another writing challenge came early on, when New Yorker Coben switched the show’s setting from the Big Apple itself to Liverpool. The first episode had the action taking place in New York, but when Shindler read the script, she immediately had the idea to transplant the story to Merseyside, in North West England. Quay Street is based in nearby Manchester.
“And going to Liverpool, it totally works,” Coben says. “It feels a lot like a mini-New York. But it was Nicola’s idea to set it there and it was absolutely the right place for it. It’s just very vibrant and very silly. There’s an absurdity in the air that’s very positive, and the Scouse people are so genuine and hilarious and take no shit. It’s perfect for our world.”
Coben hasn’t been content with only writing the scripts, however, and has had a hand in every stage of the show’s development, including watching auditions and visiting Liverpool, where she spent several days scouting locations with the production team.
“In the UK, they don’t do showrunners as much, so I think the showrunner role is kind of split between me, Nicola and our producer, Laura Kirkham, and then our directors, Sam Arbor and David Sant,” she says. “You just talk through every single detail of it. Every single graphic has its own 15 emails in a thread talking about one text message. It’s all very collaborative.”
On the back of her first original series, Coben says she is now more conscious of how scripts can be written to be more budget-friendly, such as fewer night shoots, and how they can be better written to support the work of both the directors and the actors.
“You don’t want to be telling the actors what to do,” she says. “You just want to give them the guidelines because they know their characters, in the end, better than anyone, so you want to leave that. You don’t want to be prescriptive. You never tell them to cry. If they want to cry and it comes naturally, then they’ll cry. I learned a lot for sure.”
And what does her father think of the show? “He’s a total dad about it. He’s very proud, and I’m very proud of what we’ve made. It’s really exciting to get to show that to him.”
tagged in: Amazon, Charlotte Coben, Dead Hot, ITV Studios, Nicola Shindler, Prime Video, Quay Street Productions