Jetty crime

Firebird Pictures exec Elizabeth Kilgarriff tells DQ about collaborating with Jenna Coleman once again for BBC four-parter The Jetty, piecing together the decades-old mystery with writer Cat Jones and creating a new iconic detective.

She’s travelled through time and space in Doctor Who, ruled England as Queen Victoria and plotted revenge as a woman scorned in Wilderness. But in upcoming BBC crime drama The Jetty, viewers will see star Jenna Coleman in a strikingly different role.

That’s according to executive producer Elizabeth Kilgarriff, who has reunited with Coleman for this four-part crime thriller set in a fictional lake town in Lancashire, in northern England.

It’s here that a fire tears through a holiday home, leading Detective Ember Manning (Coleman) to work out how it connects a podcast journalist’s investigation into a missing persons cold case and an illicit ‘love’ triangle between a man in his 20s and two underage girls.

But as Ember gets close to the truth, it threatens to destroy her life – forcing her to re-evaluate everything she thought she knew about her past, present and the town she’s always called home.

Kilgarriff’s Firebird Pictures was also behind Wilderness, which launched on Prime Video last year, and the exec says playing Ember will showcase Coleman’s versatility on screen.

“With The Jetty, we are seeing Jenna in a completely new role,” Kilgarriff tells DQ. “I don’t think we’ve seen her in this role before. And I hope what was appealing for her and what really does come through is she’s very funny. In amongst the darkness and the deep emotional turmoil, it’s very funny, and she plays that brilliantly. I really hope that this felt like an exciting new space to be in.”

The exec says the ambition behind The Jetty was to create a new “iconic” detective by putting Coleman in the middle of a crime series. “Those two things together feel like a really exciting proposition,” she notes. As the story plays out, numerous layers of Ember’s character will be peeled away, leaving her as much of a mystery as the secrets being held by the people and the places closest to her.

“Working with Jenna is a joy. She’s a real pro, and a delight,” Kilgarriff continues. “And she’s drawn to roles that hold many layers. Obviously on Wilderness, that was the case, but Ember Manning is a very different role. There are lots of different layers in terms of what she’s feeling, what she’s hiding – and that’s what she is so clever at doing. She’s very aware of all those things and yet able to connect with the audience so you are with her as she goes on a really big journey. There’s a lot that happens.

“Without saying too much, the present-day story opens up questions for her and her past. She’s also a young female detective in her early mid-30s and she is the mother of a teenage daughter, so I really hope this is a piece that will feel like it appeals to a really broad audience.”

Alongside Coleman, the cast includes Archie Renaux, Laura Marcus, Bo Bragason, Amelia Bullmore, Ruby Stokes, Tom Glynn-Carney, Weruche Opia, Matthew McNulty, Ralph Ineson, David Ajala, Nina Barker-Francis, Miya Ocego, Elliot Cowan, Shannon Watson, Arthur Hughes and Dominic Coleman.

Stokes and Bullmore play Ember’s teenage daughter and mother, respectively, while Opia is the podcast journalist whose arrival in town triggers the events of the series.

“While she’s there, she realises there is something happening in the town that feels disturbing, in the sense of someone potentially grooming girls,” Kilgarriff reveals. “Then something happens quite early on in episode one that pulls Ember into a similar investigation, so you start to realise that what the podcaster is looking into is probably the same thing Ember is looking into. By the end of the first episode, all I can say is that all the pieces of the puzzle you have been watching potentially come together in a way you’re not quite expecting. There’s a really big hook that then pushes us into episode two.”

Part detective thriller, part coming-of-age series, the show comes from writer Cat Jones and is her first original series. She has previously written on shows including Waterloo Road, Harlots and Wolfe, and had been a writer Kilgarriff hoped to work with when she launched Firebird Pictures.

When they eventually started talking about potential projects, it was Jones who pitched the idea behind The Jetty. They then worked up the story together and mapped out the four-episode “jigsaw puzzle” in the most satisfying way possible.

“We pitched to the BBC once we worked through the show and how it would work, and then developed the first script. From there, we had it greenlit and got Jenna attached as well,” says Kilgarriff, a former BBC drama commissioner. “With Cat, me and [fellow executive producer] Sarah Wyatt, we were storylining together. But Cat’s very clever. It’s been a really fun, brilliant process, even though it was quite mind-bending sometimes to get the four episodes done.”

Behind the camera is Chilean director Marialy Rivas (Young & Wild), with The Jetty marking her first project to be shot in the UK. “She was really brilliant, just calm, and she absolutely understood the material,” Kilgarriff says. “It was probably a bit of a shock to come from Chile to the cold but, if anything, it was very interesting. She was able to look at the locations in a different way – and she found it very exciting. That’s what comes through.

“She could see the beauty in the cold rawness of where we were. Some of the locations are quite remote, in the middle of nowhere, but we talked a lot about this show being a dark fairytale and she’s found that absolutely.”

For the location, Jones drew on her own background growing up in Lancashire to bring authenticity to the show’s small-town setting. That the story would play out somewhere where everybody knows each other – and their personal business – was particularly important, as the show deals with themes of secrets and memory in a place where no one forgets the past.

“Underneath the beauty, there is this swirling darkness, and things that have happened in the past are still feeding and informing things in the present,” Kilgarriff says. “That’s what Cat wants to look at, in terms of misogyny and sexual politics. How much have things changed? It really is a beautiful part of the world. But it’s about the human beings at the centre of that and what people are hiding.”

Distributed internationally by BBC Studios, which is launching The Jetty to global buyers at its annual Showcase event in London, the series will debut on BBC One and BBC iPlayer later this year. But with a never-ending carousel of television detectives, what will make Ember stand out not just to UK audiences but around the world?

“It’s the Jenna factor, and she’s a very relatable central character,” Kilgarriff says. “But the ambition with this has always been, yes, it’s UK-set, it’s very much a British drama, but it has been made in a way that perhaps is a bit more heightened. How we tell the story isn’t quite as domestic, so it feels like something that will perform well internationally. It’s very much in that Sharp Objects, Top of the Lake space that feels like it will appeal to audiences around the world.”

tagged in: BBC, BBC One, BBC Studios, Cat Jones, Elizabeth Kilgarriff, Firebird Pictures, Jenna Coleman, The Jetty