Making waves
Storm clouds gather for the holidaymakers living together beside a Scottish loch in Channel 4’s atmospheric thriller Summerwater. Writer John Donnelly and executive producer Mike Ellen tell DQ about adapting Sarah Moss’s novel and the importance of challenging stories.
A tense, multi-layered thriller, Channel 4 drama Summerwater isn’t a series that wants to stay in the background. In fact, from the opening stages of episode one, from the flickering flames of a deadly fire to the idyllic yet isolating landscapes of its Scottish setting and its pulsating, sometimes oppressive score, this is a piece of television to make viewers sit up and take notice.
“It is intended to be a very characterful and very distinctive drama,” executive producer Mike Ellen tells DQ about the series, which is based on the book by Sarah Moss. “It is meant to be a show that demands your attention and pulls you in. It’s not a second-screen drama.”
With a cast led by Dougray Scott, Shirley Henderson and Valene Kane, the story introduces a group of families who have all booked a stay at Scottish holiday park Summerwater to escape their problems. Instead, they are confronted by their deepest desires and darkest secrets, and simmering tensions between holidaymakers lead to a devastating climax.
The plot unfolds over a single 24-hour period, with each episode replaying events and confrontations from the perspectives of different characters, exploring themes such as relationships, sex and identity through humour, heartache and tragedy. At all times, lighting, locations and the soundtrack are used to build a visceral, immersive atmosphere.
“The book is incredibly atmospheric,” says screenwriter John Donnelly. “One of the things I loved about it is it’s so astute on the details of human behaviour, the idea of people concealing stuff on a micro level and these small points of friction that everyone has. From that, you get a sense of a society where there’s this anger underneath, the way the country’s working at the moment, and that starts domestically and broadens out.”
Describing Moss’s novel as beautifully detailed but “incredibly interior,” Donnelly was excited by the opportunity to paint the characters’ internal anxiety across the screen and “really lean into those moments that are incredibly human, when we do things that surprise ourselves, and the way our own behaviour is a mystery to us sometimes.”
“There is a kind of thriller element; a terrible thing has happened,” he adds. “The first layer, which most things tend to be interested in, is who did it. Then the slightly more interesting question is, why did they do it? But really, what we’re interested in is how did we get to a place as a society where this thing felt inevitable, and how are we complicit in that? You’re just trying to create something visceral that you can key into, and then you can unpack all that other stuff from it.”
With the use of time jumps, multiple perspectives and a voiceover to tell the story, Ellen believes Summerwater delivers a “really satisfying ending” that answers most of the “obvious” questions.
“But part of the fun of the show is we’re in the same 24 hours in the present, and there are little bits of crossover,” he continues. “Gradually, you build up this picture of the day through different people’s POVs. That was terrifying for everyone to try to make that work, but it’s a credit to John and the whole team that they actually have made that work, and it does make sense at the end of it.”
Donnelly knew from an early stage in development that the series would shift perspective in each episode, but he didn’t set out to make a “complicated” drama. “It just seemed like the simplest way of telling the story, because the book has such psychological acuity in terms of how all the characters behave. You’re in their heads so much,” he says. Therefore, it felt necessary to see the ensemble of characters in the lead-up to the climactic blaze so viewers could follow the build-up of pressure that leads to the show’s conclusion.
“Really, it was just trying to find the simplest way through, in terms of following that throughline of the characters. There is a complex structure to it, but we’re not trying to be smart. We want the audience to have a good time. That’s the basic thing,” the writer says.
With influences ranging from Willy Russell’s Channel 4 drama One Summer and Jimmy McGovern’s BBC series The Lakes to filmmakers Andrei Tarkovsky and David Lynch, Donnelly particularly wanted to tell a story about modern Britain and what it means to be British, against a landscape that makes it feel “epic.” Elements of paganism also add a “strangeness” to proceedings.
“We’ve tried to be as ambitious as we can in terms of creating a drama where it asks questions rather than giving you answers, where it is provocative in the sense of prodding you to think about what you’re seeing and to think about the way we act and the care we take with our relationships with each other,” he says. “We’re not going for ‘quirk,’ we’re not trying to annoy an audience. Our hope is that it’ll connect with people in that way.”
Debuting this Sunday, Summerwater marks the first project from Ellen’s Glasgow-based production company Freedom Scripted, with All3Media International handling distribution. The exec now hopes it can become a calling card for the kinds of projects Freedom wants to make, after his ambition for the series perfectly aligned with that of lead director Robert McKillop (Ludwig), who directed the first four episodes. Fiona Walton (Rebus) helmed the final two.
“Robbie is great at being distinctive. He really pushed that. Every time the baton’s been passed from Sarah to John to Robbie and then Fiona, they’ve pushed it a little bit more, which is sometimes scary but it’s really exciting as well,” Ellen says. He wanted to show rural, picture-postcard Scotland on screen, with filming taking place both in urban areas like Glasgow city centre, Motherwell and East Kilbride and in rural settings around Loch Lomond.
The score that drives the series comes from Gazelle Twin, who previously worked with McKillop on TV series Then You Run. Meanwhile, the director worked with DOP Annika Summerson (Baby Reindeer, Ludwig) and production designer Stephen Mason (The Rig) to create the show’s stylised look.
From the luminescent lighting to the props and the soundscape, “everything was thought through in advance,” Ellen says. “Then a big challenge was Fiona doing episodes five and six, just picking up that look and feel and matching it, which she did an amazing job of. Everyone was talking about all those aspects right from day one and preparing for it, so when we got on set or on location, people had a pretty clear idea of what the directors and everyone were going for.”
Donnelly describes writing scripts in a way that would lay out his own vision for the show while also inviting a director to bring something new to it themselves. That means the finished article isn’t exactly what he had imagined, “but the important thing for me is that it isn’t exactly how I saw it. That’s never what I’m interested in,” he says. “It was much more exciting to me to have a director go, ‘This is how I see this.’”
After the show was greenlit in spring last year, filming began that November, meaning making Summerwater was a “pretty intense” experience for all involved. “But it did mean that, in a great way, we just had to put a lot of trust in the team to go and do it,” Ellen says.
Among them, series producer Jules Hussey (Ralph & Katie) and her team faced the “Jenga puzzle” task of scheduling the shoot with an ensemble assembled by casting director Des Hamilton featuring Scott, Henderson and Kane alongside Daniel Rigby, Arnas Fedaravičius, Anna Próchniak, Gabriel Scott, Shereen Cutkelvin, Anders Hayward, James Harkness, Shauna Macdonald and Jamie Sives.
Fedaravičius and Próchniak play a Polish-Lithuanian couple who find themselves at the centre of events in Summerwater, with Donnelly’s script also seeking to dramatise elements of the experience of Eastern European workers in the UK.
“It is a feature of the book that they’re labelled as ‘the Eastern European family’ by the people of the other cabins because they haven’t quite bothered to find out exactly where they’re from,” the writer says. “That is another example in terms of exploring the idea of identity, how we see other people, how people see themselves. We have an entire episode where we really lean into their story, which again is in the context of some of the fractures there are in society. We wanted to have a really hopeful story that shows what the potential for Britain is, and why, in various times, it has been a really appealing place where people from Europe do want to come.”
This family aren’t presented as “holier than thou,” however. “They are annoying,” Ellen notes. “Sarah, the author, said this is the kind of holiday you have to approach with determination. It’s a British holiday in the pissing wet rain, and then you find two cabins down there’s this family making noise at night. So that’s part of the joy of it. They’re warts-and-all human beings.
“Then in episode three, we totally lift the lid on that and we see how they got to where they are now and what their hopes and dreams were when they came to the UK. There is actually a lot of hope in the final episode, as well as some really dramatic events.”
It’s the optimistic notes at the end of the series that Ellen hopes will give viewers a satisfying feeling and leave them wanting more. “We definitely want to do a season two as well,” he says. “While there’s all these big ideas and really interesting things going on, we’re here to entertain people, get people talking and leave them wanting a little bit more.”
Donnelly also hopes the series will challenge viewers who put their faith in the series and tune into a show that might demand additional attention. “You can get something really rewarding from things where it’s not all laid out for you, where you get a visceral experience, it asks questions of you and gives you something to think about and talk about, and it’s provocative,” he says. “That’s the area of TV drama that needs protecting, not because it’s more important than the other stuff, but because the other stuff will always take care of itself. Asking those big questions, but doing it in a way which is fun, entertaining, exciting and a bit unusual, that’s what we’re going for here.”
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Trespasses: Amid the political and religious tensions of 1970s Northern Ireland, a forbidden romance ignites between a young Catholic school teacher and a Protestant barrister, threatening to unravel both families and communities.
The Gathering: In a tight-knit Merseyside community, the aftermath of a violent crime at a local beach party exposes simmering resentments and secrets within the lives of several families connected by the event.
Deep Water: Set in England’s Lake District, three very different women with closely guarded secrets navigate the complexities of motherhood, relationships and betrayal.
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tagged in: All3Media International, Channel 4, Freedom Scripted, John Donnelly, Mike Ellen, Sarah Moss, Summerwater